The History of Gospel Music by Woog Adam;

Author:Woog, Adam;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The History of The Blues
ISBN: 5538672
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
Published: 2018-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

“Their Pain and Their Joy Were Mine”

Writer James Baldwin, in this excerpt from his book The Fire Next Time, describes the power a church service had on him:

There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multi-coloured, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fills a church. . . . Nothing that has happened to me since, equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, “the Word”—when the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs—they surrendered their pain and joy to me, I surrendered mine to them—and their cries of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Yes Lord!” and “Praise His name!” and “Preach it, brother!” sustained and whipped on by solos until we all became equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar.

Viv Broughton. Black Gospel: An Illustrated History of the Gospel Sound. Poole, UK: Blandford, 1985, p. 6.

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