Gospel in the community is not always the same as gospel on the big shows or on nationally selling records. While the fashion in radio listening or record buying may be for choirs or contemporary performers, all styles of gospel coexist within the community. Unlike pop music, where a new fashion will banish the previous vogue, gospel’s successive new developments find their own place in the structure alongside the older ones. The sheer number of grassroots performers, many highly skilled despite their anonymity, means that gospel always has a substantial pool of potential new stars. And they do not sing in vast arenas to an anonymous mass. Their venues are churches, schools, and small community centers, where they perform to the people they will meet in church on Sunday. It is a world far away from the taste manipulators and trendsetters who infest other forms of music. Gospel music continues to develop because it is not only still in touch with its community, but still belongs to it. (xxxv–xxxvi)
Much like the Civil Rights Movement contained moderate and militant, conservative and radical elements, golden age gospel music eventually consisted of both traditional and experimental or, rather, “sweet” (or “soft”) and “hard” elements. For instance, between 1955 and 1965 the Golden Gate Quartet, CBS Trumpeteers, Dixie Hummingbirds, Harmonizing Four, Pilgrim Travelers, and Swan Silvertones were the dominant “sweet” gospel quartets. The major “hard” gospel quartets included iconic artists such as the Blind Boys of Mississippi, Blind Boys of Alabama, Sensational Nightingales, Mighty Clouds of Joy, Spirit of Memphis, and Swanee Quintet. A number of quartets developed styles that blurred the imaginary line between the “soft” and “hard” gospel sounds, such as the Soul Stirrers, Fairfield Four, Pilgrim Jubilee Singers, Chosen Gospel Singers, Zion Travelers, Clefs of Calvary, and Bright Light Quartet.
Even when we seriously consider Young’s two-tier, local/national model for exploring gospel music we must bear in mind that beyond internal, more or less cultural and aesthetic dynamics, a number of external social and political factors shape and shade the composition, production, distribution, and consumption of gospel music. Which is also to say, even though gospel is an art form preoccupied with heaven, it has never been able to completely transcend the inhospitable earthly context of its origins and evolution. As discussed above, the composition, production, distribution, and consumption of gospel music has been directly impacted by African Americans’ collective incessant experience and endurance of cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, social segregation, political repression, and anti-black racism. Consequently, the story of this music’s composition, production, distribution, and consumption, as gospel and blues scholar Guido van Rijn (2001) contended, actually “confirms how the racial situation provided a crucial context within which the artistry and commerce of African American popular music took place.” However, it also illustrates “how much the story of the creation, distribution, and consumption of that music has much to tell historians about the African American community during years of great social upheaval and change” (140).
Arguably, one of the most interesting things golden age gospel reveals to us is that gospel artists did, indeed, create civil rights-themed gospel songs, and that these songs seemed to be the special providence of the B-sides or, rather, “flip sides” of records by incredibly obscure artists on equally incredibly obscure and poorly distributed local labels. Bearing in mind the “underrepresentation of African American label owners in the recording industry” during the Civil Rights Movement, van Rijn maintained,
a disproportionate number of these civil rights songs also appear to have been cut for black-owned labels. Maybe African American owners, as those within the industry with the greatest personal stake in the movement’s success, were sometimes more willing to go out on a limb to record potentially controversial material. Yet, in truth, there was hardly a stampede to cut such songs from anyone, black or white. And there was no guarantee of a public airing for those songs that were recorded: fears of possible reprisals, doubts about their commercial appeal, and the certain knowledge that even if they avoided formal ban, they would not get airplay on the radio, combined to ensure that many civil rights blues and gospel songs remained unissued. (139–140)
Nevertheless, no words should be minced about the fact that even in the context of civil rights-themed gospel songs, grassroots gospel artists were not alone. It is simply important to bear in mind that arguably the vast majority of civil rights-themed gospel songs, especially those either composed or performed by professional gospel singers, more than likely were not recorded or, if they did find their way onto wax, as van Rijn observed, “remained unissued.” Here, then, the emphasis is on both unrecognized and unrecorded protest songs arising out of the grassroots gospel community, gospel localism, and gospel regionalism that feasibly indelibly influenced the intentionally understated protest praxis of national, commercial, and professional gospel music during the Civil Rights Movement.
