Tweet

Comments (0)

 1 of 5

It was the typical behind-the-scenes stuff of awards shows—a small security detail watching everyone's every move, journalists huddling near the media area, carping about limited access and hoping for a decent seat in the press rooms. Performers arrive, a marching band passes by outside.

There are so many elegant black folks here—men dressed beyond the nines, women in full-length fur, dropping names of designers (Girl, who is that dress? And those shoes?). And such careful coiffure—braided, locked, 'froed, lyed, dyed, and fried—that a newcomer might wonder if she's at a church convention or a fashion show. The answer, on both accounts, is yes.

But it's big business too. New artists will be introduced to a loyal audience; old ones will be rediscovered. Album sales will pick up. Hands will be shaken, cards exchanged, business deals done.

These are the Stellar Awards, the biggest night in gospel music. Held each January, the Stellars are part awards show, part church convention, and part big-time networking opportunity. It's a big celebration of the business of gospel music, and especially so this year, with the 20th anniversary of the awards show. Everybody got an overview of the profound and rapid mainstreaming of gospel music over the last two decades.

Once upon a time, most gospel music was sold at mom-and-pop record stores, at churches, at tables at the back of local concerts. A gospel fan heard his favorite artists on the radio, at local churches, and occasionally at concerts. A gospel artist might live on small freewill offerings split with host churches or benefit from big-money concerts in large urban cities. A few of the best-known artists—million-sellers like Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward—made good money, but primarily through a well-developed church-and-gospel-concert circuit.

Now, this industry-within-an-industry is a multi-million-dollar business. Gospel music has its own labels, its own cable networks, and its own A-list celebrities, managed by A-list businesspeople and reached only through their A-list publicists. A savvy businessperson can make a more-than-comfortable living in the delicately negotiated intersection of business and ministry.

Gospel music and the gospel sound are everywhere—movie soundtracks, mainstream award shows, commercials for aspirin and aftershave. It's thriving in countries like Japan, Germany, England, Ghana. More than jazz or the blues, it's the form of black American music that people—religious or not—connect to.

Contemporary gospel music as we know it is a relatively new phenomenon—younger than many baby boomers. Horace Clarence Boyer, one of the preeminent scholars of gospel music, identifies Edwin Hawkins' "Oh Happy Day"—a top-40 hit in 1969—as a major turning point for the genre in several ways.

"It moved black gospel from the black church and the black auditorium and Carnegie Hall into popular record stores and theaters and hip-hop joints," says Boyer, coauthor of How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel. The song's success yielded two divisions within gospel music—that designed for a church or concert setting, and that designed to appeal to popular tastes. The former tends to emphasize testimony over the musical style, while the latter reverses the two.

"Oh Happy Day" also paved the way for the aural fusion evident in much contemporary gospel. Says Boyer, "It borrowed so heavily from the popular musics of that day—rhythm and blues, jazz, and Latin music—that it began the major fusion of black gospel overtly with other popular musics."

next page... |  1 of 5