Gospel: Where Song & Sermon Meet

Thoughts on the new Henry Louis Gates history series which premiered on PBS this week.

Last night, I was part of an incredibly vigorous and thought-provoking panel discussion at the National Museum of African-American Music, sponsored and curated by WPLN, Nashville’s local news and NPR station. The motivation for our gathering was PBS’ new history series, Gospel: Where Song and Sermon Meet, written and produced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The series is ambitious in that it attempts to cover a genre that formulated in the 1930s and has evolved over the last (almost) one hundred years. I’m not the documentary watcher who expects every name to be mentioned or every single significant moment to be relayed. However, Gospel: Where Song and Sermon Meet, had every opportunity to be the most comprehensive series on the genre to date.

And it is not.

Episode 1, “The Gospel Train,” is the only essential episode. It moves swiftly through the spirituals and gives historical and cultural context for Thomas Dorsey’s invention of gospel and introduces the confluence of elements that helped gospel solidify its cultural hold within the Black church. Of the four episodes, it is the most focused and well crafted. Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson are prominently featured and their stories are well told.

But it all goes downhill from there.

Gates’ desire to elucidate his subtitle, “where song and sermon meet,” distracts from the reality that while gospel music grew within the church, it also was cultivated and expanded as a cultural force outside of the auspices of the church via concerts and programs with artists functioning as independent agents, performing in theaters and arenas. The series presumes that the artists and their music were discovered exclusively in church, ignoring the vital role of radio and the radio announcer. New York radio announcer Joe Bostic sponsored Mahalia Jackson’s first Carnegie Hall appearance, and played an important role in stretching where gospel was presented outside of its conventional circles. The series champions Rev. C.L. Franklin’s 70+ recorded sermons, but never explains the mechanism that put them in the ears of listeners around the world in the first place. While the word “industry” gets thrown around, it is never explained how gospel music actually became industrialized.

Episode 3, “Take the Message Everywhere,” clumsily attempts to cover roughly 30 years of gospel’s evolution, from the late 1960s into the 1990s. While Andraé Crouch is rightly focused on, there is barely a mention of the church’s resistance to gospel’s expansion. There is nary a mention of the Mighty Clouds of Joy’s controversial crossover into R&B and disco territory with 1975’s “Mighty High,” nor the New York Community Choir’s 1977 crossover hit, “Express Yourself.” Their significance is not only in the crossover success, but in that they were the artists willing to go into the clubs themselves to perform their hits. Instead, The Clark Sisters’ 1983 hit “You Brought the Sunshine” is, once again, presented as the central crossover moment. There is also not a mention of Tramaine Hawkins’ 1985 #1 Dance hit, “Fall Down (Spirit of Love),” the highest charting of any of the aforementioned tunes, nor the controversy and dialog that hit opened up.

Most shocking to this writer is that Bobby Jones Gospel, undeniably the most important gospel television show, is not evaluated or mentioned at any point. Beginning in the 1980s, Bobby Jones Gospel single-handedly shifted the hold that gospel radio had in determining gospel hits and how artists were elevated from the local stage onto a national platform. Dr. Jones’ show carried cultural and theological weight as well. He was the only gospel personality to speak during the AIDS crisis, imploring the church to treat those living with AIDS with compassion and empathy. He positioned women ministers and evangelists like Beverly Crawford and Nuana Dunlap not just as singers, but as preachers and healers who, without pause, prophesied and laid hands on people when women, in the largest denominations, were not allowed to do so. Jones’ power was grounded in being unencumbered by denominational demands. He showed support, by way of his platform, to artists like the aforementioned Tramaine Hawkins and, later, Kirk Franklin, at points in their careers when many of the church’s hierarchy were speaking against them. To not contemplate the significance of a platform like Bobby Jones Gospel is confounding.

In Gates’ narrative, gospel doesn’t really get spicy until the 90s, dubbed the alleged “platinum era.” This is the first time the series focuses on intra-communal controversy, largely over hip-hop’s introduction to gospel. But the new norms like the mega-church and the praise and worship trend are simply treated as part of the ways the church and gospel have evolved. In reality though, everything Gates credits to the internet was already in motion via Christian television, all the way back to when Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s PTL Club began. As John P. Kee told me in our 2016 interview, “PTL changed the way we worshipped.” A deeper analysis of the ways that the (white) Christian media machine has impacted the gospel sound is absent. The series sees worship music as carrying a universalism that is the thread that connects gospel’s present to its past, without critiquing the ways these changes mute and dull not just the sound, but the spirit that has always been gospel music’s distinguishing factor.

Gates gathered some of the best academics and historians who focus on gospel including Dr. Claudrena Harold, Bob Marovich, Mark Burford, Aaron Cohen, and Deborah Smith Pollard among others as well as artists like Shirley Caesar, Lynette Hawkins-Stephens, Bishop Yvette Flunder and Shirley Miller of the Hawkins Singers, Donald Lawrence and Twinkie Clark whose relationship with gospel’s origins and evolution is comprehensive, so the failure of this series isn’t in the experts who were called (although the absence of Anthony Heilbut, who wrote the first gospel history book, The Gospel Sound, is mystifying). The problem rests in knowing what to ask or what to include from what was actually discussed in the interviews by the stellar cast of contributors. Researches on these kinds of projects only research what they are guided to hunt for, so the blame for the short-sighted narratives sits exclusively at the feet of Gates, who takes singular credit for writing the script.

For those who think I’m being cantankerous, the Wall Street Journal felt similarly, just in fewer words, writing, “Prof. Gates is an enthusiastic enough host, but a lot of what he contributes feels phoned in; much of his annotation, for lack of a better word, is done against the same backdrop, perhaps at Harvard, and he might have knocked it off in an afternoon.”

Is it worth watching? Yes. The series is filled with previously unseen film and images. For gospel lovers, that alone is worth the time investment. If you’re new to gospel history, I’d suggest augmenting your viewing with a few books that relay the gospel story with more detail and analysis.

Suggested reading:

The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times by Anthony Heilbut
When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras by Claudrena Harold
A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music by Robert Marovich

The Panel Discussion

Patrick Dailey, Odessa Settles, Dr. Bobby Jones, LaTonya Turner, G. Preston Wilson and myself

As I indicated at the top of the newsletter, this past Monday WPLN curated an incredible panel discussion with myself, Patrick Dailey (a voice professor at Tennessee State University and director of the W. Crimm Singers), G. Preston Wilson (the new director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers), and legendary Nashville vocalist, Odessa Settles. We discussed Nashville’s relevance to the gospel story (not included in the documentary) and the current state of gospel music.

I’ve uploaded my audio recording of the discussion as the latest episode of the God’s Music Is My Life podcast. You can listen via Spotify, Apple, etc. by clicking here.

Thanks to all of you who are following the podcast via your preferred streaming outlet!