Echoes of the angst of the African American experience during the Civil Rights Movement years reverberated in both the North and South, and at both the local and national levels. Obviously, even more subtly than grassroots gospel artists, elite gospel artists put into play the “we can implicitly sing what we cannot explicitly say” aesthetic of the broader black popular music tradition and, therefore, “explicit,” “tell it like it is,” “let’s call a spade a spade” outright Civil Rights Movement songs were never more than a minor, local or, at best, regional phenomenon. Here, we have obviously returned to my above emphasis on the importance of acknowledging and critically engaging gospel localism and gospel regionalism. Yet and still, my conscience compels me to admit that it is, in some senses, completely understandable that many gospel music scholars and critics have been either nearly or completely silent concerning civil rights-themed gospel songs because of what Burnim identified above as gospel’s processes and practices of “esoteric sharing and affirmation.” If, indeed, a good number of gospel’s inner-workings and folkways are “esoteric,” which is to say, intended for, or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with specialized knowledge or insatiable interests in gospel music—then gospel music scholars and critics may be forgiven for overlooking what most folk seem wholly unaware of in the first place.
In other words, I am saying that when the situation became critical, and the time for unapologetic protest could no longer be evaded, when the African American church assumed its leadership of the black freedom struggle in the middle years of the twentieth century, it seems logical to expect to hear myriad civil rights-themed gospel songs. But, truth be told, for the most part, this was quite simply not the case. Without a doubt, this does not mean that gospel artists were not actively involved and contributing in other important ways to the Civil Rights Movement, such as performing civil rights-themed gospel songs at mass meetings, volunteering for movement work, or simply making (most often anonymous) financial donations. When one really and critically studies historical and biographical (not merely musicological) work on golden age gospel artists, one walks away with the distinct impression that many of the greatest figures in gospel music were, in fact, unsung singing civil rights soldiers—that is to say, subtle, tight-tongued but undoubtedly politically active civil rights soldiers.
But, truth be told, for most members of the gospel community open resistance, even open “passive resistance,” whether participating in mass meetings, boycotts, marches, sit-ins or freedom rides, was for the most part avoided, and for good reason. As van Rijn expertly observed, during the Civil Rights Movement era, African American artists, whether gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm & blues or rock & roll artists, “their managers, and their labels, not to mention distributors, theaters booking agencies, and radio station managers, were permanently concerned about the adverse effects overtly political songs might have on both their financial and physical well-being” (126). This is precisely where a purely musicological interpretation of gospel music fails to fully appreciate the historical, cultural, soci
al, political, and economic contexts surrounding the composition, production, distribution, and consumption of gospel during its golden age. Building on this point, van Rijn reminds us,
regardless of any specific lyrical focus on civil rights issues, black popular music has always been deeply implicated in constructing the African American sense of self, community, heritage and destiny. Although there was something of a post-war flight away from blues and, to a lesser extent, gospel toward their rhythm & blues and soul progeny, these older styles continued to be enjoyed by many in the black community. Moreover, by the mid-1960s, heightened racial consciousness meant that these two protean musical forms were again widely appreciated as cornerstones, not just of black—and much white—popular music, but also of the entire African American experience. (123)
Obviously, van Rijn critically comprehends that black popular music is more than merely music when he asserted that it “has always been deeply implicated in constructing the African American sense of self, community, heritage and destiny.” Similar to other genres of black popular music, gospel has deep extra-musical dimensions—especially during the Civil Rights Movement era—that should not be overlooked in favor of analyses that a priori argue that it is apathetic, escapist, and apolitical without taking into critical consideration the ways in which gospel protest, in most instances, looks, sounds, and feels very different when compared with either rhythm & blues protest or rock & roll protest. The significance and real distinctiveness of civil rights-themed songs, whether gospel, rhythm & blues or rock & roll, in the 1950s and 1960s African American community “depended as much on their musical stylings, performance practices, and historic place within black culture as on their lyrical content,” van Rijn noted. Even if the corpus of explicit civil rights-themed gospel songs is relatively small compared with, for instance, civil rights-themed rhythm & blues songs, van Rijn importantly accented the fact that “at least one song was devoted to most of the major landmarks of the civil rights struggle.” He concluded, “[a]s such they present a modest but impressive musical response to the struggle for African American freedom, a response that is undoubtedly representative of a much larger body of unrecorded protest songs in these styles” (123).
Conclusion: Gospel Music as a Reflection of the
“Calm, Cool, and Collected” Maxim of
the Civil Rights Movement
In the aftermath of World War II gospel artists were becoming increasingly professionalized and commercialized entertainers concerned with, among other things, making a decent living. Golden age gospel music fans, scholars, and critics need to understand that as with professional performers of all (or even no) political persuasions, gospel singers had to earn money to support themselves and their families. Here, we have stumbled upon what could be termed the political economy of the composition, production, distribution, and consumption of gospel music during its golden age. I am completely sensitive to the fact that within the African American church community, whether we are speaking of the local, regional or national African American church community, associating black church music with moneymaking, entertainment, or commercialism is, in some senses, sacrilegious. But, gospel artists need the bare necessities much like the rest of us, and no amount sanctimoniousness and high-sounding hyperbole will feed, clothe, and shelter them and their families. Point-blank: Musicology must be coupled with history, sociology, and political economy, at the very least, in order to critically comprehend my contention throughout this book that when and where we come to black popular music the extra-musical is just as pertinent, if not in many instances even more significant, than the musical—for black folk music serves multiple functions that go far beyond music composition, music theory, and staid music criticism.
