It really isn’t rocket science when defining gospel music. Even though many critics over the years have labeled it “black gospel” to avoid any slight comparisons to gospel music’s offspring, gospel music’s elements are easily noticeable and remains the strongest and richest of all of its contemporaries. Whether black or white, the word “gospel” is normally associated with the raw infectious movements of African-American spiritual music of the South. And while gospel music has been embraced by most mainstream societies and branched out to affect country gospel and the pop-oriented Contemporary Christian music (CCM), the heart of gospel stems from the music from the African-American experience; deriving from the spirituals and the blues. Both of these define the ups and lows, the triumphs and tribulations of the African American culture. And both musical forms started to develop its character and origins, according to most sources, during the early 1800s and quickly became a fixated way of life for blacks during the pre-Civil War years. In People Get Ready, a book written by gospel historian Robert Darden, the author highlights the rise of black power in the Christian faith and tells of Richard Allen’s publishing of his own hymnal in 1801 - A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors by Richard Allen, African Minister. “The new hymnal featured no musical notation for its fifty-four hymn texts and the lyrics were drawn chiefly from existing collections of hymns by Dr. Issac Watts ("When I Survey The Wondrous Cross," "Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed"), the Wesleys ("A Charge To Keep I Have"), and other hymn writers favored by his African-American congregation. It also included hymns popular with the Baptists, along with the first known printed example of “wandering refrains” - chorus-like refrains added to various hymns that provided an “improvisational quality” to the singing. This kind of singing made way for more looser, congregational-friendly and repetitive songs to develop since these songs became favorites amongst African-Americans. Darden wisely injects the criticism of John F. Watson from that period, taken from a published tract in 1819 of this new music.

“In the blacks’ quarter, the coloured people get together, and sing for hours together, short scraps of disjointed affirmations, pledges, or prayers, lengthened out with long repetitive choruses. These are all sung in the merry chorus-manner of the southern harvest field, or husking-frolc method, of the slave blacks.”

This kind of description, even though it is told from a cynically-educated white point-of view, explains why the roots of gospel music remain strong today in modern gospel. The deep emotionalism and lengthy devotions of early gospel roots stands strong as an influential component of gospel music’s glorified manifestations.

Sooner or later the spirituals, springing from an African tradition, would be organized and would be the choicest form of spiritual music for the afflicted slaves. Songs like “Steal Away,” “Way Down Yonder by Myself I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray”, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, “Every Time I Feel The Spirit,” “Go Down Moses,” “Nobody Knows The Trouble I See,” “Little David Play ‘Yo Harp”. “I ‘Been Buked” and “Lord, Remember Me” came about from the rough, ravaging experiences of slavery and remains the most vibrant and highly documented form of slave music. Lawrence Levine in his ground-breaking study, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, records the importance of the spiritual (or sacred music).

“It is significant that the most common form of slave music we know of is sacred song...They were not sung solely or even primarily in chuches or praise houses but were used as rowing songs, field songs, work songs and social songs.”

The popularity of the spiritual is defined by the emergence of the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University of Nashville, Tennessee. Led by George L. White, once the esteemed treasure of the institution, the group originally started out singing material that included hymns, anthems, standards and world-recognized cantatas and began to tour the country in hopes of raising monies and awareness for the university. While touring, the group recognized that their once-favored repertoire lacked financial backing and was becoming disastrous for the choir. The group eventually turned to the spirituals and became the motivation for the group’s immediate success. It became so overtly popular that other African-American institutions including Hampton and, later on, Tuskegee University would later on organize college choirs using the spiritual as their grounds for musical popularity to help raise funds for Black education. The Jubilee Singers raised a reported twenty-thousand dollars on their first tour in 1871 and allowed them the opportunity to tour the country and even traveled overseas touring parts of Europe.

The strong elements of gospel music can be traced back to its strong rhythmic patterns, its religious tracings and performance tradition. “The performing process [of gospel] is usually intuitive as to be almost unteachable” Pearl Williams-Jones explains in Black People and Their Culture: Selected Writings from the African Diaspora. “The greatest gospel artists are usually those who were born nearest the source of the tradition.” The congregational style singing, using familiar call-and-response techniques, usually associated with the more Protestant/Holiness or sanctified churches, also help in defining familiar structures within gospel music. This creates high levels of energy and intensity within the performance; creating a mystical lather of emotion and climatic experience for the entire event. And while the tradition of early gospel music continued to spread out with major influences from other styles of music, it is important to note that blues - made popular by early gospel pioneers such as Georgia Peach, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Blind Willie Johnson and Thomas Dorsey (the latter began his singing career as the blues singer “Georgia Tom”) - and the improvisational nature of jazz created the perfect foundation for gospel music’s sharp and distinctive characteristics. According to Opal Louis Nations’ article entitled The History of Gospel Music, she highlights that Dorsey “took the simple blues refrain and adapted it for use in the church (the reverse of what later evolved into popular rhythm & blues music during the 1950s).

These powerful characteristics and dimensions of gospel music explains why there is a sharp contrast between authentic gospel music and the many branches and various styles of modern gospel. Just the performance nature of gospel alone, build up with high-octane deliveries and the deep moans, grunts and big swoops of the singer, remain the primary focus point of definite gospel music.

Modern interpretations of gospel music may confuse the definition of the word “gospel” ( translated from Old English as meaning “good news”) with the style of gospel music. But the two are different and is easily highlighted in the Houghton-Mifflin’s definition of gospel music. The definition of gospel music, according to this source, proves that point.

Gospel music (noun) is a kind of distinctively American religious music that is associated with evangelism and is based on the melodies of folk music blended with elements of spirituals and jazz.

Good definition - even though it left out that gospel music was birth out of the African-American experience and that both spirituals and jazz - products of the south - are also rooted within African-American culture.

Two careful observations must be made after rediscovering these facts.

1) Just because gospel music is a product of the African-American experience, that doesn’t apply that everything that is spiritual and black is gospel. Gospel music is still defined by its character and style and is not entirely designed around race. The origins may have been developed by blacks, but should not be viewed as a genre or style that uses race as a means of separation or division. In other words, style makes gospel what it is, not race.

2) Just because an artist sings about the scriptures or any scriptures pertaining to the Gospels of the Bible - it doesn’t qualify the material to be solely defined as being gospel music. Remember that gospel music is defined by style and its character. Always look for the defining elements of the blues and jazz and an intense performance highlighted with infectious energy. Those traits are grounds in identifying authentic gospel music.