The Gospel Quartet Vision

I believe that most of my white peers know about black gospel music would boil down to this:
1. We saw James Brown sing something really wild in the Blues Brothers
2. We saw Sister Act
3. We love the idea of black gospel choirs but have never really heard one outside of seeing The Blues Brothers and Sister Act.
4. We have been told that Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin created soul by singing gospel with secular lyrics, so we’re pretty sure we know what gospel sounds like because we have heard Hit the Road Jack and Respect.
5. We like to sing along to ‘Oh Happy Day,’ but we don’t actually know the words.

Maybe I’m wrong and all of my white friends are much more well-versed in black gospel than this, but this is my best guess.

A few caveats:
1. Most of what I know about black gospel comes from reading books and listening to a lot of records. I have attended a grand total of 2 American black church services in my life – one in Portland and one in Chicago.
2. One of my favorite older blogs was ‘Stuff White People Like.’ It was frightfully accurate, and included the observation that white people like ‘Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore.’ Totally true for me – except for the fact that a guy named Kirk Franklin exists I know basically nothing about any black gospel music created after 1970. I probably should but I don’t. I love the records I own from the 50’s and 60’s. From what little I know, most contemporary gospel music is choir or solo music, neither of which appeals to me as much as the quartets and small groups who were recording 60 years ago.
3. I have no formal training in anything related to black gospel, other than singing a spiritual in my high school choir and another one with a chamber group I sang with in Korea a few years ago.
4. I am going to distinguish between spirituals and gospel in this blog – spirituals being a folk music tradition that largely developed outdoors on slave plantations. Gospel music came out of the 20th century black church when composers – mostly in northern cities – began writing newer songs to use in church worship, drawing on western hymns and spirituals as inspiration. Thomas Dorsey who wrote ‘Precious Lord’ is the best known of these composers

All that being said, here we go!

Black gospel quartet singing did not begin in the church. It began on the campus of Fisk University when members of the Fisk Jubilee Singers formed the Fisk Jubilee Quartet, an all-male quartet that sang spirituals. The Jubilee Quartet’s arrangements were intentionally ‘western,’ with very little improvisation. The Quartet dressed like a glee club at a mainstream (white) university. Later groups like the Golden Gate Quartet, founded in 1931, added elements of jazz, blues & gospel as well as adding new gospel compositions by Thomas Dorsey to their repertoire. Between the 30’s and the 50’s groups like the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama further developed what became known as the ‘hard gospel’ style – passionate, emotional and full of improvisation – a far cry from the western barbershop tradition.

By the 1950’s most gospel quartets included five members. As a call-and-response style was imported from the church two singers would share the lead vocal while three others would continue harmony in the background, or a fifth ‘shouter’ would improvise over four-part harmony. The word ‘quartet’ was already so well established that it stuck – even for a group named ‘The Five Blind Boys.’ In addition many groups added an electric guitar and occasionally a drum. This is the style that I have come to love. These groups constantly traveled, singing in church after church as well as recording and doing live radio broadcasting. Early R&B and soul singers like Sam Cooke, Lou Rawls and Johnnie Taylor all started their careers singing with gospel quartets.

Women’s vocal groups developed in churches around the same time – the 1940’s and 1950’s. The word ‘quartet’ seems to have been used only for male groups. The music of the women’s groups was quite similar but was usually accompanied by a piano. The best known groups of the 1950’s included the Davis Sisters, the Caravans and the Clara Ward Singers. More on them in a future post, as well as a lot of music!

The Journey Begins

I have a very strange vision: A vocal group based in North Idaho singing a mix of sacred choral music and black gospel in the quartet style from the 1950’s. Those are two pretty disparate styles of music but I have a great love for and a desire to sing both of them, and I need a group to do that!

My love for gospel quartet music began in 1985. Harrison Ford’s character in the movie Witness was fixing his car while Sam Cooke’s ‘Wonderful World’ played on the car radio. I had make it to my junior year in college without even knowing Sam Cooke’s name, but I loved the song. I sat through the credits to find Cooke’s name – this was 1985 so I couldn’t exactly look it up on the internet – then headed to Tower Records for a vinyl copy of The Best of Sam Cooke. More research – in the library because the internet still hadn’t been invented – led me back to Tower Records for an album of gospel music by The Soul Stirrers – the group that Cooke was the lead singer of before he crossed over to pop music. That led me to other gospel quartets and groups from the 50’s – the Swan Silvertones, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Davis Sisters, the Caravans and the Ward Singers. Not a standard record collection for a white kid from Idaho I suppose. Some highlights:

My love of sacred choral music has both earlier and later roots. I was singing in church choirs as young as I can remember. Jean Terhark – the choir director at Coeur d’Alene High School and the best teacher of any subject and at any level I have ever studied under – made sure that all of us sang parts of The Messiah at least once while in high school. I sang in The Mendicants, an a capella vocal group at Stanford University. I then took a long break from organized choirs, eventually moved to Seoul and joined the Camarata Chamber Singers. Dr. Ryan Goessl introduced me to new (to me) choral works that I have since fallen in love with, including:

Am I imagining a group that will do all of this? I am. Probably crazy, but please contact me if you think this might be worth trying!