Rejoice and Shout

Without gospel music, there would not be Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles and a host of other great Black rhythm and blues musicians. And without these musicians, there would certainly not be rock-and-roll. Given its overarching significance for American popular culture, which after all is its greatest contribution to world civilization, we can only rejoice over the arrival of “Rejoice and Shout”, the definitive documentary on gospel music starting tomorrow at the Film Forum in New York.

Until now, the only other movie about gospel music was the very fine 1982 “Say Amen, Somebody”, a profile of Thomas A. Dorsey who is widely regarded as the father of gospel music, that can be rented from Netflix. The two films complement each other nicely. “Rejoice and Shout” is much more of an attempt to provide a scholarly framework for the genre’s evolution drawing upon interviews from experts in the field, both Black and white.

Starting out in the 1920s as something sounding quite a bit like white barbershop quartets, gospel became a much more soulful and even orgiastic form of expression in the 1940s. The film explains that Black field workers who emigrated to the north looked to the storefront churches as a place where they could “let loose” on a Sunday in the arms of the Holy Spirit. The music that evolved to meet this form of worship was more rhythmic and more blues-like than what was normally heard in churches dominated by the middle-class Blacks of the North.

The ties between early blues and gospel music are well-documented in the film. We learn from Mavis Staples that her father worked on the same plantation as Charlie Patton and modeled his gospel guitar on the great man’s blues style. We also learn that Thomas A. Dorsey held down two jobs at once. He was a blues pianist who wrote some of the raunchiest songs of the 1920s, while at the same time launching a career as a gospel musician and song-writer. Mahalia Jackson, best known for her deeply religious gospel and spiritual performances, got started as a singer after hearing Bessie Smith who she sought to emulate in her own way. And above all, there is Rosetta Tharpe who is featured prominently in the film. Tharpe got started as a guitarist playing with swing bands such as Lucky Millinder’s but like Al Greene discovered religion. Not surprisingly, the music sounded the same even though the lyrics changed. Instead of “I love you baby”, it was now “I love you God”.

Perhaps the most spine-tingling moments of “Rejoice and Shout” are old black-and-white film clips of some of the greatest male gospel groups of the classic period, from the 1940s and 50s. We see the Soul Stirrers, a group that would be led at one point by Sam Cooke, as well as the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Swan Silvertones and the Blind Boys of Alabama. For gospel fans, including me, this is like being in the presence of the gods. These groups featured lead singers who worked in the higher registers, even a falsetto in the case of the Swan Silvertone’s Claude Jeter. Customarily, the groups included a deep bass vocalist who would sing something like “Dum, biddy-dum” beneath the tenor, all in all anticipating the doo-wop groups of the 1950s that paved the way for rock-and-roll.

“Rejoice and Shout” is terrific movie and I urge New Yorkers to go see it. Hopefully, the film will be released nation-wide before long.

I want to conclude with some recollections about organizing a gospel concert at Bard College in 1965, the year I graduated. That year I was the entertainment director on campus and put a lot of effort in bringing musicians to campus whose talents I appreciated. This included jazz musicians such as Bill Evans, Freddie Hubbard, Art Farmer and the rhythm section of Miles Davis’s band at the time: Anthony Williams, Ron Carter and Herbie Hancock.

But I was also determined to get some gospel musicians to perform, having heard from friends who had graduated that a gospel concert from a few years earlier had been a big hit. Keep in mind that this was around the time that the Newport Jazz Festival was featuring gospel musicians, to George Wein’s everlasting credit.

My first step was to pay a visit to Ran Blake, a jazz pianist who had graduated Bard in 1960, a year before I entered as a freshman. Blake, who might be regarded as a musician’s musician, had organized the last gospel concert at Bard and urged me to bring back the same group that he had invited–the house band from Daddy Grace’s Church on 125^th Street in Harlem. You can actually see Daddy Grace baptizing parishioners in “Rejoice and Shout” but without his band. If you want to get a flavor of what it sounded like, you can listen to selections from “Night With Daddy Grace“, the only record they ever made at Amazon.com–a collector’s item selling for $50.

I made it up to Daddy Grace’s Church and was convinced at once that Ran was right. This was it. Just listen to track two of the record, which is Daddy Grace himself singing/rapping the Opening Prayer to the congregation. Amazing.

When I got back to Bard, I requested funding to bring Daddy Grace, his band, and his entourage up for a concert but only with the understanding that they conduct what amounted to a service in the chapel at Bard. The chapel was presided over by one Fritz Q. Schafer, the school’s Episcopalian chaplain and a religion professor I had taken classes with.

