—Ray Charles
Musicians grounded in the gospel impulse respond by bearing witness to the troubles they’ve seen, telling the deepest truths they know. The gospel singer testifies to the burden and the power of the spirit in moans or screams or harmonies so sweet they can make you cry. The testimony touches what we share and what we deal with when we’re on our own in that dark night of the soul. The word “witness” works partly because the burden involves history, power. There’s an evil in the world and, yeah, part of it’s inside us, but lots of it comes from the Devil. Call him sex or money, hypocrisy or capitalism, the landlord or Governor Wallace, but the Devil’s real. You deal with him or he, maybe she, will most definitely deal with you. If you stop right there, you’ve got the blues.
Music is healing. It’s all there to uplift someone. If somebody’s burdened down and having a hard time, if they’re depressed, gospel music will help them. We were singing about freedom. We were singing about when will we be paid for the work we’ve done. We were talking about doing right by us. We were down with Martin Luther King. Pops said this is a righteous man. If he can preach this, we can sing it.
—Mavis Staples
But gospel doesn’t leave it there. Marley, Aretha, Mahalia, and Al Green all testify to the reality of redemption. If the blues give you the strength to face another day but leave you to face it on your own, gospel promises, or at least holds out the possibility, that tomorrow may be different, better. With the help of the spirit and your people—in the church or on the dance floor—you can get over, walk in Jerusalem, dance to the music. But it takes an energy bigger than yourself, the wellspring of healing that South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim called “water from an ancient well.” For the classic gospel singers, the source is God; for soul singers, it’s love. Bob Marley calls it Jah. George Clinton envisions Atlantis, the mothership. Arrested Development imagines a tree in Tennessee. Whatever its specific incarnation, gospel redemption breaks down the difference between personal salvation and communal liberation. No one makes it alone. If we’re going to bear up under the weight of the cross, find the strength to renounce the Devil, if we’re going to survive to bear witness and move on up, we’re going to have to connect. The music shows us how.
6
Sam Cooke and the Voice of Change
J. W. Alexander of the legendary gospel quartet the Soul Stirrers remembered the precise moment Sam Cooke found his voice. Recalling the difficulties Cooke faced in trying to match the virtuosity of R. H. Harris, whom he had replaced as the group’s lead vocalist, Alexander described the moment of discovery, which occurred in a California auditorium one night in 1953: “in trying to dodge one of those high notes . . . he did a whoa-whoa-whoa type of thing. . . . He just floated under.” It was a voice that possessed a unique ability to call forth strong responses from the black folk attending the gospel show that night in California and from the teens, black and white, who heard it on their transistor radios. A pioneer on the path that led from the gospel highway to the top twenty, Cooke envisioned a world where the two audiences might merge into one, where black singers could sing what he called “real gospel” and still get paid.
The circumstances surrounding Cooke’s death from gunshots in a South Central Los Angeles motel in December 1964 have never really been explained. He’d gone there with a woman, later identified as a prostitute, who’d stolen his clothes. When he burst into the motel office angrily demanding their return, he was shot by the motel manager, who claimed that she had acted in self-defense. Many in the black community believed he’d been set up. The only sure thing is that his death changed the world of American popular music in ways that delayed the fulfillment of his dream.
Cooke mapped the paths available to singers trying to bring the gospel impulse into the interracial marketplace. He had begun his career in gospel during the formative years of the freedom movement. Beginning in 1953 when “Jesus Gave Me Water” sold sixty-five thousand copies, an extraordinary performance in the all-black gospel market, Cooke’s voice floated the Soul Stirrers through a series of hits that confirmed them as a major force in gospel. Moving to the popular marketplace, he recorded a series of seemingly innocuous pop hits including “Cupid,” “Wonderful World,” and “You Send Me.” By the end of his life, he had begun to merge his approaches in the “gospel pop” of “Bring It on Home to Me,” “Soothe Me,” and the breathtaking “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
Born in the heart of the Mississippi Delta and raised in Chicago’s Bronzeville, Cooke got a firsthand look at the transition from Southern to Northern forms of African American culture. A preacher in the socially conservative but musically vibrant Holiness Church, Cooke’s father, Charles Cook—Sam added the e as a none-too-effective disguise when he moved from gospel to pop music—had moved to Chicago and found work in the stockyards. Joining over a hundred thousand other black migrants from the South, he worked alongside many of the fifty thousand whites who belonged to the twenty Chicago-area Ku Klux Klan “klaverns.” Despite de facto integration on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, social life and housing in Chicago remained nearly as segregated as they had been in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Like their counterparts in the South, Chicago’s black churches provided centers for community activity. Young Chicagoans raised in the church—among them Cooke, Jerry Butler, and Curtis Mayfield—saw how music could bring their people together. The gospel soul they created succeeded in communicating something of the movement’s feel to a surprisingly large white audience. As historian Taylor Branch observed, their achievement carried major political significance. Describing a 1963 concert in Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon Park where Cooke performed alongside the Drifters, Solomon Burke, Dionne Warwick, Jerry Butler, and numerous others, Branch writes that the park was “jammed not only with Negro fans but also with young white people, for whom the best Negro pop music reached beneath formal and worldly preoccupations to release elemental emotions of sex, frivolity, love, and sadness.” Underscoring the political significance of the music, Branch concludes: “The stars of soul music and the blues stood with King as exemplars of the mysterious Negro church—nearly all of them had been gospel singers—but they were still ahead of him in crossing over to a mass white audience. They unlocked the shared feelings, if not the understanding, that he longed to reach.”
Cooke reached that audience with a string of hits beginning with “You Send Me” and culminating in “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which was released eleven days after his death. The song expresses the soul of the freedom movement as clearly and powerfully as King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” The opening measures verge on melodrama: a searching French horn rises over a lush swell of symphonic strings accompanied by tympani. But Cooke brings it back to earth, bearing witness to the restlessness that keeps him moving like the muddy river bordering the Delta where he was born. Maintaining his belief in something up there beyond the sky, Cooke draws sustenance from his gospel roots. He testifies that it’s been a long, long time—the second “long” carries all the weight of a bone-deep gospel weariness. Then he sings the midnight back toward dawn. The hard-won hope that comes through in the way he uses his signature “whoa-whoa-whoa” to emphasize the word “know” in the climactic line—”I know that a change is gonna come”—feels as real as anything America has ever been able to imagine.
James Baldwin reached for something similar in his classic story “Sonny’s Blues.” Thinking of his uncle’s death by mindless racial violence, his brother Sonny’s struggle with heroin addiction, his young daughter’s illness and death, Baldwin’s narrator turns to music for something that’s not quite consolation and even less understanding. Creole, the bass player in Sonny’s band, brings the jazz explorations back home: “He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell,