Having Church

I found this interesting and informative article about gospel music on a website devoted to Religion and Public Life, which according to its mission statement "exists to bring alive the message of freedom from homosexuality through the power of the Lord Jesus Christ by exalting a dynamic profile of the grace of God. Our aim is to purposefully create a community of overcoming overcomers who are not ashamed of God's deliverance. WITNESS! unapologetically seeks to influence,impact, educate and challenge the "black church" and African American community at large in its response to homosexuality."

Though the article is several years old, it's still relevant to the present situation. The author, Michael Linton, begins by making a plain and straightforward statement of the facts that doesn't mix matters:

Outrage!" "Shocking insensitivity!" "Boycott!" Art, in recent years, has raised any number of protests, but this time it isn’t Jesse Helms and his cronies complaining about taxpayer-funded obscenity. Now it’s the radical left, howling over Angie and Debbie Winans’ anti-gay gospel hit, "It Ain’t Natural" (on their CD Bold, ATF Records, 1997).

Problem is, it is "natural." And this is not a comment either way on sexual orientation or behavior. It’s natural for black gospel music to rouse the passions, scourge the ego, harangue the sinful, sooth the battered, and comfort the afflicted. The Winans aren’t doing anything unusual in their song. They’re simply doing what gospel musicians have been doing for about eighty years. They’re just "having church."

The article continues:

Gospel music is "about church." It’s music of Christian brothers and sisters who come together to praise Jesus and tell what he has done for us—first person plural. The grammar is significant. While related to spirituals, gospel is a distinct genus. Not only are the spirituals a closed repertory, being confined to those songs composed during the captivity of African-Americans, but they are also typically intensely subjective and intimate, full of what in Lieder is called Innigkeit: "Take away the world, give me Jesus," "Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen," "I’m crossin’ over into campground," "Sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home." These are songs about the sufferings and the hopes of an individual, sufferings often obscured by code language because someone who is only "three-fifths human" (the fraction used to count blacks in the antebellum census) shouldn’t be seen to be suffering. Even when sung publicly by a group, these are songs of single souls whose agony is shackled.

But there’s nothing shackled about gospel. This is music about freedom. Gospel is full of shoutin’, and clappin’, and testifyin’; it is the witness required by liberation. Even when the texts speak of "me" and "I," this "I" is not the signature of an isolated individual, but the "I" of a person standing next to another person, both sharing the experience of redemption, and each uplifting the other with his testimony. In this sense, gospel music is not recital music. It is not music to be listened to, contemplated, and applauded when it’s done. It is music to be sung, and encouraged, and commented on. That’s why the congregation at a gospel concert (there is no "audience") will often stand, sing, clap, dance, and testify—loudly—with the singers. This is music of the family, and at this table, nobody is asked to be silent.

As is appropriate for a repertory so devoted to the expression of liberation, in gospel considerable freedom is given for improvisation over standard forms. The typical gospel choir (singing in three parts—two female and one male—with piano, organ, and drum accompaniment) learns the body of a song by rote. But in performance, the director elongates the piece through repetition and modulation while a soloist (if there is one) is expected to extemporize text and music. Sometimes these improvisations become melismatic outpourings of religious ecstasy, sometimes a kind of parlando recitative sermon—but they are always constructions of the moment, punctuated by various methods of congregational approbation.

The improvisatory character of gospel both clarifies and confuses its relationship to jazz. Like jazz, gospel is the musical child of West African rhythmic traditions and Anglo-American harmonic practice. Both use call and response forms and both prize spontaneity. Yet that is where the similarity stops. Although jazz is now a fully developed classical repertory of international scope with its own artists, conservatories, theory, and historical scholarship, it has never completely shaken its roots in river town bordellos and big city nightclubs. Jazz is a secular genus (Duke Ellington’s late sacred compositions not withstanding) and its most enduring form the "blues."

But in gospel, there is no blues. Not only is that three-phrase form largely absent, its very aesthetic is antithetical to the genus. Like Gregorian chant, gospel is inextricably music of the church. And although gospel now has its commercial side too, it remains stubbornly connected to those roots. It is music of a people who choose, in spite of the "blues," to testify that "the Lord will make a way."

And the author concludes:

...my favorite new gospel release isn’t by an established artist or even on a major label. It’s a CD of a group of reformed drug addicts recorded in a Harlem church (The ARC Choir: "Walk with Me," Mapleshade label, MS 04132). When the thirty members of the Addicts Rehabilitation Center Gospel Choir sing, their music carries a diamond-like conviction: fire tested and brilliantly true. This collection of traditional gospel songs arranged by the choir’s director Curtis Lundy isn’t for the timid. Pleasant religious mood music it is not. It’s a no-holds-barred performance by men and women for whom faith is a matter of life and death. And while the Winans have sparked protests from the politically correct, surely this CD must send the devils themselves howling. Well, let ’em howl. Preach it, praise Jesus.

As I read this article, I couldn't help reflecting on the recent controversy over the cancellation of Jamaican Dancehall singer Beenie Man's Ocean concert in East London because of protests from the gay rights group OutRage! "on the grounds that his lyrics aim to incite violence towards homosexuals" (see this link.) Although Beenie Man can by no stretch of the imagination be classified as a gospel singer, the lyrics of his songs have been influenced to some extent by the powerful and in part religiously inspired anti-gay lobby that exists in Jamaica, where gays have recently been attacked and killed, the case of murdered gay activist Bryan Williamson being the most notable and shocking one.

All this has given rise to much discussion among singers of the London gospel choir in which I sing as a regular member. The consensus is that while no one has anything against gays individually, there's an unwillingness to have gayness flaunted "in your face", and a definite anger about the ability of the gay rights lobby to influence and censor black culture. There can be no doubt that the homophobic attitudes evident in the songs of Beenie Man and other Dancehall, Reggae and Hip Hop artists are reinforced by the message of the Black Church, which is generally that homosexuality is a bad thing, and needs to be discouraged. And yet somehow it's not as simple as that: where faith is a matter of life and death - the life and death of a community, of a culture, of an ethnic identity - the dictates of political correctness become largely irrelevant. And the comparisons of sexuality and race come increasingly to seem offensive and insulting. As the lyrics of Donnie McClurkin's song on his recent album Again put it:

I found something you can use
If you listen well I'm here to tell you cannot lose
A simple word to remind you that you can be the greatest ever defeated never
Even though sometimes you may lose your mind

Chorus:
Yes you can you can do anything if you try just try
Yes you can but you have to believe and rely on what you have inside
You can make it through your trials
Your trials will make you stronger
You can do anything yes you can
Oh oh

Teach your children well it's time to tell them just who they are
Train them as they go let them know that they can go far
Oh my brother why do you wait tomorrow might be too late
For I gave a provision made the decision
You can do all things through your faith come on

Chorus:
Yes you can you can do anything if you try just try
Yes you can but you have to believe and rely on what you have inside
You can make it through your trials
Your trials will make you stronger
You can do anything yes you can
Oh oh