Hope Is in the Chorus (Or, Is Gospel Music Just for Christians?)

Hope Is in the Chorus (Or, Is Gospel Music Just for Christians?)
Text from a Sermon Delivered at Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church, Portland, Maine, on August 8, 2010
© Dawn Boyer. All Rights Reserved.

During my 6 years as founder and leader of the Gospel Music Project, I have found that many people tend to assume I’m Christian, most likely the evangelical kind. When they read my writings on the web site or blog, or find out somehow that I embrace many different religious philosophies, they ask: “But how can you sing gospel music if you’re not a Christian?”

I’ve thought of a lot of different ways to answer that question, because it’s an important one. But perhaps the best answer is another question: “How can anyone who’s not a slave sing it?” That’s where gospel music comes from after all—slavery.

Like any good ex-Catholic, I’m going to make a confession. When I joined my first gospel choir, I wouldn’t sing the word “Jesus.” I’d simply replace it with “God.” Why? Well, here’s where my confession might get a little uncomfortable for some, so please listen and stick with me for a bit. My hope is that we’ll come out on the other side together in deeper understanding.

I’ll be honest. I have nothing against Christianity, and I know that practicing the rituals and ways of the different Christian denominations gives great comfort and solace to millions of people. A lot of good is done in this world by Christians. I’m not here to bash Christianity. I think the principles it’s founded on are beautiful and rich and true … and hard as hell to live out sometimes. And I do my utmost every day to abide by most of what Jesus said … because the truth of what he spoke while here on this earth, like all great truths, is profound. It’s just that personally speaking, I cannot reconcile that God would choose one man to be God. If needing to believe Jesus is the Messiah is a prerequisite to being Christian, I cannot subscribe. I wanted to get that out so you’d know where I stand. I do, however, believe deeply in how Christ taught us to behave with one another. I love how he talked in parables. It makes us think. It makes what he said as fresh today as it was almost 2000 years ago. Give me a good metaphor, and I’ll run with it every time. There’s a richness in metaphor that expresses deep truth more than any fact could. Life from death? Redemption from suffering? A belief in something bigger than ourselves? You bet. That I can get on board with.

Let me back up a bit to my childhood. My mother is a quiet, devout Yankee Irish Catholic, and each of her 5 daughters was baptized Catholic and brought up in that tradition. I’m no stranger to Christianity. My father was a storytelling, life-of-the-party Southern Baptist from North Carolina who loved music and sang old country and white gospel songs with us. Our family dynamics collided and divided and exploded with those two very different ways of being and believing. Life was never dull in our house.

Add one more element to that mix: Rachel, the African American woman who came on certain days to clean our house while we lived in the south. I was only 5 when she entered our lives, but even at that age, I knew something was very wrong with how she was treated differently from us. It had nothing to do with socioeconomics: we weren’t affluent; my father was a Tech Sargeant in the Air Force. This had to do with skin color and skin color only, and I knew it. The “N” word was used frequently on my father’s side of the family back then. I was guilty of using it as a child myself, before I learned what it meant and the hate and harm it inflicted. Yet I loved Rachel and her dignity and the light she held in her heart. I’d hear her sing, and the world became a flood of hope, and pure joy, and some startling kind of amazing grace. I began to sing her songs because they stirred something deep and good inside me. How could anyone look down on such beauty, especially when it was just because of skin color? Something didn’t make sense.

During the late 1800s, a group of people, black and white, all educated, felt a similar way and decided to transcribe the slave spirituals they heard on plantations so the songs wouldn’t be lost. Two of them—Col. Thomas W. Higginson (a friend of Harriet Tubman’s) and Henry George Spaulding—were Unitarian ministers. Transfixed and transformed by what they heard, not unlike the way I was as a child when I heard Rachel sing almost 100 years later, they compiled the music into a book entitled Slave Songs of the United States. It is to this day one of the most invaluable resources we have. Without it, we, all of us, black and white, may never have heard “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” or “Down in the Valley to Pray,” or “Rock My Soul,” or countless other songs that have become a part of who we are in this culture.

