The Gospel music is a specifically American genre that has undergone many changes since its inception in revivalistic camp meetings during the mid-nineteenth century. This development has informed both worship style and musical roles within churches across denominational lines. Current trends in gospel music suggest that the influence of general public musical taste may be stronger than that of theology.
Historical Orientation
Gospel music is a genre of popular Protestant worship-song specifically American in its origins. Traceable to the rural revival camp meetings of the South (1830-60), it later expanded in the major Northern urban revival campaigns of the last third of the nineteenth century. Its practice among both black and white evangelical communities has resulted in two definable styles of performance and sound-aesthetic, despite the amount of material shared in common. Stylistic relations to Tin Pan Alley during the first thirty years of this century, and to definitive black influence from the 1940s onward, are well documented among popular culture historians. As a result, contemporary listening habits in gospel music are basically the same in breadth and type as those of the pop music constituency, notwithstanding the primacy of the medium in the evangelical church. Current uses include structured congregational singing, spontaneous sing-along sequencing, choral settings, solos, duets, trios, ensembles, along with the workplace contexts of all-night music broadcasting, program tags, fillers, and service vamps, but also strategic evangelistic-concert programming, street-witnessing, shut-in or prison visitation, background music for the headphones, Sunday school programming, and a wide variety of youth, collegiate, radio, and TV programming.
Gospel music focus is on the person and work of Christ, in all contexts. Some constant thematic emphases have remained throughout the over 160-year history of gospel: the grace of God; eternal life and resurrection; the cross; redemption; and faith, hope, and love. On the other hand, there have been some interesting thematic shifts over the years that are discernable and that may have contextualized connections. From 1830 to 1865, these themes included the Last Day, judgment, God the Father, the death of the believer, and the pilgrim’s journey; through 1900 and the Sunday school movement, the focus was on prayer, obedience in faith, the prodigal son, solace, and clouds of witnesses; from the 1940s to about 1960, popular themes included soldiers for Christ, victory or witness, and rescue; from the 1970s to the present, music focused on God’s attributes, family membership in Christ, fellowship with Jesus, or again, the attitude of the worshiper.
In addition, psalm paraphrase is central to gospel music settings. This source links the medium to nearly all Western hymnody in the generic sense, although its styles, uses, and methods of transmission have made it a distinctive body. Because the music traditionally is learned by youth group rote-memorization (and hence liable to all kinds of individual rearrangement and improvisation), it is important to realize that most of the songs are in fact composed pieces. Essentially it is folk music that has a long line of publication in a spectrum of hymnals and softcopy, crossing virtually all Protestant denominations and currently entering ecumenical circles.
Recent popular worship songs appearing in such Roman Catholic sources as Worship II or Worship III or in the folk-hymn output of the Weston Priory in Vermont have demonstrated (since Vatican II) the existence of a notably charismatic repertory resembling the service methods of gospel music. However, contemporary liturgical worship song is distinguishable from gospel song in two ways: (1) liturgical worship song has Gregorian stylistic roots (both in melody and in formatting), and (2) it adheres to sacramental theology, especially as it pertains to the Lord’s Supper.
Varieties of Gospel Music
At present, five distinct repertories are identifiable in gospel music.
Rural White (1830–1865). This is the “shape-note” music of the South and Midwest during the revivals of the antebellum era. The shapes refer to the reading system in which variants of the circle, diamond, square, and triangle form the noteheads, and become pitch-equivalents relative to each line and space of the music staff. “Wondrous Love,” “When I Can Read My Title Clear,” and “Amazing Grace” are all members of this song-body—all known popularly today as “Early American Folk-Hymnody.”
Rural Black (1830–1900). These are call/response songs and soliloquies referred to as spirituals, which have been romantically rescored in a considerable number of choral settings. This type also is deeply related to the history of the rural blues of the Deep South.
Northern Urban White (1875–1975). This is the core repertory popularly called “gospel music.” Three identifiable generations of composers/evangelists have contributed to this movement.
The first published hymnals using the term gospel as such were P. P. Bliss’s Gospel Songs (1874) and Bliss and Sankey’s Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs (1875), recently reprinted in facsimile in the A-R Editions of the University of Wisconsin (Madison). Aimed at the Sunday schools via the Baptists Robert Lowry and W. H. Doane, these songs moved almost simultaneously into the Chicago-based ministries of D. L. Moody and the Y.M.C.A. Christian-founded secondary schools (e.g., Mt. Hermon, Northfield, Massachusetts) also used the music, as did participants in the British revival movement during the same era. This fact—plus the Anglo-Celtic roots of many of the first-generation composers/evangelists—has secured the core repertory (1865–1975) a solid status in the specifically Anglo-American history of modern evangelism.
