9/23/2011

The Wonderful World Of Gospel Music

By Grace Edwards


For nearly all clients, the thought of gospel music invokes mental images of exuberant performances by large choirs during lengthy church services. Believe it or not, however, a time once existed when these renditions hardly ever occurred in a church. Vastly few clients realize that the genesis, history, and origins of this musical genre didn't merely begin a whole new generation of song. Essentially, its creation spawned the entire contemporary culture of African Americans.

Gospel music's origins can be found in Africa. While the tribal songs of Africa may seem distant in sound to contemporary gospel, African slaves brought with them a close relationship with spiritualized music.

Despite the music being banned as a means of preventing slaves from communicating with every single other, the slaves continued to play their music or even developed a new sound. They sung about Christian themes and combined the existing Western style of instruments and harmony with their own traditional styles. This was the birth of gospel music as we know it today.

Slavery was widespread in the South and this percentage of the country is where the new music first originated. The doctrine of master and slave was further reinforced by having slaves forced to attend religious services. Eventually, the church became a sort of escape for the slaves and helped them through difficult times; a wonderful deal of them continued to embrace religion after slavery was abolished.

Before much longer, African Americans began their own brand of distinctive musical culture within the relative safety of church confines. Slave converts to Christianity began adopting the naturally sedate, somber music of Methodist hymns. They soon started to interweave their extraordinary native variations into the reverent strains. Indeed, many popular contemporary gospel song formats that continue to be colossal musical forces in contemporary African American religious culture are traceable back to native African tribal music. Two notable examples are the "call and response" structure and the use of complicated rhythmic percussion as a musical accompaniment. Gospel music really began completing off in North America during the late 19th century.

During the late 18th century, slaves were allowed to perform in front of the public in large venues, and this led to the new style of music becoming well-liked in the North American territories. A whole lot white people found that they truly liked the music and it was not long before the new musical style began to influence not only religious music, but well-liked music too.

Many of the even more all the rage, recent music celebrities like Sam Cooke, Elvis, Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson, and Jerry Lee Lewis have publicly attributed their phenomenal entertainment success to a personal background in which gospel music and its fascinating origins and history featured prominently. Of all the above parties, Mahalia Jackson is the only one who has carved an entire occupation exclusively from the gospel music backdrop. Although the other performers mentioned above didn't derive their musical success solely from gospel music, they experienced phenomenal secular musical success via gospel music crossover productions.




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