Getting Over

It’s unusual to be inspired and calmed in the same moment, but I had that experience this week and I’m still processing it.

It was while viewing an HBO documentary about the black gospel quartets of the mid 20th century. It was a rollicking fun watch, or listen (more accurately), because those groups BELTED in a way that no one has before or since. I was really awestruck. Like so much black history, these musicians, loaded with so much talent, are largely unknown.

It’s not just because the racism of that era marginalized black performers or because the racism of our time hides so much black history. It’s also because those musicians, nearly all of them, weren’t singing for themselves.

Here’s the super short version of what happened, and the reason I’m writing about it:

In the 1930s and 40s, numerous Black quartets like the Soul Stirrers and the Blind Boys of Alabama were traveling the Gospel Highway, singing with all their considerable might to help their audiences and themselves “get over.”

They called it the “shiver” — a communion with God that could be brought on by the singing, falling, grimacing, shouting and bodily depletion of performer and audience. They were entertainers but they were warriors too — fighting for the soul of the room. And they did it for donations that barely covered their gas, food and lodging. They followed the tobacco and cotton harvests, knowing the audience only had money at specific times of the year.

In the 1950s, record labels began to take notice, realizing that this music could be repackaged into massive secular hits for a mainstream audience. Sam Cooke “crossed over” in 1957 effectively turning the sacred quartet tradition into the foundation of the modern music industry. Sam Cooke got rich and famous. So did Lou Rawls, Wilson Pickett, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin.

Here’s who didn’t: Claude Jeter, Julius Cheeks, Ira Tucker, Archie Brownlee and Dorothy Love Coates.

That second list of artists knew where the money was. Labels practically begged them to record R&B music. They wouldn’t do it. They were religious men and women: Jeter promised his mother he would only ever sing for the Lord and believed his voice was a gift from God, not to be sold; Cheeks didn’t think his music appropriate for a nightclub; Tucker figured he’d get to sing gospel forever because the community’s need for spirit never went out of style; Coates believed pop music was too trivial for the message she was carrying.

I’m compelled by every one of those reasons, and their story-carriers. They are amazing. But the showstopper for me was the rationale I heard voiced in the documentary: the music stops working the moment it stops being about devotion. For certain artists, it wasn’t that they wouldn’t. It was that they couldn’t. They couldn’t cross over because they felt their music wouldn’t survive the crossing.

It’s not that gospel couldn’t become rock and roll; it could and it did. Change “God” to “baby,” and there you have it.

But for so many of these artists, the art wasn’t just their voice, sound and lyrics. It was also a shared burden between singer and listener; it was a spiritual struggle; it was a gift and release to a suffering people; it was a communion and collective experience that included the divine. It was, after all that, a feeling.

What’s any of that to do with HERE? My small business, like most, is a daily puzzle. Where is the next dollar coming from? Where’s my market? Can this reach more people? Is my pricing right-sized? Are the profits okay for this for-profit enterprise?

But for me, when I’m too focused on all that, something massive is lost and my soul feels it. The money-making part of my business is important. It’s also insufficient. That part is too small to contain what HERE really is. Worse than that, the money can be a threat to what HERE really is. That’s what those gospel heroes understood. There is art in what I’m trying to do, and community, and love.

First we create. And if we create well, for the right reasons, with others and for others, the money comes. Who knows how much? What matters — what I remembered watching this history — is that our commerce must serve our lives and whatever we hold as divine, and not the other way around. Chasing dollars or chasing communion is a choice that doesn’t let you have it both ways.

The gospel singers who didn’t cross over reminded me who I stand with and why I’m doing this. It made me proud and relaxed me all at once.