Schafer, who fancied himself a bit of a Zen hipster, turned out to be a real asshole. He refused to allow the chapel to be used by the African-American riffraff because they had degraded it last time—in his opinion—with their rollicking in the Holy Spirit. I often wish I could go back to such incidents from my youth in a time machine and let people like Schafer have it with both barrels. With all his Zen posturing, Schaffer was nothing but a racist.

When I called back Ran with the bad news, he told me that he would make some more contacts but it would take him about a week or so.

Meanwhile I got the bright idea to ride over to Kingston, NY—just across the Hudson River—on my motorcycle (with my girlfriend Dian on the back seat) on a Sunday morning to scout out the Black community. Yes, I know that this sounds like a scene from “Animal House” but we were deadly earnest, at least I was.

We first checked out Kingston’s premier Black church, in an impressive brick edifice. Like the middle-class churches described in “Rejoice and Shout”, the music was staid enough to put you to sleep. The next stop was a storefront church on a run-down street called something like “The First Church of Holiness and Salvation” or something like that. Inside was a scene that I will remember to my dying day. A woman in her eighties was sitting at a table with two young children, a boy and a girl, in their Sunday finest. In the middle of a singing/rapping bible lesson to them, she beckoned to us to sit down without missing a beat. We listened to her transfixed for about fifteen minutes. Her skills were almost as advanced as Daddy Grace’s but unfortunately she lacked the full complement of musicians to make it all worthwhile.

Fortunately, we heard back from Ran Blake a day or so after the Kingston trip. He introduced us to Johnny Peoples, a Brooklyn bus-driver who managed and was lead singer in two groups: the Brooklyn Skyways and the Mighty Clouds of Harmony. Johnny told us that he would be happy to perform at Bard, even if it was not in the chapel. Furthermore, much to our delight, he had no objections to us serving alcohol at the function. God and Satan would be serviced both in the same evening!

I whipped up some Unicorn Urine just for the occasion. This was a punch devised by Andrews Wanning, a literature professor at Bard who like fellow professor Tony Hecht was a hard drinker—just like everybody else who taught there except for Fritz Q. Schafer, I suppose. I even remember the recipe: one part vodka, one part Milem, and one part soda water.

At 7:30 on the evening of the concert that was scheduled to begin at 8, two Cadillacs pulled up to the gym where the concert was to be held. The musicians poured out in their white tuxedos, with their girl-friends and wives wearing chiffon dresses in pastel colors. They all had conked hair. This was well before Black Nationalism had kicked in.

The concert was just electrifying. It would be impossible for me to put into words what they sounded like except to note that they performed in the style that was deeply popular in the Black Community at the time, namely the Soul Stirrers/Swan Silvertones style.

When the concert ended the musicians began gathering at their cars, ready to make the trip back to Brooklyn. As they did, the most amazing thing happened. They began singing/rapping to us in the same style as Daddy Grace and the Kingston grandma. The words were not from scripture but improvised verses about how much they appreciated performing before an enthusiastic audience (helped along by Unicorn Urine obviously.)

For those who want to find out more about Ran Blake, a most articulate and deep-thinking jazz musician, I recommend this interview he gave to The Wire, a British publication.  Here he reminisces about studying with Lenny Tristano:

Right. I went out to Long Island and had a lesson. George Russell came and I had met him at Lennox. And what a great cook he was. Bill Russo came and Oscar Peterson even came down and gave me two lessons. It took me ten years to pay for one. I really was not a very good filer, but to absolutely see people I’d heard about, and to have my ears extended – to the Platters. Chris Connor was away that period, but I believe that was really the only non-black singer I appreciated. Tommy Talbert, but I liked all the Atlantic stars – MJQ, John Lewis, Percy Heath, Connie Kay, Milt Jackson…they would be dropping by and sometime some of them would say, “Ran, do you want to join us for coffee?” But I knew that I was just there. I began to feel worse and worse about my playing, because I really didn’t fit in with Clyde McPhatter, or the Tristano’s for speed. Laverne Baker was doing a Bessie Smith record and just to be at one of the great studios, was…It really was classic and it became very important. That was a big element in my life. There are so many people who play R&B better than I do. Maybe part of that doesn’t come out. But I keep coming back to Al Green and Ray Charles. But Tom had these great machines. The Ertugans were dapper. Naturally I had a little more in common with Neshui. So that was six weeks. And I would go back and forth. Bard was a wonderful school. I got to know the community. I had a newspaper route. We put on three to four festivals. A dog joined our combo, who could hit the bass drum.