Another crossroads for Chicago's gospel music

Two blocks off bustling I-57, a sacred sound rises above the crunch of snow under latecomers' feet. Beth Eden Baptist, the "Mother Church of Morgan Park," is gearing up another Sunday service at the intersection of the newly named Robert E. Wooten Sr. Drive and 111th Street.

This church and these sounds capture an original Chicago creation - modern gospel music - in its glory, complexity, and at an important crossroads. Gospel thrives in new forms and influences popular music at large, but some experts worry that its roots in older congregations may be in danger while others say its very popularity is pulling it from its religious mission. Artists, devotees and congregants are committed to gospel in many forms, and Chicago's South Side maintains the richest traditions in the world.

Since 1923, Beth Eden has welcomed the Great Migration of blacks and nurtured generations of gospel music. "Lord, I want to live up yonder," the choir intones slowly, carefully, in an a cappella jubilee version of the old spiritual. "My Mother's gone to glory, I want to go there too," the ensemble continues in a pitch-perfect harmony revealing practice and devotion. "Lord, I want to live up yonder, in bright mansions above."

Soft shouts of praise from the sparse congregation obscure the end of this delicate paean to God and the underground railroad, but before the applause can fade, Minister of Music Robert E. Wooten Jr. slides into the organ-driven "I Thank You, Jesus" and the church erupts in tambourine sway and praise.

Black migration streams from the South date back more than 150 years, but when World War I halted European immigration and raised Northern demand for industrial labor, the stream became a mighty river. Historians estimate that up to 7 million African-Americans moved north in 50 years - a migration of epic scale.

The Chicago Defender trumpeted the opportunities awaiting blacks in Chicago, and new arrivals brought more than dreams for a better future, they brought rich cultural traditions. Black music was already changing from field and work songs to spirituals, blues, jazz and more.

"From 1915 to 1960 over half-million African-Americans migrated to Chicago from the South, including my mother and father," said Fernando Jones, a renowned bluesman and professor of music at Columbia College in Chicago. "A lot of the musicians that were the architects of modern music were part of that migration."

One of these architects, known as the best brothel-and-party piano player in Atlanta, moved north in 1916 to find fortune in Chicago's famed music bars. "Thomas A. Dorsey sang the blues," Jones said, "but he also created a gospel music considered heavenly. He could sing both with complete conviction."

Dorsey worked in churches - he was appointed music director at New Hope Baptist Church in 1922 - and in blues clubs and studios, recording a huge hit as Georgia Tom.

In 1925, Charles Henry Pace organized the Pace Jubilee Singers at Beth Eden, establishing the church as a center for the sounds of emerging gospel music. Though their toe-tapping, carefully arranged spiritual style was popular, the vocal improvisations of the "Dorsey Songs" performed by Mahalia Jackson, Willie Mae Ford Smith, and others would establish Dorsey as the most famous gospel composer of all. Still, his achievement built on a rich foundation. "When the blues is added first to spirituals and then to jubilee, it becomes gospel," gospel historian Robert Darden writes in his 2004 book, "People Get Ready!"

Scores of Chicago churches supported the vibrant and evolving sounds of gospel worship. In 1933, the associate pastor of Pilgrim Baptist Church at 33rd and Indiana, then the second-largest church in the city, left to lead Beth Eden.

Robert Wooten Sr. remembers growing up in the church, "where anybody who came here, they knew Beth Eden was noted for its music. On second and fourth Sundays you couldn't get anywhere near here to get a good seat," he said, pointing around the warmly lit sanctuary. "It was that well attended."

In 1949, Wooten founded the Wooten Ensemble, now under the direction of his son, Robert E. "Bobby" Wooten Jr., and the longest operating community ensemble in the country. "We started rehearsing on Tuesday nights in '49, and I never changed that time in all these years," the elder Wooten said. "I had one member in the armed forces for 20 years, and I saw him outside the church and said 'When you comin' back?'" Wooten said as the sanctuary emptied. "'When you rehearsin'?' he asked and I said 'You know it's still on Tuesday night,' so he came right back."

Wooten, a graduate of the Chicago Conservatory, said he responded to a call from God to build an ensemble that would sing gospel jubilee, spirituals, anthems, hymns, and more. This unusual breadth and uncompromising commitment to black sacred music has connected Beth Eden and the Wootens to the history of gospel ever since.

"I had an audience with Thomas Dorsey," Wooten said. "We did all of his selections and then he came out and spoke and shared a third verse of 'Precious Lord' with us. It was very, very meaningful."

In January 2006, Dorsey's famed Pilgrim Baptist Church burned to the ground. Across the street from the ashes and empty walls, Pastor Keith Gordon leads a revival of the Pilgrim community. The key to Gordon's faith? Beth Eden Baptist Church.