The second generation was one that stylistically modeled much of its music on Tin Pan Alley. Flourishing from about 1910 through 1945, it persisted through the successors of the central figures to about 1965. Focusing on figures such as Archer Torrey, Charles Gabriel, Homer Rodeheaver, and Merrill Dunlop, it also included singers such as Esther Hauser (from the Churchill Tabernacle, Buffalo, New York), and up to the early years of George Beverley Shea and the black gospel singers Mahalia Jackson and Ethel Waters. By the end of this period (the late 1950s) gospel singers ranged from Ed Lyman and Frank Boggs to the operatic bass Jerome Hines.
The third generation is transitional, picking up much of the idiom and ethos of black rhythm and blues and the adaptation of “R&B” during the early 1950s into rock and roll. Thus this generation considerably overlaps the later figures of the second style-period, but by the time it entered the 1970s it merged with the Southern gospel strain of white gospel music (the Gaithers, singer Doug Oldham, and others) and also generated numerous “genre-groups” modeled after the specific personal styles of individual evangelist/composers (e.g., The Great Commission Company of Campus Crusade for Christ and its bright, upbeat albums of the early 70s and the street sounds incorporated into the music of John Giminez concerning converted drug-addicts, released in a song-album by Word, Inc.). This period included hit songs from the Billy Zeoli productions of Gospel Films, Inc. It also was the period of a major breakthrough of black gospel, by then a jazz/blues-based practice within the black church, into the secular arena as top-rated hit music (e.g., the Famous Ward Singers, Aretha Franklin, and Sam Cooke, who originally was with the Soul Stirrers).
Urban Black (1900–1945). This music was closely linked to the New Orleans and Chicago jazz and blues scenes and lasted from the era of ragtime, two steps, and quadrilles through the 1940s. It is the era of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Thomas A. Dorsey, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Golden Gate Quartet, and the Sensational Nightingales. It was the sacred counterpart, stylistically, to rhythm and blues and immediately preceded the crossover of R&B to rock and roll through such catalyst figures as Little Richard and Elvis Presley.
Urban Commercial Synthesis (1970–Present). This is a genuinely new musical body, influenced by technological innovation in all audio/visual media, by global marketing networks, by technomusical influences on form, style, and sound, and by the maturation of the music industry as an international agent in worship trend awareness, taste formation, marketing patterns, copyright legalities, and public relations within the evangelical culture.
This music body has at least two identifiable subdivisions, the first of which may be called traditional gospel music (including classical sacred songs updated stylistically and technically in the interest of a new sound, a trend represented to some degree since the early 1960s). The second subdivision is largely comprised of the Scripture chorus (or the praise chorus), a genre that is bound to nearly all contemporary movements in worship and to its own Pentecostal origins in the 1970s. This genre has a number of features separating it from the older material. Most important, it has come from an unusually large and active number of composer/performers, many of whom are professional, but even more of whom represent a virtual wave of locally active “neo-troubadours.” These musicians are persons who are sufficiently literate in digital sound production to compose and produce their own praise-and-worship songs without necessarily having had formal training in traditional vocabulary and theory of music. Also distinctive is the tendency toward complex vocal rhythm. The syncopations and word displacements of this music effectively alter the traditional listener’s aural sense of expectation. It is an issue of music that is simple in structure but subtle in detail.
Contemporary Issues
The Role of the Music Director. In the last decade, the growth of the Scripture chorus paralleled a shift in the role of music director. The traditional positions of choir director and organist were replaced in many churches with positions containing more comprehensive descriptions, such as Fine Arts Minister, Pastor of Celebration Arts, Minister of Worship, or Worship Leader. Part of the new emphasis is on intensified stewardship to the congregation, a spiritual responsibility to the assembled body via the acts of worshiping God. This role implies mentoring others in a worship team. With the new modes of contemporary Christian music expression, it is possible for an astute leader to discern and guide emotive progress within the service, partly because the Scripture chorus itself often has tag lines and small segments of words that can be repeated sequentially, thereby creating a connective design throughout the service. This feature is also found in many of the new worship-oriented tapes designed for congregational participation or home use (e.g., Integrity’s Hosanna! series All Nations Worship, the Kingsway series Worship Leaders from Around the World, or the Maranatha! Music’s series Songs of Hope). These presentations are new models of sing-along. They feature professional compilations of soloists, background vocals, percussion, acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and prominent, ongoing participation by the worship leader. In this context, Scripture choruses show flexible modularity and intense expressiveness that has become a hallmark of the Willow Creek seeker-sensitive service.
