Music in Black American Life, 1945-2020 by Laurie Matheson

Author:Laurie Matheson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Hold My Mule

Shirley Caesar and the Gospel

of the New South

CLAUDRENA N. HAROLD

From When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul

and Hip-Hop Eras, by Claudrena N. Harold (2020)

There is nowhere in the USA quite like America’s South; there is no place more difficult to fully understand or fully capture. … The people who walk that land, both black and white, wear masks and more masks, then masks beneath those masks. They are tricksters and shape-shifters, magicians and carnival barkers, able to metamorphize right before your eyes into good old boys, respectable lawyers, polite society types, brilliant scholars, great musicians, history makers, and everything’s-gonna-be-all-right Maya Angelou look-alikes—when in fact nothing’s gonna be all right.

—James McBride, Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul

If one thing doesn’t work you shift and you do something else. If a fast song doesn’t work, you use a slow one. … I change every time I get up to sing. … I take everything into consideration, what’s going on around me, and I adjust my music for my audience. Yes indeed, I did it last night. Almost every time you hear me sing I do it. … Like for an example, the song my sister (Ann) sings “You can depend on Jesus.” I’ll say … in a sing-song fashion “Gonna be alright, gonna be, gonna be alright, everything’s gonna be alright.” Really what I’m waiting for, I’m waiting for the musicians to get into a pocket; by the time they get into that pocket, phone Aunt Jane. I’ll give you a quarter if she ain’t home.

—Shirley Caesar in Brooksie Eugene Harrington, “Shirley Caesar: A Woman of Words”

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