Customer Reviews

Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age

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This book, whose title doesn't seem so inviting, is one of the best I've read about gospel music. One of the key points Jerma A. Jackson makes is that gospel's signifficance as marker of black identity has followed it's rise from religious marginality in pentecostal denominations to mainstream entertainment. Gospel has come to mean a lot of different things to different people. To this reader, people most likely to utter general statements about black gospel as "culture" and such, would not likely have been the inventors of it. Pentecostals may have been the most faithful carriers of "african retentions", but they were all about Jesus, not about "blackness".

I hope this doesn't distract from the books many attracting and interesting observations. One of them is that female christian singers, because of their focus away from worldly things, could invade "male aesthetic territory" with a lot more ease than secular artists like the blues singer Memphis Minnie. This perspective on religious music is interesting, as it shows that faith may liberate or empower people to think and act in ways that secular discourses deny them.

It is well known that rock and roll derived from the Negro blues music, and that the latter always had a strong gospel influence from the churches that often formed the centres of many Negro communities.

Jackson investigates more closely these roots in gospel music. But she focuses on a relatively overlooked aspect. The female gospel singers. She digs into fading records of the pre-WW2 decades, to recover a history that was almost forgotten. The book is also generously illustrated with photos of many such singers.

We see an intersection of sacred music, the personalitites of its women, and the music industry of that time, with its invidious demarcation into "regular" music and Negro music. Jackson shows how some women, possibly as a reaction against hardship and discrimination, were able to achieve some acclaim and a niche for themselves.

This is an excellent little book. It gives a basic overview of how gospel came about and how it came to the mainstream and who took it there. We are introduced to Arizona Dranes, Thomas Dorsey, Rosetta Tharpe, and
Sally Martin. I had never heard of Arizona before and am encourage to read more about her.

Marie Knight was at one time partners with Rosetta Tharpe. These words of hers resonated with me:

Marie Knight vividly described the corporate culture that pervaded the industry, providing a look behind the glitter and glamour of popular culture. "There's more to recording than just walking in the studio," she explained. "Every minute is counted. All the minutes you burn up." For a musical group, she continues, "all the time that's wasted comes out of the leader's check." Similarly, the success or failure of any singer or musician did not rest solely on skill but also hinged on the willingness of managers to invest in the music. "It's not what you know," Knight reiterated on several occasions, stressing the importance of what she called "financial background." "It's who you know. If you expect to go anyplace, you got have a background."

I recommend this book.