Word: gospelers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Nobody has more vividly evoked the kind of supercharged evangelist-gospel atmosphere of Aretha Franklin's childhood than Black Novelist James Baldwin (a onetime Harlem storefront preacher). In his 1963 book, The Fire Next Time, he wrote...
Most important, once Charles broke the barrier between gospel and blues, the way was open for a whole cluster of ingredients to converge around an R & B core and form the potent, musical mix now known as soul?among them, in Critic Albert Goldman's words, "a racial ragbag of Delta blues, hillbilly strumming, gutbucket jazz, boogie-woogie piano, pop lyricism and storefront shouting...
...started outstripping their white imitators. Charles was the first to reach a mass white public, starting as far back as 1955 with his hit record, I Got a Woman. In more recent years, a string of others have come along behind him. Lou Rawls, for example, is a former gospel trouper who spices his blues songs with reminiscences of his boyhood in Chicago's South Side slums. He used to work only in the Negro nightclub "chitlin circuit." As for radio, Rawls says, "I never got played on the top 40 stations because they said I was too, uh?well...
...other hand, some soul singers are so deeply imbued with the enduring streams of blues and gospel, so consumed by those primal currents of racial experience and emotion, that they could never be anything but soulful. Aretha Franklin is one of them. No matter what she sings, Aretha will never go white, and that certainty is as gratifying to her white fans as to her Negro ones...
...decided to sing the gospel song Precious Lord. The words, as the congregation knew them, were straightforward and simple...