Word: gospels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Billy Kyles muses as he recalls the colleagues surrounding King that fatal evening in Memphis, Tenn. They were vivid, vigorous, virile young men. In his last hour alive, King and his friends had a pillow fight in his motel room. History records that his last thoughts encompassed gospel music, neckties, soul food and the high price of righteousness. "I'd rather be dead than afraid," this threat-haunted man explained to his friends that...
...form of comic melodrama depends on creating emotional extremes, acute cartoons of recognizable behavior, people who hurt and get hurt. Public humiliation is the penance his stage characters must endure before they are absolved in a final embrace and bring the curtain down with a full-throated gospel song...
...everyone in the Soweto Gospel Choir, success and struggle have been inseparable. In 2002, a concert promoter asked Johannesburg-based events producer Beverly Bryer to put together a South African choir to fill in for a Welsh one that had pulled out of a tour of Australia and New Zealand. She called Mulovhedzi, who ran a choir she often booked. Within a month, they auditioned hundreds of singers from Soweto, picked 32 and recorded an album to accompany the tour. It topped the Billboard world-music chart in a matter of days. Then came sold-out tours...
...story of the Soweto Gospel Choir is not just one of musical excellence. It is also a tale of the reinvention of a township once known as a hotbed of rebellion, then as a cauldron of crime, and now emerging as the muscle that drives Africa's biggest economy. At the start of the 20th century, Soweto was a collection of shanty towns on the outskirts of Johannesburg where the British colonial authorities housed the black and colored laborers working the city's gold mines. The apartheid regime formalized this divide, allowing blacks and coloreds into the city...
Under apartheid, large gatherings were forbidden. Church became the only place where blacks and coloreds could meet in numbers. Gospel music, with its themes of hope, strength and redemption, became their only legal form of protest and their only means of escape. "We sang to keep going," says Lucas Bok, the choir's musical director. "Singing was the only way to express yourself." That need spurred the creation of hundreds of gospel choirs in Soweto - the massive talent pool from which Mulovhedzi drew his recruits...