People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music

Rating:
Summary: Music Lovers and History Buffs--Don't Miss This!
Review: The words sing off the page in People Get Ready. As an avid music lover, I knew jazz, rock, R&B, hymns, and black church music had some "hazy" connectivity. I felt it along the bones, but never appreciated the full story, which Darden unleashes with style and enthusiasm. Like a native guide in uncharted terrain, he moves from slave songs to post-Civil War music and onward to today, mixing interviews, research and reportage into a harmonic worldview of blues, jazz, jubilee, gospel and spiritual music. This is the kind of book a history buff and a music lover can enjoy equally. If you love music, it helps you find more music you love and understand your favorites more fully. If you love history, it helps put the modern musical scene into context as business, art, and spiritual catharsis.

Read it. Yes, that's a recommendation imperative. In Darden's exuberant and expert prose, the words have as much harmony as the songs they describe.

PS: I also enjoyed an interview I heard with the author on All Things Considered (the radio show from NPR):
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Rating:
Summary: Not a "new history" really...
Review: With some reservations (I heaven't read the whole book yet) but the impression I get is that this book is a pretty unambitious cronicling of the gospel phenomenon with no particular focus whatsoever. What it teaches you is pretty much the same as you were told in secondary school, nothing new except for volume. An epigram with a pretty strongminded citation about gospel from black theologian James Cone is left uncommented in the general stream of "facts". The same goes for his use of Mark Anthony Neal's "One Diaspora Under the Groove" a piece he wrote about Kirk Freanklin's and God's Property's hit "Stomp" in "What the Music Said". It may sound interesting to cite black academics who's supposed to know black people, but the stringing together of various sources is done pretty uncritically, as if they were all equally meaningful.

The author (who's written a host of books covering everything from golf to christian businessmen) pretty much says it all in the preface: "I was interested in the who, what, where, and when. I was fascinated by the why and how of gospel. I don't think I fully answered any of my questions. But I had a wonderful time trying."

This is not a recomended book for academic students of gospel music, unless you're studying the literature itself. It is not either a book recomended for the fan of today's gospel music. Those who are particularly interested have probably read it all already in magazones or at various websites. I guess this book is mostly for the roots audience, but to them I would rather recomend Anthony Heilbuts fabulous book. The Gospel Sound. Much more fun, and definately a more meaningful reading of gospel.

Best recent academic treatises of gospel are: "Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age" by Jerma A. Jackson and "Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel" by Glenn Hinson.

The book most likely to appeal to listeners of todays gospel music (except for artist biographies of the Williams Brothers, Shirley Caesar and the like) is All Music Guide contributor and Capital Entertainment founder Bill Carpenters "Uncloudy Days: The Gospel Music Encyclopedia" coming out this year.