Gospel

Literate, urban blacks increasingly depended on rehearsed music sung by choirs or smaller vocal groups, indebted in style to arrangements of spirituals popularized by the various jubilee singing groups of the day. Congregational support came as hand clapping and supportive ejaculations, not as singing. Modern black gospel music derives from this stage, though its history is difficult to trace because of the virtual absence of written or recorded documentation. A handful of phonograph discs made by the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet and other groups in the first years of the present century confirm that the harmonically based jubilee style had spread to other areas of black vocal music; field recordings made in the rural South and in Southern prisons in the 1930s and '40s tell us that triadic, tonal vocalizing had extended to orally disseminated music and that the male quartet (usually featuring one or two exceptionally high tenor voices) had become a popular medium; commercial recordings made in the 1920s of both sacred and secular music document the vocal and rhythmic viruosity which had become part of these traditions. A flood of recordings by black male gospel quartets in the 1930s and '40s, by the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, the Famous Blue Jay Singers, the Kings of Harmony, the Soul Stirrers, and many others, preserve some of the most complex music for small vocal ensemble ever performed, while underlining the successful integration of harmonic and formal aspects of white music into the expression of intensely black religious and musical expression. Other recordings from the same period inform us of the early utilization of instruments in black religious music. The modern era of gospel music, taken by most scholars to begin with the compositions of C. A. Tindley and Thomas A. Dorsey, falls outside the scope of the present chapter. However, its most important musical impulses were surely derived from spirituals and jubilee songs of the decades leading up to World...