Take My Hand, Precious Lord
This tragedy does not cause Dorsey to think of suicide. Instead he writes what will become his most famous song and a canonical work in the Gospel music world “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Now immersed in his good works he renames the convention the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses with additional chapters in St. Louis and Cleveland. He again travels church to church giving sales pitches for his sheet music, and he incorporates performance into the pitches. At first Frye and Sallie Martin joined him in singing his compositions to prospective church customers. Martin later becomes known as the “Mother of Gospel Music.” Though Dorsey initially resisted working with her. As a Pentecostal and Holiness singer her ecstatic, trance like physicality and shout singing seemed too wild for even Dorsey. But her tenacity and practical abilities won him over. They formed Dorsey House of Music as the first African-America owned religious music publishing company in the U.S. Dorsey added 19th century style Jubilees, or “negro spirituals,” to the repertoire. This brought more distinct African and slave era sounds to the genre. Syncopation, counter rhythms of stomps and claps, the call and response of field hollers and work songs, extensive use of minor keys, shouts, trills, an overall prioritization of complex rhythms over harmony.
The movement grew rapidly with 3,500 members in 24 states by 1933. Martin, in addition to her popularity as a singer, proved essential. She acted as primary administrator, organizer and financial custodian of the movement. The continual mass migration of African-Americans from the South to the North and West changed the culture of the city churches. These folks were habituated to getting down back home and they liked lively church services. Even some white churches took notice. Pilgrim Baptist began receiving offers to perform in Chicago area white churches. Imagine the surprise for some of those congregants.
But not everyone liked the new style. Which is to say some people hated it. Dorsey said he “had been kicked out of the best churches in the country.” They said this heathen music degraded sacred spaces. They said it was uncouth. They said the musicians usurped the central role of the clergy. They said it was more like a concert than a church service. They said the messages of the songs themselves undermined the message of the preacher’s sermon. Even if they acknowledged the preacher gave boring sermons. And frequently women sang solo making her message preeminent to the male preachers message. And that would not do.
Dorsey remained music director of Pilgrim Baptist and head of the NCGCC until his retirement in the 1970s. Some of the old time church goers and leaders never accepted his Gospel music. But millions of others did. He never claimed the spotlight. Never considered himself a particularly good singer. Never recorded much after his Georgia Tom days. He knew his role as the Lord’s vessel. Movement leader and composer. Some compare him to W.C. Handy. Though the better comparison is A. P. Carter. Handy observed a musical style, from a labor class culture to which he did not really belong, almost like a cultural anthropologist, archived, re-worked and organized material and commercialized it. Dorsey wrote his own songs combining strands of protestant hymns, Jubilees, Blues and proto-blues styles, Jazz, Ragtime and barrelhouse boogie. Like Carter, he created a large corpus, over 400 songs in his case, of the music of his people, his class and race, for his people. (Irish immigrants and their descendants, like Carter, were not “white” people in the 20s.) Carter and Dorsey did not care to imitate the culture of their “betters.” Dorsey built his corpus, lead his movement. He still cut a dashing figure but with stoic, serious demeanor filled with drive and determination to pave the gospel highway further and further to more churches, more towns and cities. A modern day prophet and evangelist.
The talent to spread the movement came to him. Back around ’25 when they both struggled to make a living performing spiritual music, Dorsey met 14 year old Mahalia Jackson fresh in town from New Orleans. He and the youthful Bessie Smith imitator stood on street corners of the Windy City singing his Gospel songs trying to sell music for 10 cents a sheet. He coached her in how to come across to Northern, big city audiences. He told her to slow down, to pull out more emotion. She took some of his advice. With his success in the 30s he called on her to join him in demo sessions to sell songs. As she matured and began to find her own fame he wrote a special song for her. “Peace in the Valley.” Gospel music as a commercial genre began. In the late 30’s he heard a young congregant of Pilgrim Baptist named James Cleveland. He mentored the boy. As a young man and organist at her father’s church in Detroit, James mentored Aretha Franklin. Then he became the most prominent male vocalist in the Gospel world. In 1972 James collaborated with Aretha on what may be the peak of Gospel music, her album Amazing Grace.
Would Soul music have existed without Thomas Dorsey’s Gospel music? Solomon Burke coined the term “Soul Music” in 1960 to describe his style and avoid the old Gospel world stigma of playing the “devil’s music” Rhythm & Blues. The “soul music” gambit, with its vaguely spiritual connotation, worked and soon all the major players copped to the coinage. Though by ’60 Rhythm & Blues has been branching for a decade or more. Vocal harmony groups sang “doo wop.” And then that branched into boy groups and girl groups. Uptempo groups driven by loud electric guitar or pounding piano played “rock n roll.” Others, the soul singers, took the romance of the crooners and traded that suave, intimate sound for the charged emotion of Gospel underpinned by the energy of Rhythm & Blues. Gospel music, as a commercial genre, grew steadily peaking in popularity in the late 1970s but never gained more than a sliver of the overall music market. But like 19th century spirituals and jubilees the influence of Gospel reverberated long and strong. Soul music became immensely popular and lead to Funk and Disco. The foundations of Hip Hop lie with Soul and Funk and the studio techniques of Disco. With some additional elements, the same can be said of the Big Pop that Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones created with Thriller. The template for much of Pop music to this day.
A world without Dorsey’s Gospel might not have made much difference to those down home Georgia boys, Little Richard, James Brown and Otis Redding, raised in the country fried, charismatic Baptist and Pentecostal churches. Ray Charles though would probably have sounded a lot more like a straight mix of Louis Jordan and Nat King Cole without the emotional depth he got transposing Girl with God. But really Soul music and Gospel intertwine in ways that cannot be parsed. Sam Cooke’s career started in the Gospel group the Soul Stirrers. Jackie Wilson started singing in church choirs, and Barry Gordy broke into the music business writing songs for Wilson. Pastor C. L. Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit rivaled Chicago’s Pilgrim Baptist as the most important church in the Gospel movement. Mahalia Jackson frequently sung there and stayed in the Franklin family home where she would prop young Aretha on her knee and they would sing together. Sam Cooke, Martin Luther King Jr. and any number of leading Gospel and church figures might also be in that living room. Smokey Robinson first heard Aretha play piano at age five when he was at the Franklin home playing with her brother. Gordy and Robinson made Motown Records the most dominate hit machine of the 60s and early 70s rivaled only by the Beatles while launching the careers of some of the biggest stars of the 70s and 80s. Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. Without the mainstream success of Cooke and Motown making black music acceptable for white audiences would rawer Soul singers like Brown and Redding been confined to a niche market like equally talented Bluesmen B.B King and Howlin’ Wolf who never had mainstream hit records? And without Motown’s meticulously crafted sounds as a at first an aspirational example and then competitor, would the Beatles have been just another band of British rockers imitating Little Richard and Chuck Berry? Without one broken man, a down hearted Bluesman on the brink finding an inner light and will to do God’s work none of these careers would have come together as they did.
Some said Dorsey defined the genre or call him “Father of Gospel Music.” Famed musicologist, folklorist and director of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, Alan Lomax said he “literally invented Gospel.” Really doe. Sallie Martin, James Cleveland and Mahalia Jackson and dozens of others got Gospel music over to the masses. Popular music always needs a group. A little help from your friends. Community.