The Decline of Gospel Songs. In contrast, traditional gospel songs in general are showing signs of declining use. In churches where both traditional and newer songs coexist, the hymnal is often complemented by the overhead projector. In other instances, congregations trying to attract the unchurched seeker have completely eliminated the hymnal to promote a wide variety of contemporary, pop-based musical expressions. These range from Top 40 secular selections (with new texts) to TV theme songs or solo and group improvisations. The music staff of Eastside Foursquare Church, Seattle Washington, currently writes more than half of all the choruses sung in their services. This explosion of composition is significant; creative options both for music staff and for individual congregational members are currently more available locally than in recent decades. The Scripture chorus seems to have provided the catalyst for this activity.
Seen in the larger context of the seeker-sensitive movement in worship, the traditional gospel song—while remaining vital in some conservative churches and in specific, targeted radio broadcasts such as The Morning Chapel Hour or Bible Tract Echoes—may become irrelevant, or at least rare, within the next decade. Two factors appear to reinforce the trend: (1) the listening habits of recent generations raised on the dominant influences of rock and country-western music; and (2) increases in indigenous popular worship music in the Third World countries where major revival is presently active. Immigration has allowed Third World music to find its way into the American experience, particularly through the growth of ethnic churches in which the traditions of the homeland are carried on.
Continuation of Gospel Tradition. Notwithstanding the force of current trends in worship music, there are several factors that still show continuity in traditional gospel music. First, the enormous repertory and practice of Southern gospel, both as a musical style linked to its secular counterpart in country-western music and as a living tradition unbroken since the 1940s to the present, continues through such composer/arrangers as Mosie Lister, the Gaithers, Joseph Linn, Carl Perkins, Elmo Mercer, Dottie Rambo, and other key figures in the movement.
Second, hymnals are still being published that feature gospel music as part of eclectic surveys in a conscious effort to both inspire and educate congregations; such hymnals include Genevox’s The Christian Praise Hymnal or Lillenas Musicreation’s Worship in Song. A similar effort, combined with dramatic landscape views, is Steve Green’s album/video, Hymns: A Portrait of Christ.
Third, programming on many conservative broadcasting stations (such as the USA Radio Network) continues to feature music that prevailed during the transitional era 1950–1970. One may still hear the songs of John W. Peterson, the arrangements of Paul Mickelson or Ralph Carmichael, or vocals from George Beverly Shea, Claude Rhea, and the operatic duo Dean Wilder and Robert Hale.
Pluralism of Styles. The pluralism of current gospel music practice is apparent in several ways that go beyond the earlier discussion. These matters merit some attention. A growing number of churches are currently reevaluating the purposes and structures of worship (such as open worship or the seeker-sensitive Vineyard Fellowship style) and the impingements these matters have on the worship arts. First Presbyterian Church of San Mateo, California, offers a comprehensive philosophy of worship leadership training that has earned this church a reputation as being a resource center, especially for charismatically oriented mainline churches on the West Coast. This new style is essentially a call for interdisciplinary approaches to worship leadership training. Apart from an assumed biblical and theological growth goal, it exemplifies trends in worship music that are simultaneously more specialized (to the locale) and generalized (in aesthetic stance). An open question is the extent to which such views are currently relevant to small churches or to churches where worship may be more Word-based or informal in strategic planning.
In Christian liberal arts and Bible colleges, there is an increasing difference between student music preference and the music provided by the institution when the service is not student-controlled. In other terms, a comparison can be drawn between formal chapel hymn-scheduling and the private listening habits of Christian undergraduates or their enjoyment and physical participation at contemporary Christian artist concerts. Faculty members and administrators may not be familiar with top singers and the contexts surrounding them, whereas students will know current music through experience and by talking with peers. In short, gospel music may be experiencing a generational culture gap.
