People Get Ready!: A New History of Black Gospel Music
by Robert Darden
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert DardenEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-10-05
ISBN: 0826417523
Number of pages: 440
Publisher: Continuum
Book Reviews of People Get Ready!: A New History of Black Gospel Music
Book Review: Gospel Music A Message _People Get Ready!! Passeh Passeh!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I shall need to review the reviews. But let us write. Today it is a book I should still much like to have 'on the book planks,' though the planks are no longer there. To help other candidate buyers some quotes from pages in the book:
Entry for 24 May 2007 Gospel Music A Message _People Get Ready!! Passeh Passeh!! Previous | Next
Gospel music From People Get Ready! (A New History of Black Gospel Music) by Robert DARDEN A Continuum (2004) ISBN 0-8264-1436-2
Some early writers including Dr. Seth Rogers, a Northern surgeon during the Civil War, point to field hollers and work songs as one of the basic components of the spirituals. And it is clear that slaves brought the work songs (also known as hollers, "cottonfield hollers," cries, or "whoops") with them from Africa. "A slave's call or cry could mean any of a number of things: a call for water. food, or help, a call to let others know where he was working, or simply a cry of loneliness, sorrow or happiness." Like most of the work songs (some captured by Alan Lomax in the seminal field recordings of the Georgia Sea Islands CD), the hollers contained a rhytmic quality that made the work seem easier, be it rowing, picking cotton, or laying railroad ties. Most were performed in the now-familiar "call and response" format. Noted Ethiopian scholar Ashenafi Kebede differentiates calls from cries. Whereas calls may have been primarily used to communicate information _to alert a dozing friend of a fast-approaching white overseer _cries, on the other hand
express a deeply felt emotional experience, such as hunger, loneliness, or lovesickness. They are half-sung half-yelled. Vocables are often intermixed in the text. The melodies are performed in a free and spontaneous style, they are often ornamented and employ many African vocal devices, such as yodels, echolike falsetto, tonal glides, embellished melismas, and microtonal inflections that are often impossible to indicate in European staff notation.
These cries, Kebede believes, may have evolved into te religious songs of spirituals of African Americans. "There is no doubt,"he writes "that these calls were African in derivation and that they were sung in African dialects in the early part of slave history."
Suddenly [a slave] raised such a sound as I have never heard before, a long loud musical shout, rising and falling, and breaking into falsetto, his voice ringing through the woods in the clear frosty night air, like a bugle call. As he finished the melody was caught up by another, and then, another, and then,by several in chorus. (p.43)
Despite the inroad made by the Holiness/Pentecostal churches, more African Americans were still Baptists than any other denomination, with sixty-one percent of the 5.2 million black church members in the mid-1920s calling themselves Baptist, folowed by the Methodists in distant second. Until Sherwood and Tindley, black Baptist and Methodist churches generally sang modified spirituals and camp meeting songs, along with "hymn-like compositions,"similar to those sung in mainstream white churches. According to Boyer, these songs always featured a salvation-based message, a standard verse/chorus format (eight bars each), rhythms dominated by quarter and dotted eighth notes, and an antiphonal chorus. ... Tindley's lyrics focused instead on specific concerns of African-American christians, including "worldly sorrows, blessings, and woes, as well as the joys of the afterlife. Furthermore, most of his songs were placed in the pentatonic scale and allowed ample room for rhythmic,melodic, and even lyric improvisations. The Tindley Gospel Singers .. to come from the predominant Baptist tradition who were attracted to the new, more emotional music emanating from the Sanctified tradition, but .. "I'll Overcome Someday" (1901) ...(p. 161) Even the more conservative older gospel groups, such as the Pace Jubilee Singers, found his songs too singable to ignore _ their version of Tindley's "Stand by me" was a hit in 1930. (p162)
One of Tindley's contemporaries was a woman .. Lucie .. Campbell [self-taught] ... NBC National Baptist Convention Convention Golden Gems, Inspirational Melodies, Spirituals Triumphant and Gospel Pearls .._ all of which, incidentally, included her compositions. (p.163)
Summary of People Get Ready!: A New History of Black Gospel Music
People Get Ready!: A New History of Gospel Music is a passionate, celebratory, and carefully researched chronology of one of America?s greatest treasures. From Africa through the spirituals, from minstrel music through jubilee, and from traditional to contemporary gospel, People Get Ready! shows the links between styles, social patterns, and artists. The emphasis is on the stories behind the songs and musicians. From the nameless slaves of Colonial America to Donnie McClurkin, Yolanda Adams, and Kirk Franklin, People Get Ready! provides, for the first time, an accessible overview of this musical genre. In addition to the more familiar stories of Thomas A. Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, the book offers intriguing new insights into the often forgotten era between the Civil War and the rise of jubilee?that most intriguing blend of minstrel music, barbershop harmonies, and the spiritual. Also chronicled are the connections between some of gospel?s precursors (Blind Willie Johnson, Arizona Dranes, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe) and modern gospel stars, including Andrae Crouch and Clara Ward. People Get Ready! knits together a number of narratives, and combines history, musicology and spirituality into a coherent whole, stitched together by the stories of dozens of famous and forgotten musical geniuses. FROM THE INTRODUCTION ?Among the richest of the lavish gifts Africa has given to the world is rhythm. The beat. The sound of wood on wood, hand on hand. That indefinable pulse that sets blood to racing and toes to tapping. It is rhythm that drives the great American musical exports, the spiritual (and, by extension, gospel), the blues, jazz and rock ?n? roll. But first you must have the spirituals?religion with rhythm. In this book, I will show the evolution of a musical style that only occasionally slows down its evolution long enough to be classified before it evolves yet again. In historical terms, spirituals emerged from African rhythm, work-songs, and field hollers in a remarkably short time?years, perhaps days?after the first African slaves landed on American shores. From the spirituals sprang not just their spiritual heir jubilee, but jazz and blues. And gospel music in its modern understanding morphed from the spirituals, the blues, jubilee and?of course?African rhythm. What today?s gospel music is and what it is becoming is part of the continuing evolution of African American music. Religion with rhythm.?>History & Criticism Books
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