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88 Black Sacred Music Michael W. Harris. The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xxiii, When blues singer Son House crooned on "Preachin' the Blues," "I swear to God, I got to preach these gospel blues," he was not referring to the same "gospel blues" as Michael Harris in his book The Rise of Gospel Blues . Harris is writing about the gospel created by Thomas A. Dorsey, music traditionally viewed as the religious antithesis of the blues. To Harris, however, gospel is "sacred blues," just as to James Cone the blues are "secular spirituals ." Harris's joining of the terms "gospel" and "blues" is akin to Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Son House, and Big Bill Broonzy combining the terms "preaching" and "blues" in the songs that each of them called "Preaching the Blues." In both instances, the synthesis ex presses the sacred-secular dialectic, the theological tension, that characterized the lives of these great musicians. In fact, Harris care fully portrays Dorsey as the personification of the tension between the assimilationist and indigenous African American traditions . This "double consciousness," as DuBois would say,
Black Sacred Music – Duke University Press
Published: Mar 1, 1993
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