A Change Is Gonna Come – The Gospel Impulse

As I mentioned earlier, Craig Werner’s A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America is serving as something of a source text for “Morning Song” posts this month.  Interspersed with the (largely chronological) chapters, are short thematic entries in which Werner defines three foundational “impulses” of black music:  gospel, blues and jazz.  Because music is what it is (and because radios pick up signals from almost anywhere), since World War II these “impulses” have shaped and defined much of American, and global, popular music.

The first impulse Werner defines (I’ll get to the other two in posts later this month) is the gospel impulse.  He insists that the “gospel impulse” goes far beyond the commercial and ecclesiastic confines of “gospel music”.  His “Gospel Impulse Top 40”—an illustrative, not definitive list—includes songs from Bob Marley’s reggae, Martha and the Vandellas’ pop, Charles Mingus’ jazz, James Brown’s r&b, Bruce Springsteen’s rock, Parliament’s funk, Sister Sledge’s disco, Sweet Honey In The Rock’s folk, and Abdullah Ibrahim’s world beat music—as well as cuts by gospel artists like Mahalia Jackson, Dorothy Love Coates and Kirk Franklin.

Rather than attempt to improve on Werner’s writing, I’ll just quote liberally from it.  He begins by defining the “gospel impulse”:  the belief that life’s burdens can be transformed into hope, salvation, the promise of redemption.  And then continues:

At its best, the gospel impulse helps people experience themselves in relation to rather than on their own.  Gospel makes the feeling of human separateness, which is what the blues are all about, bearable.  It’s why DJs and the dancers they shape into momentary communities are telling the truth when they describe dance as a religious experience.

The gospel impulse half-remembers the values brought to the new world by the men and women uprooted from West African cultures:  the connection between the spiritual and material worlds; the interdependence of self and community; the honoring of the elders and the ancestors; the recognition of the ever-changing flow of experience that renders all absolute ideologies meaningless….

The gospel impulse consists of a three-step process:  (1) acknowledging the burden;  (2) bearing witness;  (3) finding redemption.  The burden grounds the song in the history of suffering that links individual and community experiences….We don’t choose our burdens; we do choose our responses.

Musicians grounded in the gospel impulse respond by bearing witness to the troubles they’ve seen, telling the deepest truths they know….The word “witness” works partly because the burden involves history, power.  There’s an evil in the world and…lots of it comes from the Devil.  Call him sex or money, hypocrisy or capitalism, the landlord or Governor Wallace, but the Devil’s real.  You deal with him or he, maybe she, will most definitely deal with you….

…(G)ospel promises, or at least holds out the possibility, that tomorrow may be different, better….Whatever its specific incarnation, gospel redemption breaks down the difference between personal salvation and communal liberation.  No one makes it alone.  If we’re going to bear up under the weight of the cross, find the strength to renounce the Devil, if we’re going to survive to bear witness and move on up, we’re going to have to connect.  The music shows us how.