The music that helped free a people and lift a nation
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part One: Roots 9
1. Got On My Traveling Shoes: Black Sacred Music and the Great
Migration 11
2. "When the Fire Fell": The Sanctified Church Contribution to
Chicago Gospel Music 27
3. Sacred Music in Transition: Charles Henry Pace and the Pace
Jubilee Singers 48
4. Turn Your Radio On: Chicago Sacred Radio Broadcast
Pioneers 58
5. "Someday, Somewhere": The Formation of the Gospel
Nexus 71
6. Sweeping through the City: Thomas A. Dorsey and the Gospel Nexus
(1932 - 1933) 87
7. Across This Land and Country: New Songs for a New Era
(1933-1939) 112
8. From Birmingham to Chicago: The Great Migration of the Gospel
Quartet 132
Part Two: Branches 147
9. Sing a Gospel Song: The 1940s, Part One 149
10. "If It's in Music -- We Have It": The Fertile Crescent of
Gospel Music Publishing 167
11. "Move On Up a Little Higher": The 1940s, Part Two
179
12. Postwar Gospel Quartets: "Rock Stars of Religious
Music" 204
13. The Gospel Caravan: Midcentury Melodies 229
14. "He Could Just Put a Song on His Fingers": Second-Generation
Gospel Choirs 260
15. "God's Got a Television": Gospel Music Comes to the Living
Room 281
16. "Tell It Like It Is": Songs of Social Significance
297
17. One of These Mornings: Chicago Gospel at the
Crossroads 317
Appendix A. 1920s African American Sacred Music Recordings
Made in Chicago 331
Appendix B. African American Sacred Music Recordings Made in
Chicago, 1930-1941 335
Notes 337
Bibliography 389
General Index 401
Index of Songs 435
Illustrations follow page 228
Robert M. Marovich hosts "Gospel Memories" on Chicago's WLUW 88.7 FM and is founder and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Gospel Music, www.journalofgospelmusic.com.
Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research in Recorded
Blues, Gospel, Soul, or R&B, Association for Recorded Sound
Collections (ARSC), 2016.
"Opens a window on an important part of 20th-century Americana that
has been little explored heretofore."--Library Journal
“[An] exhaustively researched history of this important Chicago
musical export. . . . Here, in Marovich's important work, are the
lesser-known stories of the originators who created a wholly
original sound of holiness in Chicago that reverberates
today”—Chicago Tribune
"A City Called Heaven is a valuable resource that points to the
many voices that were important to the success of gospel music.
With his text, Marovich extends an invitation to readers and gospel
music lovers to celebrate the beautiful and spirit-filled
contributions of those who paved the gospel highway from Chicago to
heaven and back."--Black Grooves
"A truly major contribution to the history of African-American
music."--Blues and Rhythm
"Robert Marovich's magisterial account explores how the encounter
with urban life infused gospel music with blues and jazz, without
displacing old habits of ecstatic worship brought from African and
baptized by encountering Christianity."--Milwaukee Shepherd
Express
"Essential."--Choice
“An impressive, comprehensive combination history, anthology and
analysis of black gospel music. A City Called Heaven — Chicago And
The Birth Of Gospel Music blends interviews, character studies,
rare photographs and numerous magnificent stories and encounters to
provide readers with a wide-ranging look at this vital, constantly
evolving idiom.”-Nashville Scene
"A labor of love. . . . Marovich's book is indispensable music
knowledge and a welcome statement on Chicago's cultural
legacy."--Popmatters
"A thoroughly researched, dynamic account of gospel music's history
in Chicago over five decades. . . . A riveting
narrative."--Newcity
"No American metropolis played as mammoth of a role in the
development of African-American gospel music as Chicago. And no
book has ever examined that complicated movement in such an
expansive manner as A City Called Heaven. There's an incredible
amount of information packed into its pages; by the time you finish
this work, you'll possess extensive insight into the Windy City's
sacred music history that simply wasn't available prior to this
under one binding."--ARSC Journal
"In A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music Bob
Marovich ploughs deep and wide to connect all of Gospel's variant
threads from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first
centuries. . . . Its beauty and practicality as a definitive
reference source on Gospel music lies in the book's additional
depth, in the attention also given to the unique contributions of
countless small and medium-sized players and their accompanying
