The Birth of Gospel Music 2
Thomas Dorsey
Although many forces laid the musical foundation for this genre in several different contexts in the first quarter of the twentieth century, it was not until the 1930s that the term gospel music and its repertoire and distinctive performance style gained widespread usage among Black Americans across denominational lines. During this decade, Thomas Dorsey (1899-1993), lauded as "Father of Gospel Music," relinquished his career as an accomplished blues and jazz pianist-composer and devoted himself entirely to the development and advancement of gospel music (Duckett 1974, 13; Boyer 1973, 21).
Dorsey was a 1916 migrant to Chicago from Georgia. Born in Villa Rica, near Atlanta, the son of an itinerant Baptist preacher, he grew up playing the organ in church. As a boy, however, he also worked selling soda pop at a vaudeville theater in Atlanta, where he was regularly exposed to such blues performers as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Captivated by the music he heard at the 81 Theater, Dorsey chose to cultivate his own musical gifts by learning to read music and apprenticing himself to pianists who played at the theater where he worked. By the time Dorsey was sixteen years old, he had built a reputation as the number one blues piano player for rent parties in the city, eventually acquiring the nickname Barrelhouse Tom. Later, in Chicago, he recorded under the name of Georgia Tom.
As a result of the Great Migration, the one-room folk church of the rural South became the storefront church of the urban North-a key context for the emergence of gospel music. Whether in former retail shops such as grocery or dry good stores, in houses, garages or abandoned theaters, Southern migrants, members of the lower socio-economic strata, often expressed a preference for worship in storefront churches. Their smaller size, averaging sixty members or less, allowed members to identify personally with the pastor and with other worshippers, something that larger churches could not offer (Ricks 1960, 122). In addition, worship in the storefront church was less formal, and more closely akin to the worship to which Black migrants had been accustomed in the rural South.
When Dorsey entered the world of Black religious music in Chicago in 1921, he found a scene that was rich and engaging. Although the numbers of storefront churches, with their rural southern-based musical expression, represented only a small minority of church members among blacks in the first third of the twentieth century, their distinct worship style was replicated in larger Chicago congregations: Methodist, Baptist, and Spiritualist. Furthermore, Dorsey was struck by the music he heard at the National Baptist Convention in Chicago in 1921, and he acknowledged that the work of C.A. Tindley in Philadelphia was having widespread success among Black Christians nationwide:
The name 'gospels' was used around 1905-1906 when C. Albert Tindley was writing songs. I can remember … his '[We'll Understand It Better] By and By'… this song was a great hit around 1907 in the churches of the South. They had no pianos, but the 'Amen Corner' sisters would carry the rhythm by patting their feet and clapping their hands.
(quoted in Ricks 1960, 133)
It should be gathered by this quote that Dorsey and others often performed the hymns of Tindley in the gospel music idiom, which served the church well. An example of such, preserved in the Pentecostal style, can be heard by Bishop Carlton Pearson at the Azuza Street Festival in 1996:
Bishop Carlton Pearson - We'll Understand It Better By and By (Live at AZUSA 2) '96 [ 00:00-00:00 ]
From 00:00 - 03:17, he shares a story of an old lady who recalls the hymn at 03:17.
Bishop Carlton Pearson - We'll Understand It Better By and By (Live at AZUSA 2) '96
Stand By Me
When the storms of life are raging
Stand by me
When the storms of life are raging
Stand by me
When the world is tossing me
Like a ship out on the sea
Thou who rulest wind and water
Stand by me
Leave It There
If the world from you withhold of its silver and its gold,
And you have to get along with meager fare,
Just remember, in His Word, how He feeds the little bird,
Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.
Leave it there, leave it there,
Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.
If you trust and never doubt,
He will surely bring you out,
Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.