A purely religious or musicological analysis of the professionalization of gospel artists simply fails to take into consideration the fact that professional gospel artists’ careers would have been placed in peril if they even hinted at Civil Rights Movement support, whether moderate or militant. Their recording contracts, radio airplay, and concert appearances would all be jeopardized if they did not, as it were, “play it calm, cool, and collected.” Even semi-professional or amateur gospel artists eking out marginal existences by holding down soul-sundering and dream-destroying jobs in the South could easily engender the ire of local segregationists and regional racists aplenty. Indeed, being “calm, cool, and collected” was a dire, life-or-death matter. Consequently, golden age gospel songs, not surprisingly, reveal very little evidence of plainspoken “protest,” of the “double-conscious” inner-thoughts and inner-feelings of the gospel artists themselves. Again, much had to be masked or, rather, “veiled,” as Du Bois metaphorically put it in The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois [1903b, 2–3] famously wrote: “[I]t dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. . . . [T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world”). To reiterate, disguising “gospel protest” was, literally, a matter of life-or-death during the Civil Rights Movement.
Not only had gospel spread throughout the African American community by the 1950s, but it had also gained an increasingly effusive white audience as well. Bearing this in mind, it is not surprising to learn that most gospel artists steered clear of songs that could jeopardize their livelihoods, if not, literally, their very lives. In the face of economic retaliation or worse, most gospel singers understandably avoided outright support for the Civil Rights Movement, irrespective of their personal socio-political inclinations. There was also considerable pressure from managers, record companies, and radio stations for gospel singers to eschew any semblance of civil rights support. Even a brief survey of the Civil Rights Movement will reveal that for all of its emphasis on non-violence, civil disobedience, and passive resistance, anti-black racist physical and economic violence awaited any African American who broke with the “calm, cool, and collected” maxim of the movement and audaciously put into play the “explicit,” “tell it like it is,” “let’s call a spade a spade” truth-telling that lies at the heart of African American culture, especially African American religious culture. With this in mind, we should solemnly ask ourselves: Is it any wonder, then, that “gospel protest” during the Civil Rights Movement was not explicit, and it did not unequivocally voice the core views and values of the movement?
Well-founded fears of physical and economic retaliatory violence kept most African Americans, whether moderate or militant, from becoming openly and actively involved in the movement. It should be recalled that in many parts of the South white supremacist and anti-black racist terrorist organizations and associations such as the Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens’ Council, and American Independent Party were in most instances indistinguishable from the local, county, and even state government. Keeping in mind that only a fraction of African Americans were actually members of civil rights organizations or actively participated in the rallies, boycotts, marches, sit-ins, and freedom rides that became the signatures of the movement, once again, one has to wonder whether it is fair, realistic, or even reasonable to expect artists and entertainers to commit “career suicide” and “social suicide” while most other African Americans embraced more subtle forms of support, most often made clandestine contributions to the movement, and painfully swallowed their pride and did what they had to do to put food on their tables, clothes on their backs, and keep roofs over their heads?
As a matter of fact, artists and entertainers’ higher public profile and greater reliance on public approval arguably made them more reticent to instigate or become openly and actively involved in anything that might elicit negative public reaction. However, and this should be strongly stressed, the exact same statement (minus the reference to artists and entertainers’ higher public profile and greater reliance on public approval) could be made about most members of the African American community during t
he Civil Rights Movement. If gospel artists wanted to have successful careers and really ply their crafts (e.g., make commercial recordings, have their work regularly featured on radio playlists, and secure lucrative concert bookings), they simply could not “tell it like it is,” or “call a spade a spade,” or certainly not openly embrace and put into practice the special tradition of truth-telling that lies at the heart of African American culture (once again, I remind my readers that Du Bois declared at the dawn of the twentieth century, “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,” and that what I am referring to here as “the special tradition of truth-telling that lies at the heart of African American culture,” is essentially black folks’ ongoing articulation of their distinct “second-sight”). In other words, gospel artists quite simply could not utilize protest language or any sort of radical-sounding rhetoric in their songs. Once again, “gospel protest,” as with much of African American musical protest more broadly speaking, is predicated on the “we can implicitly sing what we cannot explicitly say” aesthetic.
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