How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel

There is no artistic outpouring more likely to stir the soul and shake the rafters than the African American sacred folk music called gospel. How Sweet the Sound takes us from Los Angeles, where the first notes of the undeniably new sound burst forth in 1906, to the Deep South, where ecstatic worshippers in the Pentecostal churches forged the gospel tradition. Then from Chicago, with the mass northern migration of African Americans in the 1930s, gospel entered the mainstream of American popular culture.In How Sweet the Sound, music historian Horace Clarence Boyer charts gospel's emergence as a discrete musical style in the early 1900s. He details its heyday in the years from 1945 to 1955 and describes its development through the 1960s, when the soulful strains of the once-churchbound music could be heard in the finest concert halls in the country.A gospel singer himself, Boyer brings added insight to the story of this extraordinary indigenous American art form and the equally extraordinary people who created it. He explains the various styles and stages of the music, and refers to more than a hundred of gospel's finest, from Thomas A. Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson to the Soul Stirrers and Aretha Franklin. Rare performance photographs and backstage studies by Lloyd Yearwood illustrate Boyer's text.