details. . . . A City Called Heaven is a Bible of where Gospel and
has been, where it's going, and who's been at the wheel in a
century of melding and shaping. An essential new
reference."--Chicago Book Review
"In A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music,
Robert M. Marovich offers a discerning look at the role of this
city on the genre's development. . . . For recovering rich insight
from these sources, Marovich deserves great praise for this timely
study. . . . An impressive achievement, and is most worthy of a
detailed reading."--Journal of Folklore Research
"A thoroughly and richly drawn history. . . . Marovich has produced
an important work that will reward both fans of and serious
researchers of gospel music."--Journal of the Illinois State
Historical Society
"Marovich uses gospel music in Chicago to show how genre and urban
historiography can be combined with one another because the needs
and constraints of life in the city ultimately led to the
development of a music as a spiritual
counterbalance."--Jazzinstitut
"An extraordinary work. A long-overdue history of the city and
people at the heart of gospel music, A City Called Heaven is a
readable, meticulously researched chronology that provides a link
in understanding not just gospel music, but African American music,
history, and religion. The book's greatest strength is Robert M.
Marovich's unparalleled access to Chicago's gospel music royalty,
past and present. The detailed scholarship and analysis is enhanced
by hundreds of interviews. Nobody knows Chicago gospel better than
Marovich. To use the language of the African American church, it is
a 'blessing' to have a scholar who loves this music this much be
the one to write this essential history."--Robert Darden, author of
Nothing but Love in God's Water, Volume 1: Black Sacred Music from
the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement
"Throughout these fascinating pages, Marovich colorfully shares the
blood and sweat, as well as the feuds and collaborations that
worked hand in hand to birth this stunning and uniquely American
music known as gospel. It's a book worth a loud, boisterous, and
affirmative shout!"--Bil Carpenter, author of Uncloudy Days: The
Gospel Music Encyclopedia
"Chicago, America's homeland of the soul, is also gospel's capital,
its Vatican and Mecca. As early as the 1920s, the city presented
the full range of black religious expression, from the high church
anthems of the Pace Jubilee Singers to the storefront ecstasies of
Bishop F.W. McGee. During the 1930s, as the music evolved into
modern gospel, Chicago became the home of its most prolific
composer, Thomas A. Dorsey; its most famous soloist, Mahalia
Jackson; and its most influential group, the Robert Martin Singers.
Their impact was not limited to the gospel circuit. Rhythm and
blues, and soul, would be unimaginable without Dinah Washington or
Sam Cooke, both of whom began as teenage wonders of their local
churches, not to mention their colleagues, the pianists and
guitarists who revolutionized the roles of supporting musicians in
a secular setting. In the 1950s and 1960s, Chicago soloists like
James Cleveland, groups like the Caravans, and quartets like the
Staple Singers rocked the nation. It would be more than enough to
cover all these subgenres, and the many gifted individuals, each
with a memorable story to tell, and Bob Marovich does so with
unerring taste and sympathy. But he also explores social and
political ramifications, from the 1930s, when Mahalia sang Dorsey
songs in honor of her local alderman, to the 1970s, when Jesse
Jackson's Operation Push became a vehicle of social protest.
Because he doesn't neglect the extramusical side of gospel, his
song of the city will ring out for years to come. Students of
cultural history will be enthralled. Lovers of gospel, soul, or
jazz will be shouting the victory."--Anthony Heilbut, author of The
Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times
"Detailed and chock-full of original research, it's the book that
finally details the history and development of African American
gospel music in Chicago."--Kip Lornell, author of "Happy in the
Service of the Lord": African American Sacred Vocal Harmony
Quartets in Memphis
"A much-needed extended history of Chicago's pivotal role in the
development of gospel music, on its growth within the city, and on
how its artists, composers, and various media entrepreneurs helped
to make gospel a worldwide music form."--Deborah Smith Pollard,
author of When the Church Becomes Your Party: Contemporary Gospel
Music
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