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The same man wrote “It’s Tight Like That” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” As Georgia Tom, Thomas A. Dorsey cut it with Tampa Red in 1928 - one of the dirtiest hits of the decade, and the record that set off the hokum craze. As Thomas A. Dorsey, he wrote the song Mahalia Jackson sang at Martin Luther King’s funeral. And the order is not the one you would guess: “It’s Tight Like That” came after his religious conversion, not before it, because the church songs were not paying and he had a wife to feed.
Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Garrett Cash for the fourth installment of HolyRoll, their history of gospel music, in a conversation first recorded in 2022 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened.
The book under discussion is Michael W. Harris’s “The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church,” with Anthony Heilbut’s “The Gospel Sound” and Robert Darden’s “People Get Ready!” alongside it.
Garrett found Dorsey by accident, on a Georgia historical marker in Villa Rica, where he stopped expecting a Civil War battle and wondered for a moment whether the big band leader Tommy Dorsey had been born down the road.
Nate’s own discovery was stranger: that music which seems as old as the church itself has a starting point, and that it came as late as the early 1930s. Dorsey was a preacher’s son and a church organist’s son who moved to Atlanta, learned soft piano in houses where couples danced quietly, and then went north in the Great Migration and watched Chicago fill up with the up-tempo New Orleans jazz of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, which left his own style hopelessly out of date. He worked his way back up as Ma Rainey’s bandleader, collapsed into a depression that stopped him performing for something like eighteen months, and came out of it by way of a preacher who, the story goes, pulled a snake out of his mouth.
What followed is the story Harris tells: the Black churches of the North had spent two generations stamping out the call and response and the shouting of the old brush arbor meetings in favour of anthems and classical choral music, and the migrants filling their pews wanted it back. Dorsey gave it to them, got thrown out of the best churches in the country for it, and inside a few years had taken them over. Then his wife Nettie died in childbirth while he was away singing in St. Louis, and their baby son died the next day. A friend sat him at a piano to take his mind off it, and out of an old hymn tune he made “Precious Lord.”
Also: Willie Mae Ford Smith and the National Baptist Convention of 1930; Theodore Frye, the strutting preacher who became his first partner; Sallie Martin, who fixed his business; why Dorsey was selling sheet music rather than records through the Depression; and the documentary “Say Amen, Somebody,” which Nate recommends without reservation.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
* “It’s Tight Like That”, Tampa Red and Georgia Tom,
* “Rock Me” Sister Rosetta Tharpe with Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra,
* “(There’ll Be) Peace in the Valley (For Me)” Elvis Presley
* “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” Mahalia Jackson
This episode originally dropped in 2022.
Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas, and Danny Park.
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