A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music
464
A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music
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Overview
A City Called Heaven celebrates a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252097089 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2015 |
| Series: | Music in American Life |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A City Called Heaven
Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music
By Robert M. Marovich
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Robert M. MarovichAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09708-9
CHAPTER 1
Got On My Traveling Shoes
Black Sacred Music and the Great Migration
Rise, shine, and give God the glory, glory;
Rise, shine, and give God the glory, glory;
Rise, shine, and give God the glory in the Year of Jubilee.
"Do You Think I'll Make a Soldier," Wiseman Sextet version
The Gospel Train Is Comin'
The Illinois Central passenger train screeched to a stop at the Twelfth Street depot on Chicago's South Side, its smokestack coughing up frothy puffs of soot as if the fatigue of traveling 1,126 railroad miles north from New Orleans had caused it combustible indigestion. From among the train's human cargo, black men, women, and children trudged slowly through the passenger car doors and made their first footfalls on the platform.
The Promised Land.
Once inside the Illinois Central station's bustling lobby, the new arrivals searched the sea of faces, looking for family members, friends, and neighbors who had already settled in Chicago and promised to meet them when their train arrived. Those who had nobody waiting for them could hail a porter or redcap and seek explicit directions to their final destination
For the majority of arrivals, that destination was Bronzeville—the "city within a city," the Black Metropolis—the primary residential and commercial district for Chicago's black population during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In those days, Bronzeville was an eight-and-one-half-square-mile community concentrated between Roosevelt Road (1200 South) as the northernmost border, Cottage Grove as the easternmost border, Wentworth Avenue as the western boundary, and a southern border that shifted over time, from Thirty-First to Thirty-Fifth, then to Forty-Seventh and eventually Sixty-Third Street.
Many of the earliest southern migrants got their first eyeful of Bronzeville from the streetcar as they traveled the few miles south on State Street from the IC Station at Twelfth Street into the heart of The Stroll, Bronzeville's main entertainment district during the 1920s and 1930s. The area along State Street between Thirty-First and Thirty-Fifth Streets was packed with entertainments of every kind, a Chicago equivalent of Beale Street in Memphis or Rampart Street in New Orleans. Patrons of the Grand Theater enjoyed generous helpings of classic blues from Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, who made her entrance onto the stage by bursting forth from a giant papier-máché Victrola. On the same block as the Grand were the Lincoln Theater and the Vendome Theater, where Louis Armstrong and Carroll Dickerson's Orchestra got patrons dancing after the motion-picture show. For fourteen-year-old Wealthy L. Mobley, who migrated with his family from Minter City, Mississippi, on Christmas Day 1935, the sight of Chicago was "awesome!" He explained, "Well, you know, coming out of the country, the only light we saw was the lighting up of a lightning bug!"
Squeezed between the come-hither facades of dazzling theaters, cafés, and restaurants were furniture stores, funeral parlors, beauty shops, and sparse, somber storefront churches. As if to underscore the difference between them and their gaudier neighbors, these churches were minimally furnished with wooden folding chairs facing the pulpit in meticulously arranged rows, reverently awaiting the next service. On Sunday mornings and evenings, the rhythmic singing and shouting coming from Pentecostal and Holiness churches along State Street were so exuberant that one might suspect the buildings' proximity to the clubs had infected their congregations with the jazz bug.
Passersby were as much an expression of the area's contrasts as the buildings. Walking along State Street were men in sharp suits, women in smart dresses, factory workers in overalls covered in grease and dirt, and slaughterhouse employees splattered with animal blood. On one corner might be a battered man in an even more battered fedora, a cigarette dangling from his mouth while he played bottleneck country blues on guitar. On the other corner might be a sturdy, serious woman dressed in a long, dark dress, somber hat, and black Oxford shoes. Like the bottleneck guitarist, she sang with passion, but whereas his repertory was blues, hers was the gospel hymn and evangelistic song. He sang about hurt, she about salvation, but both strummed the same chords, sang with the same raw and genuine feeling, and hoped for a few coins in their cup or tambourine by day's end.
