Unit 4 Introduction

One must credit the catharsis of the ring shout as the primary source in which all Black musical and cultural expressions are rooted. For it was from an oppressed people that this manifestation of rhythm, body movement and song transcended the vicissitudes of the slave experience in America.

With the church being the center of the Black community, the idiom of gospel music began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the hymns of Charles Albert Tindley. The hymns flowed directly out of the reservoir of Negro spirituals, employing the two-part structure of verse and refrain, the trope of call-and-response, and the art of repetition, as practiced by slaves in their invisible churches, praise houses, and various camp meetings.

The term “gospel” is derived from the synoptic gospels of the New Testament, which records the miracles, teachings, and saving and sustaining power of Jesus Christ. The genre becomes crystallized in the 1930s by former blues pianist Thomas A. Dorsey.

With the merging of the elements of blues and the religious fervor of the spiritual, gospel music became the mechanism through which the African American community sustained themselves through theology of “somehow”—something that keeps you when you have no idea that you’re being kept.

In this unit, we will explore emerging genres of the African American experience while identifying specific tropes or fusions across the sacred and secular genres of the early twentieth century. Spirituals to Hymns to Gospel…. Blues to Ragtime to Jazz.