I had intended to discuss gospel music during Black History Month, but sometimes other issues prevailed. However, I wanted to continue with the other half of the story. Also, let’s discuss Black history year-round.
Thomas Andrew Dorsey (July 1, 1899 – Jan. 23, 1993) is known as the “Father of Gospel Music.” He often said he just put [blues] music to the hymns of Rev. C.A. Tindley.
To distinguish their contributions, I call Tindley the originator of the “gospel hymn” and Dorsey the developer of the “gospel song.” Dorsey’s gospel songs had a different musical style as he based them on the blues.
Dorsey was the son of an Atlanta Baptist College-trained minister and a musician mother. But he chose another direction and played secular music as a youth, mainly on the rent-party circuit and Atlanta’s red-light district, learning from the blues musicians there. Seeking advancement in his musical career, Dorsey moved to Chicago and, in 1919, attended the School of Composition and Arranging.
In the 1920s, as “Georgia Tom,” he toured with Ma Rainey and his own bands. Before film or audio recordings, audiences across the South attended traveling tent shows for entertainment. Under these tents, female performers like Gertrude “Ma” Rainey helped invent and popularize a new type of music: the blues. Ma Rainey admitted that she had heard a Black woman sing this new music and asked what it was. The answer was “blues.” Adopting this music, Ma Rainey became the first person to sing and record the blues in the North.
As Ma Rainey became more popular, so did Dorsey, who wrote and sang blues music. Over the next few years, Dorsey made a name for himself by writing and recording blues tunes, one of which reputedly sold over seven million copies.
Ma Rainey enjoyed enormous popularity touring with a hectic schedule, but beginning in 1926, Dorsey was plagued by two years of deep depression, even contemplating suicide. He experienced a spiritual re-invigoration of sorts in 1928. After that, he vowed to concentrate all his efforts on gospel music. After the death of a close friend, Dorsey was inspired to write his first religious song with a blues influence, “If You See My Savior, Tell Him That You Saw Me.”
Many churches spurned Dorsey’s gospel blues music as profane, but it eventually caught on as Dorsey was invited to form a gospel chorus at Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Chicago.
Dorsey’s musical partners urged him to organize a convention where musicians could learn gospel blues. In 1932, however, just as Dorsey co-founded the Gospel Choral Union of Chicago—eventually renamed the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses—his wife Nettie died in childbirth, and 24 hours later, their son died. His grief prompted him to write one of his most famous and enduring compositions, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”
Now at the center of gospel music activity in Chicago, Dorsey countered his grief by immersing himself in marketing his songs. An unintended consequence of his sales strategy helped spread gospel blues, as he worked with numerous musicians who assisted in selling his sheet music, traveling to churches in and around Chicago and beyond the area.
To sell his sheet music, Dorsey used great soloists to demonstrate, starting in 1932 with Willie Mae Ford Smith from St. Louis, whom he made director of his soloists’ bureau, and continuing with Mahalia Jackson, whom Dorsey had begun teaching his songs to when she was 17.
Dorsey copyrighted and published over 400 songs, the most famous of which are “Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley.” Country Music Hall of Fame star Red Foley’s version of “Peace in the Valley” in 1951 was among the first million-selling gospel records.
Other classic songs by Dorsey include “Old Ship of Zion,” “The Lord Will Make a Way Somehow,” “It’s a Highway to Heaven,” “I Don’t Know Why,” “If You See My Savior,” and “Search Me Lord.”
Dorsey was the acknowledged leader of the gospel movement of the early 20th century; most protestant hymnals include some of his songs.