Chicago did not look or feel like the Promised Land as proffered by the Chicago Defender, the largest weekly newspaper by and about African Americans. The streets were not paved with gold, and some were not even paved. Still, Chicago did not have lynch mobs, sharecropping, or "Colored Only" signs. You could ride the streetcar and not have to move when a white person sat down next to you.
Starting around 1916, but given an official start date by the Defender of May 15, 1917, the Great Northern Drive, or the Great Migration, sent wave upon wave of black men, women, and children crashing upon Chicago's shores. Between 1910 and 1920, the Great Migration swelled Chicago's black population from 44,103 to 109,458, placing the city fourth among all U.S. cities in total black population by 1920. Of blacks living in Chicago in 1920, more than 80 percent—some 91,000—had been born outside Illinois, with the largest percentages arriving from Kentucky, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, and Mississippi. Most came from Alabama and Mississippi.
The Great Migration was called an exodus for good reason. Entire families evacuated plantations, small towns, and rural villages, but mostly left the cities of post-Reconstruction Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. In 1918, an adult could purchase a one-way ticket on the Illinois Central from New Orleans to Chicago for $22.52; by 1927, the one-way fare rose to $37.76. Individuals unable to afford the fare from savings sold property and personal goods or sought financial assistance from family or friends already established in Chicago. Especially enterprising individuals organized family, friends, and neighbors into "emigrant clubs" that enabled them to negotiate group discount fares with the train companies. When police began patrolling southern train stations to prevent the black labor force from leaving, ticketholders hid behind trees and brush north of the station. As the train lumbered past, the entire area seemed to spring to life, like jubilee: black men, women, and children, bags in hand, darted from behind cover and ran toward the train doors.
Regardless of the way migrants traveled, Chicago was the destination of choice, particularly for those from Atlanta, Birmingham, Mobile, New Orleans, and Memphis. Myriad reasons were given for leaving the South, but they could all be summarized as "to better my condition." That is what Chicago promised, what the Defender screamed from its front pages and editorials, what Pullman porters spoke about, and what relatives, friends, and neighbors—the pioneers who traveled to Chicago to test the waters—described in postcards, telephone calls, and during occasional visits back home. Some things told about Chicago were not true, but as one newcomer noted, "So much of it true, don't mind the other."
The Promised Land?
Substandard housing was one of the migrant's first disillusionments in the Promised Land. Blacks who moved to Chicago prior to the Great Migration found living accommodations without much difficulty, even though the city's restrictive housing covenants kept them within the confines of Bronzeville's narrow rectangular border. But by 1920, when more than one hundred thousand African Americans had settled in the city, Bronzeville was packed to bursting. When demand for flats outweighed supply, landlords subdivided already subdivided housing stock, creating the kitchenette—a cramped, dingy, and unsafe efficiency unit.
Employment was another disappointment. Many men toiled under the same backbreaking work in the northern steel mills and slaughterhouses as they had endured in the South. Migrants had also not escaped domestic servitude by coming north. The work available to them included jobs as janitors and wait staff, and maids and laundresses for women. When funds were available, women entered beauty schools, trained to become teachers, or studied nursing at Bronzeville's all-black Provident Hospital or the city's Contagious Hospital. Jobs in Chicago paid better than those in the South, but with higher wages came long, arduous hours of manual labor.
Resistance to new migrants sometimes escalated to violence. The Race Riot of 1919, during which 38 persons were killed and 537 injured, proved that race relations in Chicago were on shaky ground. Further, between July 1, 1917, and March 1, 1921, 58 black-inhabited buildings in Chicago were bombed. In 1925, a Baptist church on Michigan Avenue was bombed so repeatedly that the congregation took out insurance against bombing. One Congregational church on South Michigan Avenue received national attention for placing a bulletin board in front that stated "A White Congregation Worships Here."
