Awards

• Winner of <DIV>Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Gospel, Soul, or R&B, Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2016

Overview

In A City Called Heaven, Robert M. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through its growth into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. Marovich mines print media, ephemera, and hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and historians--as well as relatives and friends of gospel pioneers--to recover forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and granted social mobility to a number of its practitioners. As Marovich shows, the music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. Yet it also helped give voice to a people--and lift a nation. A City Called Heaven celebrates a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.

Full Product Details

Author:   Robert M. Marovich
Publisher:   University of Illinois Press
Imprint:   University of Illinois Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 3.30cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.821kg
ISBN:  

9780252080692

ISBN 10:   0252080696
Pages:   488
Publication Date:   03 March 2015
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

"Acknowledgments   vii Introduction   1 Part One: Roots   9 1. Got On My Traveling Shoes: Black Sacred Music and the Great Migration   11 2. ""When the Fire Fell"": The Sanctified Church Contribution to Chicago Gospel Music   27 3. Sacred Music in Transition: Charles Henry Pace and the Pace Jubilee Singers   48 4. Turn Your Radio On: Chicago Sacred Radio Broadcast Pioneers   58 5. ""Someday, Somewhere"": The Formation of the Gospel Nexus   71 6. Sweeping through the City: Thomas A. Dorsey and the Gospel Nexus (1932 - 1933)   87 7. Across This Land and Country: New Songs for a New Era (1933-1939)   112 8. From Birmingham to Chicago: The Great Migration of the Gospel Quartet   132 Part Two: Branches   147 9. Sing a Gospel Song: The 1940s, Part One   149 10. ""If It's in Music -- We Have It"": The Fertile Crescent of Gospel Music Publishing   167 11. ""Move On Up a Little Higher"": The 1940s, Part Two   179 12. Postwar Gospel Quartets: ""Rock Stars of Religious Music""   204 13. The Gospel Caravan: Midcentury Melodies   229 14. ""He Could Just Put a Song on His Fingers"": Second-Generation Gospel Choirs   260 15. ""God's Got a Television"": Gospel Music Comes to the Living Room   281 16. ""Tell It Like It Is"": Songs of Social Significance   297 17. One of These Mornings: Chicago Gospel at the Crossroads   317 Appendix A. 1920s African American Sacred Music Recordings Made in Chicago   331 Appendix B. African American Sacred Music Recordings Made in Chicago, 1930-1941   335 Notes   337 Bibliography   389 General Index   401 Index of Songs   435 Illustrations follow page 228"

Reviews

Throughout these fascinating pages, Marovich colorfully shares the blood and sweat, as well as the feuds and collaborations that worked hand in hand to birth this stunning and uniquely American music known as gospel. It's a book worth a loud, boisterous, and affirmative shout! --Bil Carpenter, author of Uncloudy Days: The Gospel Music Encyclopedia

Opens a window on an important part of 20th-century Americana that has been little explored heretofore. -- Library Journal Robert Marovich's magisterial account explores how the encounter with urban life infused gospel music with blues and jazz, without displacing old habits of ecstatic worship brought from African and baptized by encountering Christianity. -- Milwaukee Shepherd Express

[An] exhaustively researched history of this important Chicago musical export. . . . Here, in Marovich's important work, are the lesser-known stories of the originators who created a wholly original sound of holiness in Chicago that reverberates today Chicago Tribune An impressive, comprehensive combination history, anthology and analysis of black gospel music. A City Called Heaven Chicago And The Birth Of Gospel Music blends interviews, character studies, rare photographs and numerous magnificent stories and encounters to provide readers with a wide-ranging look at this vital, constantly evolving idiom. - Nashville Scene

Author Information

Robert M. Marovich hosts ""Gospel Memories"" on Chicago's WLUW 88.7 FM and is founder and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Gospel Music, www.journalofgospelmusic.com.

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