Not too long ago, I got an email from an AME Zion preacher friend. The subject line read, “Things That Really, Really, Really Make You Go Hmmm.” In the email was a link to a newspaper article about a Nigerian couple who gave birth to a white baby girl, along with his brief comment: “I got nothing on this one … your thoughts?”

Now, before you jump to any conclusions or make any assumptions, I want to let you know that mother was faithful to her husband. There was no white ancestry on either side that either knew of. In fact, interracial relationships in Nigeria are almost nonexistent. Yet this baby has blue eyes and a huge shock of blonde hair. We’re not talking albino. That baby is normal, healthy … and white! All the scientific experts said mixed-race ancestry would be necessary on both sides for the baby to be born the way it was, and even then, the blonde hair is an anomaly, because it should have been brown or black, but not blonde, and certainly not straight.

One scientist said he could come to no conclusion but gene mutation.

Think about that one for a minute.

Maybe all of us who are white are the result of a gene mutation. It kind of changes things, doesn’t it? Maybe, after all, we do all come from the same place in Africa. Maybe all those divides we set up for ourselves—skin color, how much money we make, where we live, what kind of religion we subscribe to—maybe that’s all just a bunch of hooey we come up with to distract ourselves into thinking we’re something we’re not. Maybe God is sending a message through that Nigerian couple, who love that little girl no matter what color she is. Maybe he’s telling us to wake up and start getting along. Because, as Christianity, and Buddhism, and Islam, and Judaism, and all of the major spiritual practices or religions in the world preach, love really does conquer all. And therefore, hope always prevails.

OK, let’s get back to that gospel choir I sang in, the one where I wouldn’t say the word “Jesus.” As much as I loved all those songs I heard as a child, which Rachel and my father had both instilled deeply in me in their different ways, as an adult, I came to gospel music armed to the hilt with my defense-stuffed baggage.

Christians weren’t cool. Too much had been done in the name of Christianity that, in my opinion, was evil. The Crusades, the Inquisition, clinic bombings, bilking people out of millions of dollars, well, those were a few of the things I had a problem with. Now, Eastern religions, those were cool. I immersed myself in Buddhism. I began to learn more about different religions and the truth that’s at the heart of them all. My husband to this day calls me a Buddhatarian. But something interesting happened when I joined that gospel choir. I “got it,” not just intellectually, but here, in my heart. With no judgment attached, with nothing but the music, pure and heartfelt and triumphant, the songs began to change me. I began to realize that gospel music is universal in its message.

And I saw what happened to other people who came to hear the songs. They were brought together in one spirit no matter how different their backgrounds, and it was a sight to behold. I saw that my baggage was much too small to encompass the big, bold and broad truth of gospel music, which is, above all else, a celebration of traveling on the rough gravel road of life, where no one escapes unscarred, and yet, through steadfast hope, we can all make it through to the other side. Gospel music is about the best part of being human, which, interestingly, is the part where we let ourselves feel God, however you define that. It’s about that fearsome trouble that can grab hold of any one of us at any time, but it’s also about the triumphant light each and every one of us holds in our soul … and it waits patiently for its chance to help us rise above if we only let it. Because of gospel music, I let my baggage go, and I said good riddance.

I began to realize something else, too. Being a Christian and being Christ-like are not necessarily one and the same.

The slaves in our country came from a place that knew nothing of Christianity. And the hypocrisy of their enslavers who tried to convert them to a religion that espouses freedom, peace, love of thy neighbor as thyself, was not lost on them. Yet when they heard the stories of Moses and his people, of Jesus and that stone being rolled away, they made the connection between their plight and the plight of those in the Biblical stories. They found hope and grabbed on. They sang about it. They shared it with others. They took whatever they related to in those stories and made them their own, based on their own fragmented understanding of the Scriptures. That’s why you so often hear gospel songs with both Old and New Testament stories mixed up. (O Mary don’t you weep, Martha don’t you mourn, Pharoah’s army, drowned in the red sea.) In the beginning, those songs had little to do with Christianity as a religion and everything to do with the underlying principles of freedom and justice and a better place to get to.