If unemployment, substandard housing, and hostility weren't bad enough, the new migrants faced prejudice and discrimination from within the black community as well. Some "Old Settlers," members of the black middle-class establishment who were born or settled in Chicago prior to the Great Migration, believed the migrants' country behavior compromised any real or perceived racial harmony that existed in the city. One Old Settler commented, "There was no discrimination in Chicago during my early childhood days, but as the Negroes began coming to Chicago in numbers it seems they brought discrimination with them." Others criticized the uncouth manners of some newcomers. One unattributed article in the Defender declared, "When in Chicago, for goodness sake, do as Chicagoans do!" The writer admonished black workers for "riding busses and trains in their overalls and dirty clothes used at work" and advised them to wash before coming home and leave dirty clothes at the workplace.
The intraracial friction boiled down to class differences. Old Settlers did not work in factories—they were never afforded the opportunity. They developed stable incomes as postal employees, Pullman porters, housekeepers for wealthy white families, and doormen. In keeping with their urban middle-class standing, they cultivated a sense of refinement and respectability. They belonged to social clubs, were active politically, and fostered an appreciation for classical music. They favored highbrow performances of the all-black Apollo Chorus, Umbrian Glee Club, William E. Myricks's Federal Glee Club, and the women's Laredef Glee Club (Federal spelled backward), and Professor J. Wesley Jones's Metropolitan Prize-Winning and Radio Choir. They were embarrassed by southern migrants' folk mannerisms. Since restrictive covenants forced old Settlers and new arrivals to live side by side, every wave of migrants found the middle class fleeing further south within the city's black belt boundary. They clustered in communities around Forty-Seventh Street, then around Sixty-Third Street. As the black population continued to swell, Old Settlers moved southwest into the Englewood neighborhood. The more affluent made their homes in Morgan Park. It was not long before the migrant population was so pervasive that the Old Settlers could not go anywhere without finding new settlers living on the same block or in the same building.
It might seem that the one institution to which the new settlers could turn for solace was the church, but class differences were just as pronounced in the religious community as elsewhere. The worship style of the established Protestant churches in the urban north was dramatically different from what migrants practiced down South. The Great Migration and the resulting clash between the Old Settlers and the newcomers ultimately changed the religious order as profoundly as it did the social order, raising questions about what it meant to be black, religious, urban, and modern in the twentieth century.
"How Shall We Sing the Lord's Song in a Strange Land?"
Communal worship, with its emotional music, preaching, rhythm, singing, and dancing, originated in West African sacred and secular traditions. Black gospel music in particular retained African-derived aesthetic markers, including falsetto, religious dancing or shouting, improvisation, repetition, hand clapping and foot patting, dynamic rhythms, communal participation, antiphonal response (call-and-response), and oral transmission of the music. West Africans recognized spirit possession, a hallmark of the sanctified church, as the supreme religious experience. They regarded music and dance as both religious and secular, central to daily life and participatory.
Further, the folk preacher is a descendant of West African tribal leaders, serving as a spiritual leader and spokesperson and carrying musical elements into ritual. Jon Michael Spencer has observed that the "African rhythms of black preaching" gave the traditional black sermon its "melodiousness" as well as its "momentum and its momentousness." It is also easy to hear the folk preacher's melodiousness, momentum, and momentousness in the delivery of a gospel song sung by a soloist or lead singer.
The black church evolved from the combination of "habits of belief" carried by Africans to the New World and "religion they were taught here." "Brush arbor" or "brush harbor" meetings, named for the slaves' practice of gathering to worship under cover of brush or bushes to escape the notice of plantation owners, combined several African indigenous practices, including antiphonal, or call-and-response, singing and exhortations, impassioned oratory, and extroverted body movement. White Methodist missionaries taught psalms and hymns to slaves as they traveled the South and Southeast during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in search of converts. The conversion process or "seekin' the Lord," a rite of passage similar to African initiation rites, encouraged slaves to make public testimonies or confessions of faith. As slaves Africanized Christianity, they brought biblical themes of escape and deliverance into their own repertory of slave songs and spirituals. They were especially attracted to the mournful long-meter, or "lining out," psalms and hymns, in which a church leader recited or "called" a stanza of a psalm or song and led the congregation in a sung response. This practice, developed in mid-seventeenth-century white New England congregations in the absence of hymnbooks or instruments, was introduced to slave communities around 1750 by Samuel Davies, a New Light preacher. "Doc Watts" hymns—in essence, any long-meter hymn written by Isaac Watts and other hymnists—can still be heard "raised" or "lifted" by a deacon for congregational participation prior to a worship service in black Baptist churches.
