The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church [Hardcover]

Michael W. Harris (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195063767 | ISBN-13: 978-0195063769 | Publication Date: April 30, 1992 | Edition: 1st Ed

In the early 1930s an exciting new musical form arose in Chicago known as the gospel blues. The principal figure in the creation of this distinctive music was a blues pianist named Thomas A. Dorsey, who had considerable success in the 1920s as a pianist, composer, and arranger for such prominent blues singers as Ma Rainey. In the 1930s, Dorsey became increasingly involved in the African-American churches in Chicago. His background in the blues was an important influence on his composing and singing of church music. At first the "respectable" Chicago churches rejected this new form, not only because of Dorsey's blues playing and singing, but more because of the excitement in the church congregation that this new gospel blues produced. However, by the end of the 1930s, the power of the music had made gospel blues a major force in African-American churches and religion. Through the voices of such singers as Mahalia Jackson, gospel blues helped shape the development of American popular music. In this book, Harris looks at the story of the rise of gospel blues as seen through the career of its founding figure. Harris also places it in the broader contexts of African-American religion and the large urban migration of African-Americans after World War I.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Although gospel music has been a taproot for soul, jazz, and rock-and-roll, it remains a fairly insulated art, with its own venues, audience, and mythology. A good place to start investigating this revelatory music is Michael Harris's The Rise of the Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church. Dorsey (1899-1993), the inventor of modern gospel, began playing the piano in small-town Georgia bordellos at the age of 12. As a young man he wrote more than 2,000 blues songs, including such naughty novelties as "Tight Like That." In the mid-1920s, however, Dorsey began producing a string of sacred-and-profane hybrids, many of which became building blocks of the gospel repertoire. Harris has written a smart, scholarly portrait of a musical giant who continued to perform right through the late 1980s--and who made his feature-film debut at age 84, in the delightful Say Amen, Somebody. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

"Harris...skillfully demonstrates the ways that music can serve ideology, whether as "survival texts" or as an emblem of class warfare. He also captures the union of piety and commerce inherent in American fundamentalism."--New York Times Book Review

"Harris cleverly weaves together his biographical and cultural analysis....He has written a fine book from which historians, even the tone deaf among them, will profit."--American Historical Review

"Harris carefully portrays Dorsey as the personification of the tension between the assimilationist and indigenous African-American traditions....This is no mere academic anatomizing imposed on a music of folkish popular culture....The fact that Harris transgresses the repressive orthodoxy of the church and reveals the human contribution to gospel music to be "the blues" makes his book one of the few nonfictional pieces placeable in Ralph Ellison's "blues school of literature."--Georgia Historical Quarterly

"The Rise of Gospel Blues fills a critical void.... More than a biography of an important composer, Harris frames Dorsey's life and music against the backdrop of early twentieth-century African-American social and intellectual history....A complex and provocative work, providing a solid foundation for exploring the role of gospel music in the twentieth-century African-American church."--Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter

"A most welcome book whose subjects are dramatically underrepresented in the literature and whose specific subject has been preserved too long only in the memories of the oral tradition."--Choice

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1st Ed edition (April 30, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195063767
• ISBN-13: 978-0195063769
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,622,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important beyond Dorsey and Gospel, December 11, 2007

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (Paperback)

This book belongs on every bookshelf of anyone who is seriously concerned with African American folk and popular music, secular and religious. Harris does a good job describing not only the details of Dorsey's life, but setting him in the musical worlds he inhabited in the early 20th Century. My current research work does not include religious music, and I have been doing a lot of work on ragtime and the origins of the Blues as they related to the five string banjo. This book provided new insights on the nature of the Blues, on the relationship between the vaudveille Blues, Downhome Blues, and jazz in the 1920s that recent reading on Jelly Roll Morton, and the origins of Jazz and the Blues did not. At the same time, the book provides broad and ojective coverage of major trends in the Black church especially the National Baptist Convention in the first thirty years of the 20th Century.

