A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music
A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music. By Robert M. Marovich. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. x, 441, notes bibliography, index, index of songs, illustrations. Paper, $29.95.)A City Called Heaven, by gospel music researcher and broadcaster Robert M. Marovich, fills a great void in the history of African American music in Chicago. Until now the city has been well covered with full histories on jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, and soul but was bereft of such a history on the city's singular role in developing gospel music.Marovich laudably explains the full social context of the rise of gospel music in Chicago, notably the Great Migration, which brought a large number of African Americans to the North and to Chicago from World War I through the next three decades. This migration formed the seedbed from which gospel music would emerge and flourish.The author goes over familiar ground in laying out the development of gospel music in the city, which was primarily the work of Thomas Andrew Dorsey. He began his career in gospel in the late 1920s by publishing his gospel song sheets and peddling them to churches. I was always under the impression that Dorsey had grown up in the church, then went into recording dirty blues (Hokum) with Tampa Red, and then returned to the church to promote his gospel music. The way that Marovich presents the story is that Dorsey never left the church, and, while active in blues, he was still engaged in creating gospel music.The new gospel music that Dorsey was composing was animated by the 1920s blues and jazz music that he performed and knew well. This gospel music eventually spread throughout all the African American churches from the most conservative old line AME churches with their European hymns to the Church of God in Christ (GOG1C) or Pentecostal churches, which had already been creating a more African American style of church music.This book may surprise many readers who are only familiar with the solo and quartet variety of recorded gospel, as personified by Mahalia Jackson and the Roberta Martin Singers, two of the most significant gospel artists who came out of Chicago. A large focus of this study is on the adoption of gospel music by the churches and the formation of gospel choirs, much of which was never recorded in the 1930s and 1940s. Notable churches the author covers are Pilgrim Baptist Church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, First Church of Deliverance, Greater Harvest Baptist Church, and All Nations Pentecostal Church.