In Sunday's early edition of The Chicago Tribune, there's a very good story by Howard Reich, the Trib's arts critic, on the burning of Pilgrim Baptist Church in the historic Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. It was at Pilgrim Baptist that Thomas A. Dorsey was music director, and it was there that black gospel music got its start. Reich says the church was "sacred space" in more ways than one:
Cultural tourists from several continents routinely made pilgrimages to Pilgrim Baptist, to behold the place where a rousing, life-affirming music first came into its own. Celebrated in feature films such as 'The Blues Brothers' and in documentaries such as 'Say Amen, Somebody,' gospel has been as deeply stitched into the fabric of the South Side as jazz and blues, if not more so.
For though the origins of jazz can be traced to 19th Century New Orleans, and though scholars believe that elements of blues have echoed through African music since antiquity, one man and one church are widely considered the progenitors of modern gospel music.
That man, of course, was Dorsey. Best known as the author of "Precious Lord Take My Hand," his gift was to change black religious music from spirituals to gospel. He started his career as a blues player named "Georgia Tom," backing Ma Rainey, among others. But in the 1920s he turned to the church. He once told the Trib:
"Before that, they would sing 'Spiri-tu-al-fellow-ship-of-the-Jor-dan land.' Jubilee songs. Wasn't nothing to them.
"But then I turned those blues moans on, modified some of the stuff from way back in the jazz era, bashed it up and smoothed it in. It had that beat, that rhythm. And people were wild about it."
The fire was Friday afternoon, and authorities say the building is a total loss. It is a historic loss for Chicago, as well as for America's musical heritage, and the story in Sunday's Trib captures that sense of history.
Source: Howard Reich. "History Burns With Church." Chicago Tribune, online ed. 7 Jan. 2006.
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