Black Gospel

Black gospel centers the voice. Piano and Hammond organ thicken the harmonic ground, hand claps and tambourine drive the pulse, and a soloist's call is met by a choir's response. The vocal vocabulary includes shouts, growls, melismatic runs and a deliberate cracking-up sound that pulls grief and joy into the same phrase. The music is built for a congregation rather than a concert hall — even on recordings, the spatial assumption is that everyone in the room is participating.

Modern Black gospel took shape in early-20th-century America when Thomas A. Dorsey, a former blues pianist, brought blues and jazz language into church music. Postwar Chicago and Detroit were the institutional centers, and singers like Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward set the template a generation of soul singers would inherit — Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke and Wilson Pickett all came up through gospel before R&B. The Edwin Hawkins Singers' 'Oh Happy Day' (1969) was a global pop hit that opened the genre to wider audiences.

Pay attention to how the lead and choir relate — the soloist often improvises freely while the choir holds a written part, and the tension between the two is the form. The organist's swells under a held vocal note act like another voice rather than a backing instrument.

For the songwriter root, Thomas A. Dorsey's 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' (1937). For the choir-led celebration, the Edwin Hawkins Singers' 'Oh Happy Day' (1969). For the solo vocal pinnacle, anything by Mahalia Jackson.

Thomas A. Dorsey wrote secular blues hits under the name Georgia Tom before turning to gospel, and was initially regarded with suspicion by older church leaders for importing what they considered worldly music; the very mixture they distrusted is now the genre's defining feature.