The gospel about Gospel—the power of the ring

"I told them today," Albert ("Pete") Pero would often say to me as I met him in the hall coming from one of his classes, "I told them that it's all about ritual."

Never did we go beyond that friendly exchange to test his words of wisdom, but, walking away, I always mused how Pete is one of those who "does" theology to better understand doxology.

When Pete joined the faculty of the Lutheran School of Theology in the late 1970s he began to create a kind of magnetic field in which things African and African American could find energy, be extolled, debated, contextualized, and, above all, embraced, especially since he seemed to contain all of those dynamics within himself. During his early tenure at the seminary African American ritual patterns in community worship came with increased and welcomed regularity. By the end of the 80s, manifestations of the climate he helped to create included black preaching and the emergence of the LSTC Gospel Choir, a group that provided regular injections of its lively music into the campus worship life.

Perhaps because of its seeming distance from what some might consider customary worship music, because it asks of its hearers immediate reaction, and because of its ritual (and therefore very personal, deep, and potentially contentious) dimensions, the Gospel Sound, as Gospel music is often labeled, seems to be a good place to test out formulations regarding the foundations of worship music.

What follows is chiefly propelled by Luther's admonition in the opening paragraphs of his 1523 Formula missae, "we must dare something in the name of Christ." (1) In this case the "something" goes to print for two reasons: (1) as a testimony to Pete's expansive heart, which in matters of culture and ritual always meets questions not with reproof but rather with patient tutoring; and (2) as an attempt to offer a critique of a powerful, deeply meaningful style (2) of music by taking on the role of a critic in the sense musicologist Joseph Kerman (3) proposes, that is, one who does not stop short at repertoire description but considers all the factors involved in the doing of music.

Offspring of a family wide

To discover the gospel about Gospel means sorting through the roots of this music. Origins are many and diverse, including music of populations both white and black.

When Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey took their fledgling program of urban evangelization to Sunderland, England, in 1873, Sankey there devised the phrase "to sing the Gospel" as a way to market their campaign. (4) Advance notice let it be known that Dr. Moody would preach the gospel and Mr. Sankey would sing the gospel. A year later Philip P. Bliss published a collection of the songs used at these gatherings, giving it the title Gospel Songs. (5) From then on, songs that contained a heavy dose of good news for whatever oppressed situation or singer came to be known as "Gospel." Harry Eskew and James Downey offer this succinct definition of Gospel music:

A large body of American religious song with texts that reflect aspects
of the personal religious experience of Protestant evangelical groups,
both white and black. Such songs first appeared in religious revivals
during the 1850s but they are more closely associated with the urban
revivalism that arose in the last third of the 19th century. (6)

But origins of Gospel are far more complicated than such description suggests. Early American settlers, especially New England Protestants, adorned their Calvinist-styled worship with psalms taken from metrical psalters brought along from the old country. Lack of musical instruments in their new surroundings reinforced their traditional conservative inclinations about music in worship. Delivery of the psalms thus relied on a practice known as "lining out." In this method, a leader sang a phrase from the hymn-like psalm in a rather sprightly tempo followed by the rest of the group singing the same phrase but at a much slower tempo. Depending on the situation, untrained singers together often produced heterophony (simultaneous divergent versions of the tune) while a gathering of more gifted ones provided harmony of sorts. Other surprise variations on the tune were derived from occasional ornamentations offered by the musically adventuresome (perhaps as a way to escape the boredom of the slow tempos).

These marks of improvisation themselves probably originated in the folk-song traditions of the immigrants. (7) More significant is that lined-out psalmody shares distinct characteristics with processes inherent to African and African American music. Lining out is nearly identical to the call-response pattern everywhere present in African music, while improvisatory ornamentation serves to give life to both spiritual and Gospel. It is fruitless, if not pointless, to determine who did what first. (8) Rather, the emergence of these practices in several venues reveals an important root of the Gospel style.