An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 14 | THOMAS A. DORSEY AND GOSPEL MUSIC 337

If the iconic country-blues fi gure is the lone

bluesman who creates music with only his voice

and his guitar, at least two other important early

blues styles deserve mention here. One is the

piano style developed in the South and called

boogie woogie or sometimes barrelhouse,

after the rough taverns where it was developed.

Charles Edward “Cow Cow” Davenport and

Clarence “Pinetop” Smith, both born in Alabama

in the 1890s, played instrumental numbers and

accompanied their own singing and that of others

with a propulsive bass line in the left hand and

syncopated chords, melodic fi lls, and insistent

repeated octaves in the right hand. Smith’s

tune Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie was taken up by

Blues Piano and Jug Bands

A CLOSER LOOK

numerous pianists and jazz bands for decades

after Smith fi rst recorded it for Vocalion in 1928.

An important ensemble genre is the music of

jug bands, groups of various sizes that typically

mix string instruments such as guitar, banjo,

fi ddle, or mandolin with kazoo, washtub bass,

spoons, washboard, or other homemade or toy

instruments. The foundation of the ensemble is a

ceramic jug, which a skilled player can blow into

with buzzing lips to produce a sound similar to

the tuba. Vaudeville blues singers like Ma Rainey

sometimes worked with jug bands, and jug band

instrumentalists such as Big Bill Broonzy and

Tampa Red went on to have solo careers as singer-

guitarists.

Johnson’s success: his ability to shape the spontaneous fl ow of folk blues into a

compact artistic utterance that fi ts neatly on one side of a 78-rpm record.^

When the record producer and concert promoter John Hammond tried to

book Johnson for a concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1938, he learned that

the bluesman had died shortly before under mysterious circumstances. Never-

theless, the concert—a fund-raiser for the leftist journal New Masses that was called

“From Spirituals to Swing” and purported to illustrate the development of African

American music—featured Johnson as a ghostly presence. Two of his records, one

of them “Walking Blues,” were played for the respectful audience gathered in the

nation’s most prestigious concert hall. Only a few months after his death, the

posthumous elevation of Johnson’s recorded legacy had begun. As later chapters

chronicle, postwar developments in folk and rock music would demonstrate that

Robert Johnson was one of the most infl uential of all blues musicians.

THOMAS A. DORSEY AND GOSPEL MUSIC

Blues and black gospel music share a melodic and harmonic idiom, a rhyth-

mic approach, and a rootedness in traditional African American culture, but

their functions are entirely different. Blues is a secular music, tied to work and

entertainment; gospel is a sacred music, performed in worship. Blues speaks

for individuals, gospel for communities. W here blues states problems of human

existence, gospel solves them through Christian doctrine. Blues fi ts in many set-

tings; gospel belongs to the church.

Black gospel music exemplifi es the attitude of praise rather than edifi ca-

tion. The music seeks to glorify the Almighty by offering the best—the most

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