Description
Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings throughout the Great Migration that brought it to Chicago. In time, the music grew into the sanctified soundtrack of the city’s mainline black Protestant churches. Along with drawing on print media and ephemera, Marovich mines hours of interviews with nearly fifty artists, ministers, and historians–in addition to discussions with relatives and friends of past gospel pioneers–to recuperate many forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines how a loss of economic opportunity bred an entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music’s upward thrust to popularity and opened a gate to social mobility for quite a few its practitioners. As Marovich shows, gospel music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life’s hardships. In any case, it proved to be a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.