To illustrate how the slaves freely mixed religious metaphor with their own earthly life circumstances, Laura Towne, a teacher who lived with slaves on South Carolina’s Sea Islands, wrote about how one former slave tried in broken English to describe his grief after Lincoln’s death. ‘“Lincoln died for we,” he said. ‘Christ died for we, and me believe him de same mans.’” (Darden, 109)

As Robert Darden states in his very good book People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music, “African Americans resisted, to an extraordinary degree, the very human tendency to exact a well-deserved revenge on their former masters” (111). If that isn’t Christ-like, I don’t know what is.

Perhaps the right question isn’t, “Is gospel music just for Christians?” After all, one could easily argue that gospel music is so deeply embedded in our culture--blues, rock and roll, R&B, soul, pop and pretty much every form of popular American music comes from it, after all--and its themes are so universal, that it extends far beyond any one religion. Gospel is universal the same way all religions have universal principles at their core.

Perhaps the right question is, “Is gospel music for anyone who needs it?” That’s much more inclusive, Christ-like, and, in my opinion, much more relevant to the songs the slaves sang.

The beauty and power of gospel music lie in expressing and feeling the real suffering and pain of life, while also being able to transcend that suffering and turn it into something glorious. You’ll often hear the gritty realities in the verse. But in the chorus springs the spiritual, the hope, ever eternal, ever defiant, ever triumphant. “I ain’t gonna study war no more.” “I’m tired, my soul needs restin’, but I can’t stop now where the saints have trod.” “I know I’ve been changed and the angels in heaven done signed my name.”

Unmarried and pregnant at age 17, I went on welfare instead of going to college. I inherited the alcoholic gene of my Irish ancestors and did a downhill slide like nobody’s business. But, determined to be a success story instead of another statistic, and with some kind of divine grace to help me, I pulled myself up and worked my way through school, through recovery, and into a better life. I know what it’s like to suffer and to come out on the other side.

This is why I relate to gospel music, and why I can indeed sing it, Christian or not.

My story is of course nothing like what the slaves had to endure. But still, when one suffers, it’s real, and it’s hard. Who among us has not suffered? Who among us has not at one time or another clung to hope, no matter how tiny and fragile its thread, no matter how much "darkness", like Helen Keller said so beautifully in the reading today, "lay on the face of all things"? And who among us has not at some point in our lives needed to believe in transcendence, and then, because of that belief, were able to live it? That is what gospel music is about. It is about being human yet losing yourself to something greater. You don’t need to be Christian to celebrate that. But you do need, I think, to be connected to something bigger to “get it.”

Oh, and by the way, even though I’m not a Christian, I do sing “Jesus” now. Gospel music helped me get over myself on that one. I can transcend religious and all kinds of other boundaries and get to the heart of the matter when I sing gospel. So can you. And that is a beautiful gift indeed.

Sources:

Allen, William Francis, Ware, Charles Pickard & Garrison, Lucy McKim, eds. Slave Songs of the United States. New York, A. Simpson & Co., 1867.

Darden, Robert. People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2004.

Wheeler, Virginia. "Black Parents ... White Baby." London: The Sun, 20 July 2010.

The Roots and Branches of Gospel Music

While writing a sermon I've been asked to give at an upcoming UU service in Portland, ME, I came upon one I gave last year. A few people asked to have the text sent to them, and I thought it would be good to post as well on this blog. Here it is:


The Roots and Branches of Gospel Music
Text from a Sermon Delivered at Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church, Portland, Maine, on August 16, 2009
© Dawn Boyer. All Rights Reserved.


Eunice Kennedy Shriver died this week. The media talked for days about how she started the Special Olympics, how, through her passion, the lives of millions were, and continue to be, enriched. The pain of her sister Rosemary’s tragic lobotomy had such great impact that Eunice vowed to change the way the mentally or physically challenged among us were treated. And so she did.

