Early Black Gospel
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The first recorded era of Black gospel — the race-records decades before the postwar golden age — heard in Arizona Dranes' barrelhouse-fired sanctified piano, the recorded sermons-with-congregation of Rev. J.M. Gates and Rev. F.W. McGee, street-corner guitar evangelists like Blind Willie Johnson and Washington Phillips, and the tight jubilee harmony of the Golden Gate Quartet, closing with Sister Rosetta Tharpe carrying sanctified song onto the pop stage in 1938. Its wings each feed a written neighbor — guitar evangelists into Gospel Blues, jubilee groups into Quartet Gospel, the Dorsey era into Traditional Gospel — but the Pentecostal recorded core (Dranes' piano, the preacher-and-congregation sides) lives here.
History
Race-record labels discovered the Black church in the mid-1920s: OKeh recorded the blind Church of God in Christ pianist Arizona Dranes in 1926, the same year Columbia's Rev. J.M. Gates cut "Death's Black Train Is Coming" and went on to hundreds of sermon sides; Victor answered with Rev. F.W. McGee, and Columbia and Paramount issued guitar evangelists Blind Willie Johnson and Washington Phillips; Thomas A. Dorsey's 1930s Chicago publishing circle was industrializing gospel songwriting while the Golden Gate Quartet modernized jubilee singing on Bluebird from 1937 and Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Rock Me" (Decca, 1938) took sanctified music to the Cotton Club and Carnegie Hall's "From Spirituals to Swing"; the 1942–44 recording ban and the postwar rise of hard gospel closed the era, whose canon now lives on reissues like Dust-to-Digital's Goodbye, Babylon and the Document Records complete-works series.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- My Soul Is a Witness for the Lord(1926) — Arizona DranesSpotifyYouTube
- Death's Black Train Is Coming(1926) — Rev. J.M. GatesSpotifyYouTube
- Denomination Blues(1927) — Washington PhillipsSpotifyYouTube
- John the Revelator(1930) — Blind Willie JohnsonSpotifyYouTube
- Fifty Miles of Elbow Room(1931) — Rev. F.W. McGeeSpotifyYouTube
- Golden Gate Gospel Train(1937) — Golden Gate QuartetSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- Dust-to-Digital, "Goodbye, Babylon" box set liner notes, 2003
- Jerma Jackson, "Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age", University of North Carolina Press, 2004
- Horace Clarence Boyer, "How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel", Elliott & Clark, 1995
- Document Records, complete recorded works series (Arizona Dranes
- Rev. J.M. Gates)