"I was age 15 in Sunday school class" at Beth Eden, Gordon said, "when I finally understood what Christianity really meant. And then I knew that Gospel music was part of that same beginning for me."

As famous as the blues-melded gospel sounds of Thomas Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson and Pilgrim Baptist have become, their acceptance was not inevitable.

"Initially the church was hostile towards this music as blues," said gospel musician Johari Jabir, who is a member of the African-American Studies department at Northwestern University and an expert in black sacred music and cultural historical studies. "The church was shaping [arriving] black folks into obedient urban citizens, and the blues disrupts that," he said. "Dorsey's merging of these two forms was unsettling for people."

Fernando Jones, winner of this year's Keeping the Blues Alive award from the Blues Foundation, agrees. "During that time blacks were just one generation out of slavery or sharecropping."

Churches, especially in the North, wanted arranged music that showed sophistication, Jones said. "Memories from sharecropping were associated with the blues, with field hollers," he said. "When Dorsey came to church he would put his foot up on the piano, he would put on a show. That's why the gospel music moves us," Jones said,"because it has that blues element in it, you know."

One of Dorsey's earliest and most important gospel collaborators explained her approach to both forms and is quoted in Darden's history. "The gospel song is the Christian blues," Willie Mae Ford Smith Said in the 1930's. "I'm like the blues singer, when something's rubbing me the wrong way, I sing out of my soul to settle it down."

Dorsey, according to historians, was no less shy about his approach. "Everything is a show," he reportedly said. "You got to know how to do your show."

Eventually the power and popularity of the Dorsey songs made them canon in black churches, but the debate over secular influences in sacred music continues today.

"I was a kid when Edwin Hawkins came out with 'Oh Happy Day,'" Jabir said, referencing the funky 1967 arrangement of a 19th century hymn. "And there were people in my church who said 'oh no; no no no.'"

"It used to be just pianos and tambourine . It was almost sacrilegious to play electric instruments," Jones said, but over time the organ became a staple of service, and gradually more instruments were added. Still, the boundaries seem mysterious to Jones. "My mother told me that when she was coming up in Mississippi you could do your religious shouts and move a little, but you can't cross your feet, because that was dancing," he said.

Darden also quotes the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, a co-founder and former executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, poking fun at the thin line sometimes drawn in church.

"The same beat that black folks dance to on Saturday night is the same beat that they shout to on Sunday morning," Walker said. "If you hear the beat and do not know what the program is, watch the direction of the shout. It the shout is up and down, it's religious; if it's from side to side, it is probably secular," he said, according to Darden's 2004 book.

Other musicians with deep roots in Chicago's gospel history tell similar stories of rejection and acceptance, usually mediated by time.

"People have been saying that [new gospel music] is too secular forever," said Roxanne Stevenson, a life-long church musician who is now director of bands at Chicago State University. "When my dad played his music from Jubilee Showcase, the Swan Silvertones, Clyde Jeter ... and all those old guys, my grandfather thought those were the blues, too worldly," she said.

"So I decided that if my granddad thought that Dad's music, which I thought was old as dust, was too blues, then my music from the '70s, '80s, '90s must be OK. To me, if it's holy 30 years later, it was holy 30 years ago."

"I started playing piano at my mom's church," Stevenson said. "When I could finally make sense out of my saxophone, I brought my horn instead and the pastor, he didn't care. He just said let everything that has breath praise the Lord."

Stevenson said many of her friends were not so lucky and used to trade stories of being thrown out of church for playing their horns "with too much blues" in houses of worship.

Stevenson takes her mission seriously, whether she's playing at Trinity United Church of Christ, the mega-church on 95th Street where Barack Obama is a member, or at a secular club. "I like the ministry, the spirit, the heart of the matter," she said. "There are no real rules you have to follow. It doesn't have to be danceable like RB or swing like jazz. ... As long as the message is from the heart to the heart, and as long as the message is Jesus Christ, then it's still gospel music."

The director of Trinity's formidable music program, Robert E. Wooten Jr., says his No. 1 priority is church.

"Our music has a message," he said. "Gospel music signifies some kind of reverence. If it's speaking truth, biblical truth, then we can use it in worship. If it is just adornment, then it won't get too much movement."

Wooten Jr. leads one of the largest and most inclusive musical programs in the city, preparing 27 different pieces for the 10,000-member Trinity UCC each week and still serving as music minister at Beth Eden twice monthly. Although he still occasionally stops his young players from "practicing your jazz at the church unless you're planning to work gospel at your jazz gig," Wooten Jr. says gospel music is accepting. "If Thomas Dorsey could do [boogie-woogie] before doing 'Oh Precious Lord' and 'I'm on the Battlefield,' then certainly we can accept some of the things done by younger people now."

