When Gospel Was Gospel
(Shanachie)
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When Gospel Was Gospel, a recently released compilation, does nothing to explain the genre’s unpopularity. The disc–a stellar anthology of tracks from 1945 to 1960, which compiler Anthony Heilbut dubs gospel’s “golden age”–is thoroughly accessible to anyone who listens to roots music with any regularity. Rosetta Tharpe’s jazzy acoustic guitar on “Little Boy, How Old Are You” would do Lonnie Johnson proud; R.H. Harris’s vocals on “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” recall one of Louis Armstrong’s yearning, behind-the-beat trumpet solos; the Original Gospel Harmonettes’ “You Better Run” is syncopated enough to bust your pacemaker. Plus, for more than a week now I’ve been humming the Sensational Nightingales’ incredibly catchy “Sinner Man,” which climaxes with “The world’s gonna be on fire . . . nightmare!”
The version of the song on Remember Me, a recent compilation of songs by the late gospel singer Marion Williams, couldn’t be more different. Though Williams, like Stanley and Chandler, sings a cappella, her vocals drip with emotion and even sensuality–a stark contrast to the hillbillies’ paralyzed, sexless keening. Dispensing with most of the lyrics, Williams overemphasizes her breathing like a country preacher, creating a beat around which she moans and growls, repeating “O death” over and over until the sound becomes more important than the meaning. When death does finally get in the room, she swings his “poor ice hands” so knowingly that their touch becomes a caress. At the end of the song, the listener is left contemplating not mortality or sin but Williams’s artistry. Take that, Mr. Grim Reaper.
Heilbut, who produced both When Gospel Was Gospel and Remember Me, has studied gospel for decades now, and the correlation of hardship, aesthetic power, and purity is one of his constant themes. In his classic 1971 book, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times, his love for the music seems inextricably bound to the suffering of its creators. He argues in The Gospel Sound that one singer of his acquaintance became a much better performer after she got a serious illness and ended up in a wheelchair. “It’s an awful way of learning to sing ‘How I Got Over,’” he writes, “but gospel singers take tragedy for granted.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Lloyd Yearwood, Guiseppe Pino, courtesy of Anthony Heilbut.
