The Birth of Gospel Music 1

The synoptic gospels The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which describe events from a similar point of view, as contrasted with that of John. of the New Testament provided the genesis of the term "gospel," which according to Christians records the miracles, teachings, saving, and sustaining power of Jesus Christ. Gospel music is the twentieth-century form of African American religious music that evolved in urban cities following the Great Migration of Blacks from the agrarian South around World Wars I and II. During the years 1920-30, an estimated three million Blacks migrated from the rural South to the urban North. Prompted by the desire to establish a better way of life, both socially and economically, this transplanted populace served as a key stimulus for the creation of the form of expression which was to become known as gospel music. The genre gestated in Black churches and became crystalized in the 1930s by former blues pianist Thomas A. Dorsey. With the merging of the elements of blues and the religious fervor of the spiritual, gospel music arose and quickly became the idiom in which the African American community sustained themselves through the theology of "somehow," i.e., something that keeps you up when you are not aware that a superior force is holding you.