The music
From spirituals to gospel
Where gospel comes from: the spirituals of enslaved people, the Black church, Thomas Dorsey and what those roots sound like in a Harlem concert.
Reserve your Harlem gospel seat ↗Spirituals came first
Spirituals are Christian songs associated with African Americans. They blended African musical traditions with Christian hymns and emerged under slavery in the American South. Before emancipation they were passed on by ear rather than written down, and the first published collection, Slave Songs of the United States, appeared in 1867. The songs became a way to hold on to hope and identity under oppression, and they are the older layer beneath the gospel you hear in a Harlem church today. Many are still sung in concerts and churches.
Worship out of sight
Enslaved people often met in secret gatherings known as hush harbors, away from the eyes of overseers. Out of those meetings grew what are sometimes called invisible churches, which let people worship freely. Spirituals flourished there. The first independent Black congregations followed in the 1790s, and in 1816 Richard Allen and other congregations formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church, described as the first fully independent Black denomination. Black churches became the setting in which this music was kept and developed.
Call and response
Much of this music is built on call and response. A lead singer improvises a line or a verse, and the others answer with a refrain. The pattern is one of the African elements that shaped spirituals, and field hollers are seen as a precursor. When a gospel ensemble sings a phrase and the room answers, that is the same structure at work, carried from the earliest spirituals into the present.
Songs you may know
Some spirituals are familiar even to people who have never been to a gospel concert. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Steal Away, Go Down Moses and Wade in the Water are among the best-known titles. A concert programme is chosen by the music director, so none of them is promised in any given hour. Listening to a few beforehand means a refrain may already be familiar when the singers reach it, which makes joining in easier.
The Jubilee Singers
In 1871 a touring a cappella choir of students from Fisk University in Nashville began to carry spirituals to audiences far beyond the South. The Fisk Jubilee Singers were active from 1871 to 1878 and toured Europe in 1873, and they are credited with popularising spirituals for wider and international audiences. Their concerts helped turn songs that had been sung in private worship into a repertoire that could be performed on a stage, which is part of the background to any concert of spirituals today.
Gospel takes shape
Gospel grew out of the Black church and became a distinct commercial genre. Horace Clarence Boyer traced it as a discrete style to Pentecostal churches in the Deep South around 1906. The Great Migration then carried it north, and the years from 1945 to 1955 are called the Golden Age of Gospel. Early gospel singing was often unaccompanied, with hand-clapping and foot-stomping as the rhythm, which explains why clapping is so much part of the sound.
Dorsey, Jackson and the 1930s
In Chicago in the 1930s, Thomas A. Dorsey turned to gospel and set up a publishing house. The year 1930 is often cited as the start of traditional Black gospel, because the National Baptist Convention publicly endorsed the music that year. Dorsey developed the careers of many artists, among them Mahalia Jackson, best known for Precious Lord, Take My Hand and often called the Queen of Gospel. Gospel as most people now know it took shape in that decade.
What to listen for in Harlem
A Wednesday concert in Harlem includes gospel and spirituals, so you can hear both layers in one hour: the older songs and the later, more driving gospel. The music director chooses the programme, so no one can promise a set list. What you can listen for is the structure: a lead voice, an answering ensemble, the clap that keeps time and, as guests describe it, an invitation for the room to join in.
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