Various Artists
Wade In The Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions
(1996)
Reviewed by Jamie Lee Rake
This is deep stuff. Spend a few hours listening to Wade In The Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions and reading its copious liner notes, and you'll have the equivalent to an undergrad collegiate course of the title's description. That is, apart from black gospel's latter-day avenues into hip-hop, jazz, R&B, and funk of varying potency.
Compiler Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of acclaimed African diaporan a capella folkie ladies Sweet Honey in the Rock, keeps her academic perspective high enough in the liner notes to nearly exclude discussion of the commercial considerations of gospel in its evolution from field hollers and coded songs of slaves' freedom to the stage and the stereo. Reagon's liners are good at shining light on gospel's social and artistic functions, however, and provide the reader/listener with a useful chronology of historical anecdotes.
The first disc recounts the earliest concert tradition of gospel. Four concert ensembles and soloist Kehembe Eichelberger are heard reprising 19 of the first spirituals to receive the light, tight, dryly soulful, classical-styled interpretations that made them favorites of the serious concert stage. This was before gospel music proper, when such singing went by the name of jubilee. Notably, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, from Nashville's Fisk University where this style of spiritual interpretation took root, are among the ensembles featured. The Florida A&M Concert Choir, The Princely Players and The Howard University Chamber Choir also deserve their propers, as does Eichlinger for her take on "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child." No surprise that the suggested discography includes titles from heavyweights like Paul Robeson, Kathleen Battle, Marion Anderson, and Jessye Norman.
Disc two essays rougher hewn holdovers of gospel's folk roots. Lots of clapping and added percussion combined with call-and-response singing and deep, chockblock rhythms foretell current quartet styles as much as the clicking cadences of "steppin'" choreography among many black fraternity brothers. Also captured are the measured temperance of early lined hymn singing and shape-note singing that parallels similar developments in southern gospel. If the first disc was more overtly European classical in feel, this is more African and folky. We're digging on the late Rev. C.J. Johnson's guttural baritone, the clompity stompin' of The Macintosh County Shouters, slightly smoother sounds from The Richard Allen Singers and The Blue Springs Missionary Baptist Association, Southwest Georgia. But give it up for The Seniolites and The United Southern Prayer Band of Baltimore, Washington, and Virginia, too (if you're not out of breath from saying the other long names there).
Third stop: The Pioneering Composers. Reagon is right on history's money when she cites Thomas Dorsey, Rev. William Brewster, Roberta Martin, Charles Tindley, Kenneth Morris, and Lucie Eddie Campbell as the groundbreaking composers from black sacred music's transition from jubilee to gospel. Here's where newbies to Sweet Honey can get a taste, as well as tuneage from Reagon's daughter Toshi, Gloria Griffin and one of the few gospel market recording acts featured here, Donald Vails and the Celebration Delegation, among others. Those familiar with Sweet Honey's political and (we're guessing) theological liberalism may perceive the Reagons and their Honeyed sisters to not be "feelin' it" in the manner of, say, Shirley Ceaser or Dottie People; but they all got soul when their agendas aren't obfuscating it, and it comes through here.
Finally, African American Community Gospel. Here's where documentarian Reagon (this music was all captured for a National Public Radio series) comes closest to capturing aspects of current commercial traditional (more or less) gospel-its quartets, choirs and congregations. With a few tweaks, it could be on upcoming Malaco/Savoy or Atlanta International releases and up for Stellar Awards in the traditional categories.
Overall, however, this isn't for the pop gospel disciples for whom Kirk Franklin, Yolanda Adams, Fred Hammond, John P. Kee, and Hezekiah Walker are as close to the musical/spiritual bone as they want to go. (We like all the above, but a body wants the aroma of antiquity to balance the hippest and happenin'est flava; know what I'm sayin'?). Students and anyone wanting a gospel challenge will want to get wet with the various shades of beauty and passion of Wade In The Water.
