Juneteenth Reader: From spirituals to "the gospel beat" with Arizona Dranes

An excerpt from my 2020 book "Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music"

Painting by Tim Kerr from “Ghost Notes” (TCU Press)

Updated ancient Protestant hymns- from “Amazing Grace” to “Oh Happy Day,” a 1969 pop hit for the Edwin Hawkins Singers, make up much of the contemporary gospel songbook, but there’s no way to overstate the influence of African American compositions of the 1800s. Enslaved people would hear stories of the Bible, but being forbidden to read, they would remember them by making work songs that we now call spirituals. While they couldn’t sing openly about their own desire to be free, the original African-Americans could rejoice in the story of Exodus, when the children of Israel yearned to be liberated from bondage. When the human chattel sang “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land/ Tell old Pharaoh to let my people go,” they did so with a vigor that suggests deep personal connection. Heavenly salvation and earthly freedom became intertwined. In the time of the Second Great Awakening (around 1790-1840) many slaves were converted to Christianity with the promise that great rewards awaited believers who endured great tribulations. They sang in the fields and envisioned better days.

 Spirituals find a highbrow champion

In the years directly following the Union victory in the Civil War, many newly free Blacks discarded the “sorrow songs” as sad reminders of tragic times. But an unlikely intellectual patron of spirituals was internationally known Czech composer Antonin Dvořák, who was hired in 1892 as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. Philanthropist Jeannette Thurber paid Dvořák $15,000 a year, an enormous sum back then, with the express purpose of creating a new, European-inspired school of American music.

One day, in the hall of the school on E. 17th St., Dvořák heard a man with a deep baritone singing a spiritual. It was 26-year-old African-American student Harry T. Burleigh who was on scholarship at the school and did janitorial work to pay for room and board. Enchanted, Dvořák asked Burleigh to sing more songs from the fields of old, and the student did for almost an hour.

A few months later, the Czech composer wrote the article “The Real Value of Negro Melodies,” in the New York Herald, which contended that “African Americans and Native Americans should be the foundation for the growth of American music. In the Negro melodies I discovered all that is needed for a great and noble school of music,” he wrote. The upper crusties brought the famous classical composer to teach Americans to be more like Brahms and Beethoven, and he saw the future in the music of slaves?!

The uproar was immediate. “A truly American music based on the music of socially and politically marginal groups is ridiculous,” wrote one of the top critics. But then came jazz and blues and funk and rock n’ roll and hip-hop.

As the controversial Dvořák went back to Bohemia after three years in New York, Burleigh became the most prominent arranger of spirituals, including “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” whose melody Dvořák incorporated into his famous “Symphony #9 in E Minor.”

The “coon songs” of minstrelsy, which portrayed African-Americans as either slow-witted or conniving, had been popular in the late 1800’s. But Dvořák and Burleigh brought pride to the struggle, elevating spirituals from vaudeville spoofs to the concert stage. Black singing groups like Nashville’s Fisk Jubilee Singers trained their voices to sing the cultured songs of European composers, but it was always “Down By the Riverside,” “Ezekial Saw the Wheel” and the rest of the “slave songs” segment that brought the audience to its feet.

Blues music also sprung from spirituals, with such desolate numbers as “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” and “Travelin’ Shoes” laying the foundation for the lyrical realism that would distinguish the form. But there’s also great release in the growling rhythms. Just as the enslaved sang “The Lord Delivered Daniel (Why Not Me)” to hoist their spirits, blues singers shout about no-good liars and cheats as a way to get over them.

Though generally acknowledged as 1945- 1960, the glory years of gospel can be traced to the 1920’s, when a new crop of blues-based religious songs grew in popularity so quickly that the Baptist Church had to begrudgingly endorse them or lose parishioners to the more fervent Pentecostal services. After you heard Arizona Dranes on the piano or Blind Willie Johnson on the guitar, it was hard to get in the mood for “Bringin’ In the Sheaves.” The people wanted the new fervency – jubilation, not assimilation – and eventually the bluesy gospel songs gained respectability and crossed denominational lines to become the preferred church music of most black Christians.

The first Pentecostal music star was piano shouter Arizona Dranes, who learned to play and sing classical music at Austin’s Institute for Blind Colored Youths from 1896-1910. But after she converted to the Church of God in Christ, where speaking in tongues was a big part of the services, Dranes’ music took on new fire.

Before Dranes took a train from Fort Worth to Chicago in June 1926 to record for OKeh, no label had yet tested the raucous, sanctified sounds of the Pentecostal church to the new “race records” market.

With six songs recorded on June 17, 1926, Dranes created a spirit/ flesh communion that would later be known as “the gospel beat.” Her locomotive hands drove each other, with the percussive left- the rhythm section- dancing on and around the beat like a jazz bassist. This drawling church lady from Texas was playing barrelhouse piano! But her piercing, otherwordly voice and lyrics of deep praise were so filled with the Holy Spirit that the music was undeniably Christian.

Dranes performed at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ on the South Side during her first recording visit, and in the congregration was a streetcorner mandolinist named Katie Bell Nubin and her 11-year-old daughter Rosetta, who was already getting good on the guitar. Sister Rosetta Tharpe went on to become the Memphis Minnie of gospel music, recording with electric guitar for the first time in 1941 on a cover of Washington Phillips’ “Denomination Blues” she called “That’s All.”

In an interview with Gayle Wald for the Rosetta Tharpe biography Shout, Sister, Shout, churchgoer Camille Roberts recalled a Dranes performance at Roberts Temple in the 1930s. “Along comes a woman, I can’t remember her name, but she was blind and she was from Texas, and she could just make the piano talk,” Wald quoted Roberts. “She’d get so good she’d just hit it with her elbows.”

Arizona Dranes: “In That Day” (1926)

Among those whose ears perked up in August 1926 when OKeh released the first two 78s by "the Blind Race Evangelist,” was Thomas A. Dorsey, who would go on to be called “the Father of Gospel” after penning such standards as “Peace in the Valley,” “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “If You See My Savior.”

In a 1961 interview, Dorsey gave Dranes some credit with opening his mind to laying secular styles under religious themes. “If I can put some of what she does and mix it with the blues,” Dorsey said, recalling his first exposure to Dranes, “I’ll be able to come up with a gospel style.”

Dorsey’s songwriting and arrangements were so sophisticated that churchgoers didn’t initially realize his music was based in blues, “the devil’s music.”

Meanwhile, Dranes’ style of raw, sanctified music was sent back from the studio to the Holiness/ Pentecostal churches that popped up all over urban neighborhoods after World War I.

Although their playing was as different as fire and glass, Dranes and Dorsey together formed the foundation of gospel piano accompaniment, according to a 2009 doctorate dissertation by Idella Johnson with the weighty title “Development of African American Gospel Piano Style (1926- 1960): A Socio-Musical Analysis of Arizona Dranes and Thomas Dorsey.”

A church music director and pianist herself, Johnson wrote that the gospel piano style "acquired its motivic and rhythmic impetus from Dranes and its blues quality and coloring from Dorsey." Arizona rocked and Dorsey rolled.

DEEPER READING on Gospel Music History.

For a signed copy of “Ghost Notes” paypal $35 to michaelcorcoran55@gmail.com. That covers postage, too, and this coffee table history book weighs over two pounds.