Christian militancy paid off the last week in September when a “gospel” night club on Times Square buckled under the pressure of nearly three months of nightly picketing by some Harlem churchgoers.
The club, the “Sweet Chariot,” was the first devoted solely to commercializing gospel music. Its waitress “angels” came complete with wired halos, toy wings—and mesh tights. Other items from its lexicon: doorman—“Deacon,” headwaitress—“Archangel,” drink list—“Soul Stirrers,” gin—“Deacon’s Punch,” white table wine—“Satan’s Temptation.” Other finishing touches: choir gowns for performers, rest rooms labeled “Brothers” and “Sisters,” and a stage covered by a tent-meeting canvas.
Head charioteer Joe Scandore removed these gospel gimmicks during a Labor Day break. “I wasn’t aware they would offend anyone,” he explained. But the music-and-liquor brew alone was enough to propel the picketers until he agreed never again to program a religious song.
Show business has long believed the Gospel can be good news, financially, but some of the recent injections of Christian words and music into the secular world have been in remarkably bad taste.
At Atlantic City’s Club Harlem this past summer, those tired of treading the Boardwalk could enjoy—on the same bill—the Welcome Travelers Gospel Singers and an undraped group called the Modern Harlem Girls. Reported Variety, “With chests nearly exposed … [they] bring a bit of Vegas into old Harlem as they parade in beautiful, but abbreviated, costumes.”
Night-club owners aren’t the only prospectors in the gospel gold mine. Any Christian can get such inspiration in the comfort of his own home at the flick of a TV knob, since these acts are becoming a staple for variety and folk music shows. Variety reports 100 hours of gospel quartet singing a week on American TV; a survey by the swinging Blackwood Brothers shows use of religious music (of all types) up 70 per cent in a decade. Gospel records are big business.
But the next protest won’t be at Columbia or RCA; it will probably be in Greenwich Village. In the eighth week of its “Eighth Wonder,” the following scene unfolded:
In the usual bistro dimness, an orangey spotlight focused on a cramped platform, separated from the bar by two rows of tiny tables. A gum-chewing house drummer frowned through his “shades” and worked into a bump-and-grind beat, using all the resources of his four tom-toms. The singers in front of him flashed smiles and the incongruous words throbbed:
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.…”
Equally chained to rocking rhythm but somehow avoiding the twist motions that match it so well, the “Calvin White Singers” confronted “Wonder” tipplers with some original numbers as well as well-known spirituals and sacred pop tunes like “Somebody Bigger Than You and I.”
One of their more flamboyant things—a closer for the act—was based on the motif, “They won’t believe, not now.” After they had built up enough steam the singers marched around the club, pointing their fingers at the patrons, and decided that nobody believed. The unbelievers were laughing.
Most gospel performers are Negroes and most started out in churches—often for profit—before they were herded to greener pastures. In a crowded dressing room after their “unbelievers” bit, the Calvin White group turned out to fit this pattern. These two women and three men are regular churchgoers. Some of their ministers are behind the experiment, and church friends have come to the Wonder to see them.
As White analyzed his audience, “People who’ve never heard it before think it’s a show. The others get something out of it. For those who aren’t familiar with it, the beat fascinates them and keeps them there.… The whites are trying to find out what it’s all about.”
Many performers rationalize their commercial forays as evangelism in statements to the press: doesn’t the Church teach that the words of the Gospel should be taken everywhere?
Standing virtually alone is Mahalia Jackson, generally considered the top gospel singer, who lays the night-club trend at the feet of “greedy, blasphemous church folk who are getting rich the wrong way. [The Gospel is] not here to entertain people, it’s here to save people.” However, she saw nothing wrong with performing at the Newport Jazz Festival.
“Chariot” owner Scandore said that “we were doing fantastically well” before the picketing. Now he’s been forced to shelve plans to expand to other major cities. The spread of gospel clubs will also be discouraged by the Progressive National Baptists, whose September convention in Detroit vowed that any more clubs will be met with a New York-style protest.
“Thank God we don’t live in a theocracy,” Scandore grumbled.