Besides that he speaks of Dorsey and the origin of Blues Gospel. Put shortly, Black religious music in the early 20th century was dominated by forces who wanted to squelch African originated forms of religion and worship and impose European and European American models for services and music. In the Chicago of the 1920s, the major churches were dominated by music and choir directors who had been trained in Europe to produce superb classical religious music and any kind of African American singing and praise and testifying was often banned from the church as a whole or from the Sunday service.

The pressure of Black migration from the South placed a demand on conservative churches to hold onto their congregations. After a career as a mediocre Blues pianist, more successful arranger and band leader for Ma Rainey, while enjoying success in the Blues as George Tom, well known for his dirty songs, Dorsey crafted gospel songs and more importantly gospel performance patterns modeled after the music and the acts put on by successful Blues singers. He first worked with a former preacher singing his songs and walking in rhythm around churches. When they were first able to perform this way, Dorsey--always the accompaniest--would stand up at the piano, while this preacher danced and strutted as he sang his song. The congregation got wild.

Dorsey's goal seemed to be advancing his music publishing business by popularizing his songs with soloists. It was almost an after thought that in accepting a lucrative position as music director at a major Chicago Baptist church that he set up a gospel chorus, a move that was copied and duplicated as the blues-gospel movement swept the country.

The blues gospel approach provided a compromise. The old line preachers were fundamentally against African forms of congregational worship, singing by the whole church, the old church rock songs, testifying and other African aspects of religion. Gospel offered the music in a contained form, not done by the whole congregation, but performed by a contained gospel solist or gospel choir, and presenting a limited period in which shouting, testifying, and praising in the old way was possible without transforming the service.

Throughout, Dorsey was not shy in judging his success as a commerical venture. He speaks about success in the number of employees and the amount of space he had shipping out sheet music. Since his aims were to give religious music the music feel and performance style of blues entertainment, it is hardly surprising that Blues Gospel especially in the person of Dorsey's great protege Mahalia Jackson became first an informal form of entertainment within the Black church world, and then a
form that could be found in night clubs, variety shows, and jazz concert.

A lot of thought should be given to the importance of the gospel blues. Post WWII Black popular music began with waning swing singers and older Blues singers leading off R & B. However, the generations of Black R & B singers since the late 1940s have almost exclusively come out of the gospel music industry on the top or the bottom. Soul music beginning with Ray Charles' break into his own voice in the 1950s is not much more than adding the techniques and approaches of the gospel of the 1950s and 1960s to secular music. In this sense it returns to secular music what the religious music had received from Dorsey's Blues.

However, if Dorsey had not figured out how to legitimate Blues music style with the establish Black church, the openning to perform this kind of Black music by the religious authorities was important to keeping the music going. One should remember the degree to which Black churches outside the holiness churches, particularly in the South, forbade or condemned secular music and Blues. Now, I believe whether Dorsey or some other individual had done it, African religious and music traditions would have fought their way back into Black churches. Yet, if there hadn't been a Thomas Dorsey, it might have been harder, and more distance might have been made between Black religious and secular music.

5.0 out of 5 stars I feel the Spirit Movin', June 30, 2008

By 

Big Sistah Patty (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (Paperback)

I found this book on Thomas Dorsey very interesting, though a little on the academic side; but I feel the casual reader might enjoy it. It is worth the effort. I would highly recommend it to anyone who has an interest in any aspect of African American history.

Thomas Dorsey is considered the father of gospel music in America. I did not realize that Mr. Dorsey had two nervous break downs. It is fascinating to me that that many talented people suffer from some sort of mental illness. However, he was tenacious and continued to sell his gospel blues, though at times succumbing to playing the blues to make money.

The main line black churches, in this instance, primarily the Baptist was not having it, though we know the AMEs (African Methodist Episcopal) churches did not support black folk ways either. These so called progressive black churches in Chicago had complete and utter disdain for the southern black worship styles. They were not welcoming to Dorsey at all. They were only interested in proving to the mainstream society that they could be just as dull as them. They played European music and did not tolerate clappin', shoutin', expressive sayins' or nothin', etc. They were desperate to distance themselves from their slave culture and history and blues, shoutin', dancing, clapping, etc. reminded them of their past and they desperately wanted to take on European worship style.