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In the 1940s and 1950s, when musicologists began packing the history of American music with substance and soul, whites assumed gospel music was created by whites. Not all whites bought into this fallacy, of course, as some questioned the assumption not like pacifists handcuffed to wrong, but as activists swinging picks and shovels, digging for truth.

Their interrogation carried fire and venom as furious as those carried by blacks fighting against prejudice and distortion. Hence, the history of gospel music contains ethical and factual elements.

How is it that early forms of gospel music used simple melodies heavily influenced by the rhythms of blues, jazz and other black folk styles, instead of the chords of European classical music or the twang of the bluegrass style of country music? Indeed, nowadays, American musicologists revere gospel music as African-American music that celebrates Christian doctrine in emotional, often dramatic ways.

Thomas A. Dorsey, a well-known blues pianist in the 1930s and 1940s, who as a young musician played with some of the most renowned blues artists in the land, including Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, is considered among many gospel music historians as the father of gospel music. He composed more than 800 gospel songs, such as "There Will Be Peace in the Valley," and established a legacy such that if influence could be measured in terms of distance, it would stretch miles across the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.

Such famous gospel performers as Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland, Shirley Caesar, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and the Soul Stirrers are indebted to Dorsey's infusion of blues rhythms into the cadence of traditional black spiritual songs. Even such R&B giants as James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett began their musical careers in the black church singing Dorsey's songs.

With Dorsey as the pacesetter, many Christian music enthusiasts, black and white, followed his lead and developed various styles of gospel music. Now on CDs, television, radio and the internet, you can hear urban contemporary gospel, gospel rap, contemporary gospel jazz, gospel go-go, white country gospel and white southern gospel.

In fact, with African-American culture as the pacemaker, the heart of every form of gospel music beats as vibrantly as a drummer's sticks and as movingly as tears dripping from lovers' eyes. Gospel music's future will undoubtedly shine as bright as its past.

Learn more about this author, James Strong.
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