If the stretch of road Bobby Wooten travels between Beth Eden and Trinity connects gospel music's rich roots to its accessible modern sound, it also crosses paths with an ongoing debate about the sacred content of the celebrated form. As congregations age and gospel shares talent with the secular, more may be at stake than ever before.

Cultural critic Johari Jabir worries that commodification of gospel music - whether for recording contracts or to fill mega-churches - risks sapping the form of its swing, the powerful human connection that has defined it across many forms.

"Anytime you have a media-driven production in worship, that's going to be a different thing than when people depend on their bodies and will and talent. When you have cameras and big screens, it isn't as raw as handclapping and people just swinging it out," he said. "In the '20s and '30s, when gospel music emerges, black folks are still being lynched," he said. "Our music imitates these horrors and you can't just extract the hardships."

"I don't mean to diss or tell people what to play," he added. "I know that to grow, the music has to change. I know you're not going to build a mega-church on the Dorsey canon, but what kind of gospel is being repackaged to draw people?"

Without the draw of new people, however, the multitude of churches that define and retain the South Side's rich heritage in gospel music are threatened. Jabir offers no easy solution to the tension between commodified success and principled extinction.

At the same time, black churches continue to incubate and support skilled musicians. Like Thomas Dorsey, these musicians are influenced by and contribute to popular and gospel music.

This two-way street between the sacred and secular is not new, but its intersection with the divide between mega-churches and the raw gospel experience described by Jabir puts Chicago at a crossroads.

In fact, Chicago's gospel scene has become the prime training ground for young musicians, and an easy place to find talent. From BET's "Sunday's Best" to top touring acts, gospel musicians power popular music.

Makaya McCraven, a young percussionist who just moved to Chicago to pan its rich musical prospects, said gospel drummers are constantly picked up for tours and studio sessions.

"If they get you out of a gospel tradition, then they know you're going to be able to play the parts. If it takes a few times to hear the part [because you don't read music], it's still worth it, because they know you will really be able to hit it."

"You hear some of these young guys out there on the scene and they're just killing it, using strokes they developed in the church," McCraven said.

"And the church provides a place for practice when there might not be other spaces to go," he said. "Think about it - gospel musicians get a chance to play each week in church, plus rehearsals and other services. That's a lot of time to practice and develop!"

Jones said that churches also incubate talent that the industry might ignore, like kids too young to play in clubs. "And the church is not biased: If you're overweight, too skinny, too light, too dark, freckles, you can still play," Jones said. "The guys in the band might crack jokes on you, but you're not going to be kicked out of the choir."

But incubating talent does not guarantee musicians will devote themselves to the church, especially if they must find income elsewhere.

Robert Wooten Jr. said he has never had trouble finding musicians for Trinity, which pays its band. "Biblically, the Levites were always taken care of," he said. Some don't think musicians should be paid, he said, shaking his head. "Let me set the record straight, Trinity is not one of those churches. You can't expect a great music program and not be willing to invest in it."

Every first and third Sunday, Wooten Jr. spirits away from Trinity after the 7:30 a.m. service to drive 15 blocks south to Beth Eden. He leaves the massive modern sanctuary - built in 1995 - hundreds of musicians and thousands more congregants, to spend a few hours at the place he calls his "home church."

The older congregation gathered around his father cannot tithe as well as it once did, but the church still fills with the sound of the Dorsey songs and their predecessors. The emotional sound of keys, drums and bass is filled by tambourines and voices no less strong for being fewer.

"I don't care where anybody else comes from or what anybody else does," Chicago gospel great Albertina Walker said in 1990. "Chicago is the capital of gospel and always will be. This is where great talents come to learn, this is where the great singers live. Gospel music, you know, can't really be written down. You have to hear it and feel it, and you can do that best here in Chicago."

But if gospel traditions continue to stretch to accept mainstream popularity and new musical forms, it will be left to the Wootens of Chicago to maintain the continuity on the road. The survival of older gospel forms and the aging buildings and congregations for Chicago's great repositories of gospel music concern Northwestern's Jabir.

"We don't have any institutions devoted solely to black sacred music, and that's just not good," he said. "Churches are not often good as preservation because they're trying to bring in new people. We need to change that. We need museums and cultural institutions, and I think that's possible in Chicago," he said.

"Oh, I'm optimistic about the future of black-based music, gospel and blues," Jones said, with his eyes behind shades and a smoothly-tipped hat. "The rest of the world is mature and smart enough to appreciate the musical contributions that the African in America has made to the world: the power to move people with the style of music that we make, you know."

"Black music is coming out of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles," Jones said, "We all come from folks on the plantation who had to survive and they used music as a second language when we didn't even know the regular language here." That language will survive too, Jones said. "Gospel music, it'll move you."