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Host Nate Wilcox was joined again by Garrett Cash for the second episode of the Holy Roll series which we’re recasting as part of our Let It Roll: From the Beginning… series, this time on the two people who essentially invented gospel composition as a published, professional craft — Charles Albert Tindley and Lucie E. Campbell.
Tindley was writing and publishing in Philadelphia before there was a gospel industry to publish into. He was the first African American to bring out an original song collection of his own, and the songs travelled far past the church: Elvis Presley recorded his “Stand By Me” — not the Ben E. King song, which came later and was influenced by it — and Washington Phillips cut “Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave It There.”
Lucie Campbell wrote for the National Baptist Convention and shaped what a generation of singers sang. Garrett and Nate get into her suspicion of blues and popular music as corrupting, and the young singers she found and pushed forward anyway.
Along the way: the holiness and Pentecostal movements and the Azusa Street revival, the Jubilee style that came out of Fisk and what it was trying to smooth away, lining out and why it survives in worship music now, and how these songs reached Ernest Tubb, the Carter Family, Wilson Pickett and Mahalia Jackson.
The book under discussion is “We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers,” edited by Bernice Johnson Reagon.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
* Washington Phillips, “Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave Them There” - written by Charles Tindley
* Elvis Presley, “Stand By Me” - written by Charles Tindley
* Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers, “End of My Journey (He’ll Understand, He’ll Say Well Done)” - written by Lucie Campbell
* Marion Williams and the Stars of Faith, “In the Upper Room” - written by Lucie Campbell
This episode originally dropped in 2022.
We’re relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter and calling it Let It Roll: From the Beginning….to the End.
Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.
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