In A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music, Robert M. Marovich offers a discerning look at the role of this city in the genre’s development. Along the way, he offers rich detail concerning the lives of musicians such as Arizona Dranes, Charles Henry Pace, Thomas Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, Rosetta Tharpe, the Caravans, Rev. James Cleveland, and several pastors, including Rev. Clay Evans of Fellowship Baptist Church and Rev. Milton Brunson of the Thompson Community Choir, who doubled as recording artists. This book has five central arguments. First, Marovich argues that gospel music developed as a way for migrants to construct their own identities in their newfound homelands. He contends that, notwithstanding the socioeconomic distinctions that helped to categorize black religious practices, gospel music was not strictly separated by denominational boundaries. He proposes that these cultural rituals of belief were drawn into commercial processes through an entrepreneurial urge necessitated by the dearth of jobs available for the swelling black population. Marovich then shows how the genre evolved through the continuing innovations of successive generations. Finally, he identifies a set of pivotal events in the genre’s formation.
Early in the book, the author writes that his central thesis is that “gospel music was an artistic response to the Great Migration” (2). This argument is one of the book’s greatest strengths, for by using the Great Migration as an interpretive lens, Marovich is able to examine a particularly broad range of sociological phenomena at work during this period, condensed into a racially specific historical experience. And this is very much a book about Chicago. In fact, Marovich’s magisterial command of the city’s geography, demographics, and socio-religious contours makes this book something like a history of African American life in Chicago in the early and mid-twentieth century. As such, A City Called Heaven joins with Wallace Best’s Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 and Adam Green’s Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 in placing Chicago and its archives at the center of our theoretical paradigms of black music. Moreover, this study’s perceptive focus on gospel in Chicago joins the scholarly conversation on gospel which has been enriched in recent years by Robert Darden’s People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music, Jerma Jackson’s Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music and a Secular Age, and Guthrie Ramsey’s Race Music: Black Music Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop.
Although he argues that gospel’s “birthplace is Chicago,” Marovich notes that “there was no instantaneous musical fission, no big bang that brought gospel into being” (7). Thus he argues that “gospel was a steady, incremental work in progress from the 1920s onward, starting with the Pentecostal and Holiness churches and spreading into mainline Protestant churches during the 1930s.” Making this argument, the author offers a deep look at the complexities of African American religious practice in Chicago during the period in question. He compares “The Old Landmarks,” the established churches that converted musical and homiletical excellence into political power, to the many storefront houses of ecstatic expression—sanctuaries the historian Wallace Best has called “islands of southern culture.” Marovich’s discussion of the rising Pentecostal movement allows him to trace pivotal religious figures along their own migrations, connecting the southern roots and birth of COGIC pioneers Bishop William Roberts and Elder Eleazar Lenox to the brand of religious practice they brought with them to Chicago. Along the way, readers gain insight into other aspects of that moment’s African American religious milieu, including the National Baptist Convention, the formation of National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses (NCGCC); Kenneth Morris’s role in introducing the Hammond organ to gospel music; the success of recording preachers like Rev. William Arthur White and Rev. Ford Washington McGee; and the importance of radio broadcasts begun by churches like Elder Lucy Smith’s All Nations Pentecostal Church and Rev. Clarence H. Cobbs’ First Church of Deliverance. All of this contributes to a conceptualization of gospel music as the soundtrack of African American religious experience.
As he accounts for the musical and cultural antecedents of gospel music, Marovich discusses revival music, lined hymnody, and the music of the invisible institution, as a means to connect the topic of his study to the West African origins of many aspects of black expressive culture. Here the study could have benefited from a deeper engagement with some of the sociological literature, especially studies of culture and ritual. For example, the author’s detailed discussion of the syncretism that is so fundamental to gospel performance could be aided by approaching the genre using practice theory to study the relationships between individual artists and groups to their cultural milieu. Discursive moves like this would have added more depth to the rich insights Marovich already gleans from recordings, interviews, and periodicals. These primary sources are paramount, since, as the author’s opening vignette about the destruction of Pilgrim Baptist Church and many of Rev. Thomas Dorsey’s records in a 2006 fire demonstrates, many of these resources are vulnerable to the exigencies of time. And for recovering rich insight from these sources, Marovich deserves great praise for this timely study.
A City Called Heaven consists of 329 pages of text, 24 pages of photographs, and two appendices. It is an impressive achievement, and is most worthy of a detailed reading.
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[Review length: 889 words • Review posted on October 27, 2015]