Gospel

Despite its roots in religion, Gospel music has influenced everything from blues and soul to rock and hip-hop. Gospel music evolved from the vocal spirituals sung by enslaved African Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. These songs blended African musical traditions with Biblical themes and Christian hymns. They featured movement, improvisations, call-and-response vocals, hand claps, and repetitive, multi-layered rhythms.

Gospel began to form in the 20th century under the influence of Thomas A. Dorsey, a Chicago-based Christian evangelist and ex-blues pianist who became known as the “father of gospel.” His 1932 song “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” became a standard, and was later associated with both Mahalia Jackson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement.

It was Dr. King’s favorite song. Before he was assassinated, his last words were, “Ben, make sure you play ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.”

Mahalia Jackson, who was born into poverty in New Orleans, helped popularize the genre for secular music fans. Famous for her incredible vocal performances on songs like “Move On Up a Little Higher” (1947) and “How I Got Over,” (1951) she brought gospel to Carnegie Hall, the Newport Jazz Festival, and the March on Washington.

In the 1940’s, Sister Rosetta Tharpe mixed gospel lyrics with electric guitar riffs and swinging rhythms. “Strange Things Happening Every Day” is a traditional African American spiritual she made famous in 1944. Tharpe’s groundbreaking version features vocals, electric guitar, piano, bass, and drums, and became the first gospel record to cross over onto the Billboard “race” chart, reaching #2 in 1945. Recorded in response to criticism from religious leaders, the song bridged sacred and secular music, and is considered to be one of the first rock songs. NPR once wrote that “Rock ‘n’ Roll was bred between the church and the nightclubs in the soul of a queer black woman in the 1940s named Sister Rosetta Tharpe.”

In the 1950s, male gospel quartets like the Soul Stirrers, the Dixie Humingbirds, and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi blended rich vocal harmonies and impassioned lead vocals. Sam Cooke, who came up singing lead with the Soul Stirrers, was one of the first gospel artists to cross over to secular music. His biggest hits, “You Send Me” and “A Change Is Gonna Come,” are essentially gospel songs.

The Everly Brothers grew up singing in church, and developed their signature close harmonies there. Their singing style provided a blueprint for future harmony acts like The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel.
Little Richard’s wild ecstatic vocal delivery on “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally” was straight from the church. Elvis Presley recorded three full gospel albums, which helped him win his only Grammy Awards during his lifetime.

Ray Charles turned gospel into secular pop by taking church melodies and rewriting them into songs like “I Got a Woman” and “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” creating soul music in the process.

The Rolling Stones picked up on gospel’s groove when they were recording 1972’s Exile on Main St, a famously dark and druggy album. Stones singer Mick Jagger was a fan of C.L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s fiery preacher father, and based some of his stage presence on him. Jagger wrote “Tumbling Dice” and “Shine A Light” after hanging out in an evangelical church in Los Angeles.

Bob Dylan, known for constantly reinventing himself, shocked fans when he entered his Christian rock phase in the late ’70s, releasing Slow Train Coming and Saved. Dylan preached to the crowd during concerts, which featured a trio of authentic gospel singers on backup vocals. Among them was Carolyn Dennis, who was secretly married to Dylan for 15 years.

Gospel’s influence on soul and R&B is clear. Artists took the vocal style and emotion of gospel and applied it to love songs and pop ballads. Before he was a solo artist, the deeply spiritual R&B singer Luther Vandross sang backup for artists like David Bowie and Bette Midler.

Vandross’ hit songs “Never Too Much,” “Here and Now” and “Dance with My Father” showed how he fused gospel’s emotional intensity into mainstream pop ballads. Vandross never made a full gospel album, but you could hear the genre’s influence in his singing, especially in his phrasing and vocal runs. His success in the 1980s and 90s proved that gospel techniques could be adapted to pop and R&B.

In the early 2000s,The Polyphonic Spree brought gospel’s big-choir, euphoric feeling into indie and alternative music. Aretha Franklin, often referred to as the Queen of Soul, made several gospel albums throughout her career. In 1973, she won a Grammy for her Amazing Grace album, which captured her transcendent gospel performance at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church (Jagger was in attendance). A documentary, also called Amazing Grace, was filmed during the recording and released in 2018, capturing the live performance behind one of her most famous albums.

Hip-hop and pop music have kept gospel alive in new ways. Kanye West put out an album called Jesus is King, (Before he declared himself “a nazi”, invalidating all he’d done before) featuring the 85-member Sunday Service Choir. Kendrick Lamar drew on gospel’s music and themes for his 2022 Pulitzer-prize winning album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, which can be heard on songs like “Savior” and “Count Me Out.” R&B superstars like Beyonce and John Legend are steeped in gospel’s piano and vocal traditions. Modern gospel artist like CeeCee Winans, Kirk Franklin, Yolanda Adams and Donnie McClurkin continue to release platinum-selling albums.

An astute music fan on the Steve Hoffman Music Forum named BrojB pointed out that gospel, more than the blues, is responsible for rock music’s “outlandish energy.”

One thing that gospel gave Rock and Roll was a different, more outlandish energy than the blues. Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson may have laid a musical foundation for Rock and Roll, but not the unbridled, and sometimes unhinged, edge that Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis did; and we know where those guys picked it up from. Blues is a somber music (thus the name), and even when it plugged in and became party music, it still came with restraints. The states of ecstasy and uninhibitedness the Black church generated is the very id of Rock and Roll. And the colorful preachers who shouted and stomped and sweated across church pulpits are the true forerunners of great performers like Mick Jagger and, of course, Tina Turner.

So blues might be described as the musical backbone of Rock and Roll, but Gospel is what made it fun.