Were You There When They Popularized Our Lord? Blues and the Black Vernacular: Tone Parallels to American Life

I keep starting threads here and, like the ADD guy that I am, I forget to continue – well, not exactly forget, but I get distracted easily (SQUIRREL!) by new ideas, and I change direction. But maybe that’s what makes it interesting; is this neuro-diversity in action? I don’t know, I will have to ask my Spiritual Advisor (as soon as I can find one).

But I will try to focus, especially as my recent post on the Ring Shout went – well, not exactly viral, though maybe it hinted at a localized pandemic of actual interest in American vernacular music. And it showed, in a way that I find gratifying, that all these years I have spent squinting at the sonic minutia of old American music may not have been in vain. As I have told people on the academic side, who tend to hold me at arms length, I listen to this old music because I love it, as both a spectator and musician myself, not because of some vague educational goal, but because it is like a tone parallel to my own life – and all lives, really. Not only is it like fertilizer to my own strange and wandering imagination, but it is the most amazing and fascinating music I know. It is fun, meaningful (in the most obscure meaning of the word) and deep, deeper than 45 barrels of Taylor Swift – or, better, than any number of pop and jazz stars who think they have a grip on the heritage of American sound. And this IS Black History Month, so it all lines up like the stars (the celestial type) on a clear night, with moments of epiphany which light up the skies like an exploding Musk rocket.

So I present here, as a continuum, a few songs as sung by the great Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Years ago, on an unintentionally amusing PBS documentary about her, they said two things that were quite silly and, really, hilarious. In a pious moment they introduced, first, her singing a song which they implied was a great old black spiritual, and then showed her performing Lonesome Road, which was, and I kid you not, a pop tune written by a 50-year-old Jewish guy who made his living as a music executive and professional songwriter (Nat Shilkret); and then later, in the same grave, reverent way, and as they emphasized her deep personal spirituality, they introduced her singing a song about, yes, you guessed it, SEX (Four or Five Times). Thank you, educational television (as we used to call it before it was just a twinkle in the eye of the Department of Government Efficiency).

This is black music, as black as a church service in COGIC (the Church of God in Christ), and I will post those two tunes as well as a third which actually IS spiritual in the deepest possible sense (Where You There When They Crucified Our Lord?). As I said when I first posted about this song years ago, as a Jew who feels immune to the call of religion I did at first, when hearing Were You There, feel the urge to dive into an immersive bath of holy-water, though fortunately an Atheist Intervention saved me. But that’s my point; just as they said in that old commercial that you didn’t “Need to be Jewish to love Levy’s Rye Bread,” you don’t need to be religious to love religious music and its pop offshoots, which are animated, like all of these performances, by The Spirit, not of the blues, but of a lineage – a feeling - in black life and music that runs through three hundred years of African American life and language in America (and I post this with a reminder that it wasn’t Ray Charles who introduced “the feeling” of black religion into American pop music but, just possibly, it WAS Sister Rosetta Tharpe who did, though there are other candidates for that honor). (And I apologize, as I have had to bunch these YouTube performances at the bottom of the post, due to my own technical limitations):