The songs and oratory of fundamentalist preachers and evangelists who pitched revival tents in rural areas and cities in nineteenth-century America also appealed to the black community. The use of vernacular language, emotional persuasion, and impassioned preaching echoed the slaves' brush arbor and plantation mission meetings and pray's house experiences. The sprightly camp meeting spirituals and revival songs were crafted, like the long-meter hymns, so that attendees could learn them easily and quickly.
To facilitate congregational singing, gospel hymns and camp-meeting songs sometimes incorporated a portfolio of movable couplets and single lines that floated from song to song. For example, the opening verse of "Amazing Grace" was so well known by Christians that song leaders could incorporate it into any gospel hymn or set it to any melody with complete confidence that the congregation could join in.
Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs, published by white evangelists Ira D. Sankey and Philip P. Bliss in 1875, was the first book to use the phrase "gospel hymns" in association with religious songs. Their Gospel Hymns No. 2 followed a year later. Both hymnals attempted to capture the spirit and ardor of antebellum camp meetings, the Protestant City-Revival Movement of the 1850s, and the Sunday school songs that accompanied the revivalism. More often than not, they seemed more solemn than celebratory. Nevertheless, they were far more popular among free blacks at the time than the spirituals, which served as embarrassing reminders of servitude's indignity. More than a dozen of the hymnbook's songs, including "Pass Me Not," "I Need Thee Every Hour," "Come Ye Disconsolate," "The Solid Rock," and "Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross," remain popular hymns in the African American church. Walter Pitts noted that worshippers often referred to these songs as "Sankeys."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A City Called Heaven by Robert M. Marovich. Copyright © 2015 Robert M. Marovich. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 1
Part One: Roots 9
1. Got On My Traveling Shoes: Black Sacred Music and the Great Migration 11
2. "When the Fire Fell": The Sanctified Church Contribution to Chicago Gospel Music 27
3. Sacred Music in Transition: Charles Henry Pace and the Pace Jubilee Singers 48
4. Turn Your Radio On: Chicago Sacred Radio Broadcast Pioneers 58
5. "Someday, Somewhere": The Formation of the Gospel Nexus 71
6. Sweeping through the City: Thomas A. Dorsey and the Gospel Nexus (1932 - 1933) 87
7. Across This Land and Country: New Songs for a New Era (1933-1939) 112
8. From Birmingham to Chicago: The Great Migration of the Gospel Quartet 132
Part Two: Branches 147
9. Sing a Gospel Song: The 1940s, Part One 149
10. "If It's in Music -- We Have It": The Fertile Crescent of Gospel Music Publishing 167
11. "Move On Up a Little Higher": The 1940s, Part Two 179
12. Postwar Gospel Quartets: "Rock Stars of Religious Music" 204
13. The Gospel Caravan: Midcentury Melodies 229
14. "He Could Just Put a Song on His Fingers": Second-Generation Gospel Choirs 260
15. "God's Got a Television": Gospel Music Comes to the Living Room 281
16. "Tell It Like It Is": Songs of Social Significance 297
17. One of These Mornings: Chicago Gospel at the Crossroads 317
Appendix A. 1920s African American Sacred Music Recordings Made in Chicago 331
Appendix B. African American Sacred Music Recordings Made in Chicago, 1930-1941 335
Notes 337
Bibliography 389
General Index 401
Index of Songs 435
Illustrations follow page 228