The Wonder’s manager is Reena Schavone, 27, blonde, and pretty. “We’re doing very well,” she shouted (over the shouting onstage), and she expected a steady gospel market in the future. As yet untouched by picketing, she could afford to be casual about the religious aspect:
“These songs are really Tin Pan Alley. They don’t have any church origin. I don’t see anything wrong with it: the music brings in the people and the average man really enjoys it.”
Clergy support for performers comes from those agreed that the music is basically commercial. Club apologists detest high-priced concerts and “battles of song” booked regularly into local churches as well as major amphitheaters. And they don’t think the swinging, gymnastic gospel groups are very religious, in church or out.
In Negro churches there is a growing feeling that old-style gospel music might better be left to die a natural death in show business. The realists, however, know it will be strong for a long time to come. Dr. Henry A. Hildebrand, a Methodist and anti-club spokesman for Atlantic City churches, said, “The gospel song still has religious content for a vast number of people with limited education and cultural development, not able to appreciate the great anthems. It’s nearer to their way of life.”
The chatty informality of the pop gospel is a natural, though unsophisticated, result of emphasis on a personal God. White gospel artists, also reflecting this approach and using pop music techniques, sold over 100,000 records last year. A Presbyterian minister who called this sort of material “maudlin” and “sentimental,” the Rev. Eugene Callender of New York, put it on a higher plane than the night-club gospel, but because of the performers’ choice of places to sing, not musical qualities.
It would seem a lot simpler just to leave the Christians to sing Christian songs, but show business is out for money. It sees gospel as just another type of folk music, which is popular. And there is nothing but the words to distinguish gospel from rock ‘n’ roll, whose strong, square beat continues to charm juveniles of all ages.
On the other hand, club owner Scandore can’t understand the Christians: “The ministers are a hundred years too late if they want to keep it in the churches,” he maintains. True, Christian touches have long been in the performer’s bag of tricks, especially the musician’s. In the case of instrumental music—and gospel’s influence on jazz is daily becoming more marked—few people are irked.
But when singers give little evidence of believing their own words, the result can be distasteful. If they are humorous, mocking, or otherwise lacking in taste, indignation soars.
Scandore had another complaint: “What bugs me most is that the public doesn’t understand the issue. If they really knew what this was about they’d cross the picket lines. They think it’s about discrimination or something.”
To the picketers, however, civil rights was a large part of it. Many protesters were also heavily involved in anti-bias groups. The two Baptist leaders, Dr. C. S. Stamps and Dr. Thomas Kilgore, Jr., are involved in the rights movement. Kilgore, New York head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said, “They’re stupid fools to pick out just one group for this treatment—it’s sheer discrimination. They’re laughing at the Negro, and Negro performers are pulled right in.”
To Atlantic City’s Hildebrand, “The gospel songs and spirituals have come to us out of the travail and suffering of a people who employed them as an escape from the despair of slavery. It is most unfortunate that those who use the songs don’t understand the background and history giving rise to them. They weren’t amusing or cute when they originated.”
Lutherans On The March
The style of John Philip Sousa is infecting Lutheran music, says the Rev. Charles R. Anders. “The bugbear used to be chronic ‘dragitis,’ ” he told a symposium on worship in Denver; “now it is ‘speedomania.’ ” Anders, an associate director of the Commission on Worship of the Lutheran Church in America, cited a ‘critical need” to restudy musical settings in the Lutheran Service Book and Hymnal.
The Top Five
Popular demand for the old favorites in sacred songs shows no sign of tapering off, according to a survey of religious recordings made by CHRISTIANITY TODAY. These tunes, the study showed, appear most often on currently available discs:
“In the Garden”
“The Lord’s Prayer”
“What a Friend We Have in Jesus”
“How Great Thou Art”
“Just a Closer Walk with Thee”
Sacred artists with the most albums:
George Beverly Shea
Ralph Carmichael
Mahalia Jackson
Mormon Tabernacle Choir
Blackwood Brothers
Latest innovation: an album of hymns sung by the San Quentin Prison choir.
