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

9780252039102

Table of Contents

Reviews

[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

Essential. --Choice A City Called Heaven is a valuable resource that points to the many voices that were important to the success of gospel music. With his text, Marovich extends an invitation to readers and gospel music lovers to celebrate the beautiful and spirit-filled contributions of those who paved the gospel highway from Chicago to heaven and back. --Black Grooves 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

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

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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