Aside from this powerful legacy, why am I talking about this very wealthy, white, privileged, well connected Irish Catholic woman when the topic of today’s sermon is the history of gospel music?

Because of how the footage of her funeral showed that a gospel song sung at her service brought her mourners together. I’m talking specifically about the closing song, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” It stood out because of how it lifted everyone in the church as they sang. You could see it; you could feel it; you could definitely hear it.

But hold on a minute. What does a song known for being played while African American mourners walk down a street in New Orleans behind a casket have to do with a rich white woman’s funeral in Cape Cod? Those are two totally different worlds. One doesn’t seem to belong with the other.

Ah. But that is the beauty of gospel music. As Gwendolin Sims Warren states in her wonderful book entitled Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit, gospel is universal:

“Growing up, I remember singing as many hymns by white composers such as Wesley, Watts, and Newton as I did black gospel music and spirituals. In fact, it was quite a while before I realized that such hymns were not exclusively [black] songs ….And yet, what a perfect example of the universal appeal of these sacred hymns and songs. The songs … are not exclusive to our race. These are songs that speak to the hearts of people from all cultures and races, of all ages, and from all eras of history. They are songs that heal, encourage, strengthen, reminisce, and excite. They are timeless, they are powerful—and they belong to everyone who will embrace them.”

We, the members of Rock My Soul, embrace them. Our mission is to celebrate them. And, even though (as you may have noticed already) we are mostly white, we do our darndest to make sure we get the word out about how important they are, for we’ve seen firsthand the way gospel music transforms people, and we honor and respect the great gift we’ve been given through the songs.

Let’s talk about that for a moment, this whole white versus black thing. I admit, there’s a tiny voice inside that sometimes whispers, “Who am I, a white, Irish-American woman like Eunice Kennedy (only ex-Catholic and definitely not rich!), to go around singing gospel and preaching about it?” An AME Zion preacher friend once put his arm around my shoulders and said, in a rather suggestive voice, “Do you ever get approached by any radical blacks who ask you what you think you’re doing singing their music?”

I was more than shocked, and I can happily say that has never happened. In fact, the opposite has been my experience: our work has been embraced by every African American audience we have sung to, and I am grateful for that. One wonderful woman in our community, who is responsible for making Black history known in Portsmouth, NH, put it in a way I think Gwendolin Sims Warren would have liked. She said, “Blacks can talk about how important gospel music is, and the white community is only going to listen to a point. But when the white community says it, too, then white people start listening and learning.” Then she chuckled and said, “When you think about it, most of us are pretty much a mix of white and black anyway, so why shouldn’t it belong to everyone?”

African American scholars—Horace Clarence Boyer being perhaps the most prominent—illustrate clearly how African-born slaves listened to and sang fervent hymns written by white composers during the Great Awakening in the mid-1700s, which started in New England and had a profound effect on the southern states, where slaves would attend services with slave owners. They in turn took their own understanding of rhythm and music and stories in the Bible and created the deeply personal Negro spirituals. From the spirituals to the Azusa Street Pentecostal revivals in California in the early 1800s, where whites and blacks shouted and sang and shook the walls together until social racism split them apart and white gospel and shape-note singing was born, to the jubilee quartet songs that started in the workplace after emancipation in 1865, to the birth of the black gospel choir in the 1930s, to the Civil Rights songs in the 1950s and 60s that were based on spirituals and hymns and sustained those who were committed to doing the right thing, and finally to 1969, when a black man named Edwin Hawkins reworked a Baptist hymn called O Happy Day, which was written by 2 white men from the 1800s, and that arrangement busted right out of the church and into the American Top 40 mainstream culture, gospel music has brought white and black people together to change our country for the better throughout history. And it is important for us all to embrace it and cherish it and keep telling the stories so they never get forgotten.

