Word: gospels
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Yeah! Since gospel music is the root of rhythm-and-blues and "soul jazz," the discovery turned out to be embarrassingly obvious-like eating the hen after stealing all the eggs...
...Gospel music may have seemed a surprise a half-block from Broadway, but Pentecostal churchgoers and sinners "out in radioland" have been hearing it for years, sung with devotion by such groups as the Clara Ward Singers, the Stars of Faith and the Mighty Clouds of Joy. Recently, its spirit and style and shouts of "Yeah!" (but rarely the rest of the lyrics) have crept into popular music, but only Mahalia Jackson has been popularly successful with the pure version. A couple of years ago, Brother John Sellers and the Grandison Singers became the first to sing gospel in nightclubs...
...Gospel's move into nightclubs (where Negroes call it "ofay gospel") does not necessarily corrupt either singers or songs. But its adoption by the popular-record industry gives good reason for melancholy. To succeed with the predominantly teen-age audience, it will be hyped up and sanitized to the point of becoming grotesque. At the Sweet Chariot (where the rest rooms are labeled "Brothers" and "Sisters" and the bar girls are called "Angels"), two of the groups have already had their names changed by Columbia, and no doubt they will soon begin to sing arrangements of their music that...
Having spent so long on the back streets, gospel singers greet the establishment's new enthusiasm with a doubting, puzzled Wha? Many of them have been working as rhythm-and-blues singers, and now they can be in the new groove merely by singing the remembered songs of their childhood choir-loft days. But even with all the corporate delight at the new groove's financial prospects, the cheerful, sensate piety of the music had already begun to sound like its own requiem by the end of the first week of official enthusiasm. Gospel music is the last...
...reaction to What's Going On Here? was so positive that Metropolitan Broadcasting's President Bennet Korn intends to keep it on the air. A danger is that viewers, accustomed to soaking up all the bottled pap that TV offers without thinking, may soon be taking for gospel such flawless modern history as this: "Premier Souvanna Diem came to power in 1958 when his halfbrother, Prince Song Phoami, was assassinated by his uncle, Prince Phim Dim, who mistook him for his son, Prince Stant Phoami...