You’re unlikely to find CDs by the Temptations, Bob Marley, or Dianne Reeves in the gospel section of your record store alongside those by Mahalia Jackson, the Swan Silvertones, and God’s Property, but you should. Because all of them—along with countless other artists from Curtis Mayfield and Gladys Knight to Aretha Franklin and Earth, Wind & Fire—share a profound sense of the “gospel impulse”: the belief that life’s burdens can be transformed into hope, salvation, the promise of redemption.
At its best, the gospel impulse helps people experience themselves in relation to rather than on their own. Gospel makes the feeling of human separateness, which is what the blues are all about, bearable. It’s why DJs and the dancers they shape into momentary communities are telling the truth when they describe dance as a religious experience.
I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to “rock,” Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, “the Word”—when the church and I were one.
—James Baldwin
The gospel impulse half-remembers the values brought to the new world by the men and women uprooted from West African cultures: the connection between the spiritual and material worlds; the interdependence of self and community; the honoring of the elders and the ancestors; the recognition of the ever-changing flow of experience that renders all absolute ideologies meaningless. Scholars have traced the spiritual vision of African American culture from Africa through the Caribbean and American South to the dance floors of house clubs in Chicago. But there’s no question that the gospel impulse found its strongest American voice in the gospel churches, mostly poor and almost entirely black. In church, blacks were unlikely to encounter the prying eyes of potentially hostile whites. Here they could drop the mask. Of course the real people in the gospel churches had to deal with the same problems of hypocrisy, greed, and envy as their brothers and sisters out on the block. But even in its inevitable encounters with human frailty, the gospel impulse keeps alive a vision of spiritual community that echoes throughout the music of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, Bruce Springsteen and A Tribe Called Quest.
Gospel songs are the songs of hope. When you sing them you are delivered of your burden. You have a feeling that there is a cure for what’s wrong. It always gives me joy to sing gospel songs. I get to singing and I feel better right away. When you get through with the blues, you’ve got nothing to rest on. I tell people that the person who sings only the blues is like someone in a deep pit yelling for help, and I’m simply not in that position.
—Mahalia Jackson
The gospel impulse consists of a three-step process: (1) acknowledging the burden; (2) bearing witness; (3) finding redemption. The burden grounds the song in the history of suffering that links individual and community experiences. Black folks, like all human beings who let themselves know and feel it, have their crosses to bear. Less likely than whites to subscribe to the facile optimism of America’s civic ideology, most blacks maintain an awareness of limitation, of the harsh reality that the man goin’ round takin’ names doesn’t much care whether you’ve done your best to live in the light of the Lord. We don’t choose our burdens; we do choose