Last November, Rolling Stone magazine published a list of the 100 greatest singers of all time. The top 4 came from gospel roots. These were Aretha Franklin (#1), Ray Charles (#2), Elvis Presley (#3—yes, even Elvis started in gospel), and Sam Cooke (#4). These singers developed their style, their soul, their very musical essence in the church, then branched out into the secular world, and captivated millions with what had been instilled in them. Something’s going on with gospel music.

Why does gospel reach down so deep and out so broadly? Pain. Pain is the root. Who among us has not felt it? Pain is universal. We listen to the words of people who were ripped from their homeland, forced to labor without reward, made to live lives of unendurable pain, and we respond with our own voice of pain deep down inside. “Yes. I know that feeling. I can relate.”

And yet, from those roots of pain come branches of hope and triumph. Gospel music’s true power comes from its nobility. Listen to any gospel song—“Go Down, Moses”; “Steal Away, Jesus”; “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; “I’ll Fly Away”—and you can’t help but feel the dignity, the grace, the pure grandeur of the spirit laced through the words and music. Milan Kundera, the great writer and philosopher, said, “when the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.” These songs speak from the heart, a heart that has been battered but has gained wisdom from the light within, and says, “here, take the hope I have to offer, for it will sustain you.”

And sustain us it has, for more than 300 years. The songs are just as fresh today as when they were first sung.

Let’s go back to “When the Saints Go Marching In” to get an idea of what I mean.


• It began as a Negro spiritual sometime in the early 1800s.
• Louis Armstrong was one of the first to make it into a nationally known pop-tune in the 1930s.
• It was brought into early rock and roll by Fats Domino and by Bill Haley & His Comets.
• Other early rock artists to follow Domino's lead included Jerry Lee Lewis and The Beatles.
• It is nicknamed "The Monster" by some jazz musicians, as it seems to be the only song some people know to request when seeing a Dixieland band, and some musicians dread being asked to play it several times a night. The musicians at Preservation Hall in New Orleans get so tired of playing it that a sign is posted that stipulates it will cost $10 to request the song.
• It’s often used as a popular theme or rallying song for a number of sports teams.
• Judy Garland sang it in her own pop style.
• Elvis Presley performed it during the Million Dollar Quartet jam session and also recorded a version for his film, Frankie and Johnny.
• Dolly Parton included the song in a gospel medley.
• Bruce Springsteen performed it as an encore during his Seeger Sessions Band Tour a couple of years ago.
• It was sung at Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s funeral a few days ago.

Gospel music’s branches reach into every part of our society—past to present, poor to rich, young to old, black to white, and everywhere in between. And it is important for us all to embrace it and cherish it and keep telling the stories so they never get forgotten, so that all of our lives and our spirits continue to get richer, and wiser, and brighter. Can I hear an Amen, somebody?

Sources:
“100 Greatest Singers of All Time.” Rolling Stone. November 27, 2008, p. 103 (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/24161972/page/103)
Boyer, Horace Clarence. The Golden Age of Gospel. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Brobston, Stanley Heard. Daddy Sang Lead: The History and Performance Practice of White Southern Gospel. New York: Vantage Press, 2006.
Johnson, James Weldon & J. Rosamond. The Books of American Negro Spirituals. New York: Da Capo Press, 1977.
Sims, Gwendolin Warren. Ev'ry Time I Feel the Spirit: 101 Best-Loved Psalms, Gospel Hymns & Spiritual Songs of the African-American Church. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1999.
“When the Saints Go Marching In.” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Saints_Go_Marching_In

A white atheist avant garde pop music icon's take on gospel

Brian Eno, known to many as the brains and brilliance behind Roxy Music, and also the production muse on albums by David Bowie, The Talking Heads, U2, and Coldplay, was interviewed recently in The Guardian. He has a lot to say about music in general, but I was struck particularly by his take on gospel music:

"I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything's going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distill what they all have in common it's a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It's also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They're to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious."

I wanted to jump up and down and shout "Hallelujah!" when I read this. What do you think?