Changes in Christian Music Making. Christian musicians, on the other hand, have dealt with change in various ways.
Choirs vs. ensembles. The continuing central focus on the choir, especially in Southern Baptist churches and in urban liturgical churches, stands in contrast to a more variable status of the choir in free churches as a whole. Although the place of choirs traditionally has been most variable in rural churches, the growing prominence of the worship team changes the choral role to some extent even in larger churches where choirs remain important. If anything is perceptible in popular-culture listening habits, it is the preference for the electronically mixed ensemble—not the massed choral effect associated with something like the Robert Shaw Chorale or a college-town community chorus. Choirs are still vital to many urban black churches, where they are deeply integrated into the total service format.
Modernizing Gospel music. There is also the practice of resetting older gospel songs in redefined harmony, updated rhythm, and rescored arrangement as a countercurrent within contemporary preferences. For instance, the orchestra and piano setting of “Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah” is fused with passages from Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik; and “We’ve a Story to Tell to the Nations” has been set in syncopated rhythm with orchestration and keyboard backdrop.
Classicism. A fusion style in gospel music persists, largely for piano solo or easy-choir. Such pieces are usually traditional gospel tunes set in textures or idioms borrowed from classical masters, particularly Romantic-era figures such as Liszt or Rachmaninov. A type of pseudo-classicism, it also picks up idioms of J. S. Bach and the late baroque, using them as a novelty sound within a larger frame of unrelated style (e.g., Mosie Lister’s “When Christ Was Born in Bethlehem” from his 1986 cantata Everlasting Lord, or the Rachmaninov-style piano settings of popular worship melodies by Dino Kazenakis in his concerts of the 1960s). These fusions are popular today as dinner-hour music on certain conservative-taste broadcasts (e.g., Moody Radio Network), where they are designated “sacred stylings.”
There is also a type of fusion in the opposite direction—gospel song to classical composition—that is not so well known to the church but which is quite important to the music world. A small number of composers have pursued this practice and have produced major symphonic or vocal works that use gospel tunes as the main source. Examples are in Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 1 and his piece “General William Booth’s Entrance Into Heaven”; or the Wondrous Love Variations for Organ Solo by Samuel Barber. Russian composer Alexander Glazunov also wrote a lively orchestral essay, Triumphal March (1893), as a contribution to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in that year, using The Battle Hymn of the Republic as the main material. Works of this sort are important primarily to classical music lovers but speak also to theologically trained historians of national culture and its interface with religion.
From Scripture song to lyric solo. Another development is an amplification of the Scripture chorus into the lyric solo song. This slightly formalized variety really traces back to the earlier models in the context of Malotte’s “The Lord’s Prayer” or some of the church songs of Clifford Demarest. Contemporary styling is the main difference (especially from black gospel); often a simplified version of the same song is published for congregational use. Examples include Keith Green’s “O Lord, You’re Beautiful,” or Lanny Wolfe’s “More Than Wonderful.” Similarly, Word, Inc., puts out a 3-volume Song Book (Cason and Green, compilers) featuring contemporary Christian songs for solo voice and piano based on recorded versions by top artists (e.g., The Imperials, Leon Patillo, Sandi Patti, Randy Stonehill, and others).
Changes in instrumentation. Another move has been to change the sound color of instrumentation and vocalists. This reflects aspects of changing fashion in gospel music aesthetics and merits future study in its own right. One example is changing sound scoring in men’s vocal quartets from traditional close harmony (barbershop) with equal parts, with a lead singer in either baritone or shared among the others, toward a soloist format, where the first tenor takes the lead while the others form a backdrop with occasional secondary leads.
Another major change is taking place with regard to the role of the pipe organ in worship contexts. Both theater and classical instruments are affected; the sounds of Harold DeCou at the “Mighty Wurlitzer” are really part of pre-1970 preferences of taste and are largely heard at present on conservative-taste radio broadcasts. There are some major exceptions, such as the televised performances on the classical instrument at Crystal Cathedral, or the contributions of organist Diana Bish in the Church Music Explosion conferences in Florida. On the other hand, the trend has become more multimedia tolerant, with greater inclusion of electronic band, percussion, and digital keyboards.
