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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.
Review
"Without doubt, this is the most scholarly book written on the subject of African American gospel music to date....Harris has written the first and only book on Thomas Andrew Dorsey, who brought African American gospel from the sanctified church, through the Baptist church, and into the world. This is not only a good book; it is an important one."--Ethnomusicology
"In The Rise of Gospel Blues, we are afforded deeper insights into the relationship between religion and art in African American culture. Indeed, we gain a keener sense of black churches as fountainheads of culture."--Church History
"The fact that Harris transgresses the repressive orthodoxy of the church and reveals the human contribution to gospel music to be 'the blues' makes this book one of the few nonfictional pieces placeable in Ralph Ellison's 'blues school of literature."--Georgia Historical Quarterly
"This is a highly detailed study of the music of Thomas A. Dorsey....It's a thoroughly scholarly study, well annotated and indexed...and must be recommended to anyone with a really serious interest in the genre."--Storyville
"This book has its own duality; it is at once a compelling analysis of an important African-American cultural expression and an insightful account of the first forty years of Dorsey's life....Harris cleverly weaves together his biographical and cultural analysis."--American Historical Review
"The Rise of the Gospel Blues is 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
"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
"Harris's exploration of the 'bluesman' and preacher as 'cultural analogues of one another' is fascinating and important....Harris provides an admirably detailed chronicle of Dorsey's struggles and triumphs....Harris's thoroughly researched explanation of the emergence of gospel blues will reward the attention of both enthusiasts and historians. I expect that this account will become a standard work."--The Journal of American History
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