The blues emerged among Blackamericans toward the end of the Civil War as they began to escape: 1) from the confinement on plantations that tended to focus community religious expression around an often clandestine ring shout; 2) from antebellum prohibitions against education in linguistic, musical, and other arts of European culture in the Americas; and 3) from violent persecution and sharecropper poverty in agricultural river deltas of the Jim Crow south–via what has been called the Great Migration–to a potential for economic opportunity in industrial port cities usually in the somewhat more liberal racial climates of northern states.
The blues has also been referred to as part of a “blues matrix” that also births and feeds Blackamerican literature (Baker 1984: 6-14). The full incorporation of this blues matrix into a Blackamerican church–that had already made it to the port cities and assimilated into institutional American life–might be thought of as giving birth to a Blackamerican gospel of human community compassion that went global during the period from emancipation through the struggle for Civil Rights. The church provided the body, the blues provided the soul. The groundwork for Gospel Blues was laid by people like Charles Albert Tindley.
Tindley came to be known both as the “prince of preachers” and the “progenitor” of gospel blues. He was a child of emancipated slaves in Maryland, and had to be hired out as a youth to help support the family. Tindley taught himself to read. Although musically illiterate, he also became widely known as a singing preacher in the Philadelphia church he led, beginning in 1902, and grew to massive proportions (Boyer 1983).
He connected perspectives he gained from books with a passion for community service and with the ring values at the root of Blackamerican musical tradition. This drew standing room only crowds of “black” and “white” worshippers to his sermons, that were also often held in stadiums. Tindley’s songs were transcribed by musicians who were listed on the scores as arrangers.
Tindley and his contemporaries established some of the first Blackamerican companies for publishing music. His first hymnal also included one song by Thomas A. Dorsey (later known as the “father” of gospel blues). Dorsey along with his contemporaries in the next generation set out, in Dorsey’s words, “to continue what Tindley started” (Boyer 1983).
In the case of gospel music, Dorsey’s title as “father” must also be complemented with names of several “mothers” who played equally if not more important roles in various aspects. They included Arizona Dranes, a classically trained pianist, and visually impaired church musician and preacher, who actually made the first gospel blues recordings in Chicago (Johnson 2009). They also included Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a guitarist, who crossed over into secular music. She has been called the godmother of Rock and Roll (Jackson 1995). I’ve embedded a link from a YouTube video below, focused on Sister Rosetta’s massive influence on the birth of Rock and Roll.
Another classically trained pianist, Roberta Martin, further developed many of Dorsey’s ideas and formed the Roberta Martin Singers (Kalil 1993).
Each of these people managed in their own ways to master the modern Western language that commodified them, well enough to express the ring values of their own community compassion. Dorsey biographer, Michael Harris described this process as a struggle for Blackamericans in general, which he characterized in three steps: exposure, conflict, and resolution. His biography of Dorsey focused on the central period, “conflict,” as mediator of change, or a connective tissue, between the other two (Harris 1994).
Gospel blues emerged with a spirit of hope during the Great Depression that also seems reflected in the federal New Deal at that time. This was a decade before the “soul” music that would eventually come from Blackamerican musicians both sacred and secular, who by and large got their musical training and experience in the Blackamerican Church.
It also literally took a couple of decades before even the music departments in historically Black colleges began to recognize and even permit, much less teach, the type of gospel music that came out of Blackamerican churches. Walker quotes none other than Mahalia Jackson as remarking, “All this mess you hear calling itself soul ain’t nothing but warmed over gospel” (Walker 1979: 155).
I’ve embedded a YouTube video below that powerfully illustrates how the blues matrix we hear in popular arises through gospel blues. For those who are unaware, it might appear as if gospel is borrowing from popular music. But chronologically speaking it really is the other way around.
The underlying blues matrix gave birth to Blackamerican soul music and crossed over into rock and roll. The blues matrix was also buttressed by a temporally overlapping migration northward from central and south America to create what James Noel called a “salsa/jazz/blues idiom” that literally brought the sacred river ecology of Iemana in Bahia and Yemaya in Cuba into a global explosion of musical expression (Noel 2009: 171-200). It was also the soul of “jazz” that moved up from New Orleans and traveled to Europe with the Harlem Hellfighters in World War I (Nelson 2009).
The recorded music still remained racially segregated, however, because the recording industry that spread the music began in furniture stores that were still trying to market their record playing equipment into an entertainment market that had been created by blackface minstrelsy (Esther 2018 and Roy 2004). For instance, the YouTube link embedded below presents Rhiannon Giddens’ “Carolina Chocolate Drops” singing the Blackamerican church hymn that anonymously made its way into the music of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”
(Embedded from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qzj2u6_A9I)
Perhaps most powerful of all in this sense were the connections made by Blackamerican jazz musicians directly back with Africans in Mali playing essentially similar blues but with lyrics about healthy human ecology rather than human commodification (el Hamel 2013: Kindle locations 6857-7543, Stewart 2006 and Weston 2010). I’ve included a presentation of the late Randy Weston playing with Gnawa musicians from Morocco, because it also illustrates the ring-shout values in their dance movements.
The human community compassion of the blues matrix seemed to connect with people all over the world of all different religions in one way or another, including the orally transmitted nada Brahma of India (Simpkins 1975 and Farrell 1997). It has also been credited with birthing popular musico-religious movements among young people in the US (Sylvan 2002). This appears to illustrate Samuel Floyd’s concept of a Blackamerican call-and-response that eventually becomes a “Call/Response” of global music and culture (Floyd 2017: xxiv-xxvi).
All of this also led up to a time when black codes got overturned, and movements for all types of human freedoms came alive, including movements to halt the commodification of global ecology. The American summer season ended abruptly after about 100 years, as did the two previous ones, but with an even more arrogant backlash. Black codes were disguised as law-and-order codes, most noticeably with the rise of massive, for-profit, incarceration. Globalization had already begun to replace nation-state colonial empires with corporate ones (Kruse 2015), which also brought often covert subversion and overthrow of friendly democratic governments and independence movements to maintain economic control (Immerwahr 2019). This time of globalization also became a time of Blackamericans reclaiming African heritage. For instance, rather than referring to his music as “jazz” Weston referred to it as “Sacred African Rhythms.”
Introduction / Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7
Peace Jungle 