Increased rhythmic complexities. Musicians trained in the formal classical method often find this rhythmically complex music hard to sight-read—an unpleasant surprise. On the other hand, persons born since 1960 readily learn the rhythmic licks by ear and internalize them unconsciously. The notated material is genuinely challenging to those who have studio training in worship music and should be regarded with respect by persons working toward any serious commitment as worship leaders. There is also the matter of improvisation in worship music and its growing importance both to amateurs and professionals within the church. The remarkable work of Ken Medema has shown a wide spectrum of style awareness. Medema’s ability to modify his singing quality and to improvise in styles ranging from paraphrases on Bach or Bartok on the piano, to tour-de-force rhymed soliloquies that are made up on the spot has set a standard for educated ministers of worship arts—the ability to use spontaneous creativity in worship that is simultaneously based on historical context and situational awareness.
Creation, Production, Distribution
Publishing and Awards. At present 104 publishing houses furnish gospel music as a service to churches and the public. Of these publishers, four are in the United Kingdom, one each in Australia and New Zealand, two in Canada, and the remaining ninety-six in the USA. Fifty firms alone are in California and Tennessee. Many of these houses provide gospel music that has strong affinities to popular country and western music and is marketed toward such audiences.
Closely tied to this industry are the national awards ceremonies, which are important to composers, arrangers, singers, producers, publishers, and rating agents. Gospel music has the American Gospel Association’s Dove Awards (commenced in 1969) for both black and white music categories. Other honors for artists include the Gospel Hall of Fame and the Grammy Awards in gospel music.
Gospel music’s primary publishers currently include The Benson Co. (Nashville, Tennessee), Gaither Copyright Management (Alexandria, Indiana), BMG Music Publishing (Beverley Hills, California), the Roman Catholic F.E.L. Publications (Las Vegas, Nevada), Lorenz Corporation (Dayton, Ohio), Maranatha! Music (Laguna Hills, California), Lillenas Publishing Co. (Kansas City, Missouri), Sparrow Corporation (Brentwood Tennessee), and Word, Inc., (originally Rodeheaver Co.), of Irving, Texas. Many of these publishers of worship music maintain a stable of the best-known gospel composers and arrangers as resident composers. Creative artists in their own right, also work under the auspices of a publishing house, in effect producing works for specific, perceived marketing needs and/or ministerial goals among churches and worship leaders. Lillenas, for example, retains figures such as Linda Rebuck, Lawrence Enscoe, Joseph Linn, and Mosie Lister, among others. In this respect—much like the popular music industry—gospel music is composed, arranged, and recorded in a broadly networked but tightly coordinated marketing system by which national tastes and trends of taste can both be met and proactively influenced. Media produced through this network include cantatas, sheet music, song anthologies, children’s dramas, and pageants, praise-song hymnals, traditional hymn collections, demo tapes of choir anthologies and cantatas, accompaniment tracks for solo and choral singing, and instructional media relevant to the music ministry.
Among top-rated singers and recording artists at present are such figures as Ed Curtis, Steve Green, Nancy Honeytree, Susan Ashton, Connie Scott, Cynthia Clawson, and the duo Steve and Annie Chapman. Additional writers and arrangers include figures such as Camp Kirkland, Doug Holck, Dick Bolks, or Tom Fettke; much of the material is intended for particular age levels or in some way fashioned for the size and limitations of choirs and accompanists.
Theological and Denominational Differences. There are theological and denominational backdrops to the development of gospel music that merit a few remarks at this point. In the earliest period, the conceptual sources were in two main contexts: Congregationalist (Puritan dissenter), and slightly later, Anglican (through the Wesleys, into Methodism). On the other hand, the Northern Urban repertory (1870 to c. 1930) tends to be influenced by Baptists, both compositionally and in social usage through the Sunday schools and revivals. Recent eclectic hymn collections prevalent in Christian colleges and certain collegiate Christian fellowships (such as the ones produced by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship) have, since the 1960s, taken on one of three orientations: (1) British(via the hymn-writing movement of the 1960s and 70s, e.g., Eric Routley and Timothy Dudley-Smith); (2) Presbyterian/Reformed, and since the 1980s (3) multicultural ecumenism, such as the songbook of the Madison Campus Ministry at the University of Wisconsin. In contemporary Christian praise/worship repertory, the main roots (also visible in the song lyrics) are Pentecostal, through the Assemblies of God. The influence of this contemporary material on other churches and denominations (including those not sympathetic with Assemblies of God views on spiritual gifts) is well-established, and the acceptance of such songs continues, suggesting a general popularity that may be independent of theological concerns.