Part 4: Gospel Roots of Rock and Soul

(upbeat music) You're listening to Saturday night and Sunday morning, the gospel roots of rock and soul. I'm CC Winons. Thomas Dorsey, infusing sanctified music with the blues, Sam Cook, milking his heavenly sex appeal to attract wide audiences. Sister Rosetta Tharp, elevating her divine voice to stadium crowds in the United States and beyond. From its origins, gospel music has reflected sacred and secular culture, tradition and constant change. It does change because life changes, culture changes. So you can't expect the music to stay the same. Louisiana State Music Scholar Joyce Jackson. So it changes with the aspects of life, that change. It's very dynamic. By the 1960s, gospel music had established a foothold in the American mainstream. Nearly five million African Americans had left the South since the beginning of the 20th century. They fled the terror and tedium of the Jim Crow South to establish new lives and communities across the country. ♪ Gonna tell that Mary, find out the John ♪ ♪ He claimed he has a misery, but he had a lot of fun ♪ ♪ Oh baby ♪ ♪ Yeah, baby ♪ ♪ Soul, R&B and Rock n' Roll, all of which borrowed their musical gestures ♪ ♪ And personnel from the gospel world ♪ ♪ Were selling out auditoriums and dominating the radio waves ♪ ♪ The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ♪ ♪ Promised a freer, equitable society ♪ ♪ A society that had seemed impossible to many just a generation before ♪ But the realities of persistent, institutional discrimination and ongoing wars in Southeast Asia soiled that dream. These realities also produce a counter-culture movement across America. Gospel music was ripe for a big new moment. What happened because I feel it was time to happen, especially with the situation of the world today, problems. This is gospel composer Edwin Hawkins in a 1969 interview. They don't go to church, especially our youth. And I feel with young people such as our group, we can show them that God yet lives. And instead of us trying to take the gospel to them, maybe by preaching to them, take it to them in song, maybe. And with contemporary sounds, new beats, new rhythms, and something they can understand, and something they can feel and express themselves in. For now, the Edwin Hawkins singers, number three, from the survey, doing their thing all over the 50. Oh, happy day. ♪ Happy day ♪ Oh, yes. ♪ Happy day ♪ First time I heard "Happy Day" was. I'm coming home from a club. Record producer and songwriter, Bu Mitchell, the son of the late, great Willie Mitchell, who produced many of Al Green's hits. It's like five in the morning, and this song comes on, and it just freaks me out completely. Like, you know, I'm zoned all the way. I've never heard anything, which is as close to heaven as anything I've ever heard. I'm like, am I dead? Am I, you know, it's fogging and stuff? I was like, I think I'm still alive, but this is, you know, I don't know. I'd never heard it. Thank you, some, Dorothy Morrison. ♪ Happy day ♪ Someone told me that Edwin sent for me, and Edwin told them, tell Dot to come, because I will heard it being this choir, 'cause I know she can sing. She's from the family called the Combs family. (camera clicks) In the San Francisco Bay area, three families dominated the gospel scene at the time. The Hawkins, Sligh and the Family Stone, and the Combs. Dorothy Combs told us Edwin had been scouting her for years. He said, I got this perfect song for you. And I said, oh, you do? What's it come? And he said, it's called, Oh, Happy Day, and he pulled that. He said, walk to give me that, give me that Oh, Him Book. And he got the Him Book together. It was written in 18 something. And the original Oh, Happy Day goes, Oh, Happy Day, ♪ Da-na-na, Oh, Happy Day ♪ ♪ Da-na-na, When Jesus was ♪ ♪ Da-na-na, My sins are way Oh, Happy Day ♪ ♪ Happy day, Happy day ♪ ♪ When Jesus was my sins away ♪ Again, Joyce Jackson of Louisiana State University. Although everybody thought it was a new song, It was really a different arrangement from an old hymn. It really was like the transitional piece going from traditional gospel to contemporary gospel. - And he said, "But I want to change it to, "Downdhamson Scholar and Minister of Music" at Archstreet Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. - Part of the gift of Edwin was that he felt called to bring that song forth. It was the music, the sound of that era that carried it through, that made it approachable to the majority community. - Dorothy Colmes, I put Good God in there and I got that from James Brown, where I said, "Oh, Good God." ♪ Sometimes I feel so nice ♪ ♪ Good God ♪ - That's James Brown. So I was pulling in some of the nightclub stuff when I did all happy day. So the neck thing didn't frighten me, but we were tipping kind of lightly because we knew the ladies on the front row in the white. They might roll their eyes at us and they might say, "Enough of this," that kind of stuff. You young people, you know. - And of course they had been using instruments in the churches and in the choir as before, but yeah, other things being used, I think they even used the synthesizer. And it was like everything goes now. - In our home, I was exposed to all this kind of music. - Edwin Hawkins in a 2012 interview. - So I heard everything growing up. My aunt, she listened to pop music, Peri Como, Nacking, Colo, and all those people. ♪ The melody lingers on ♪ ♪ You and the song are gone ♪ - So we heard all kinds of music, including the Oswald which happened to be our favorite. When I was talking to me to start to rearrange and create, I was hearing these different harmonies from these different kind of different genres of music. They're developed, the sound of Edwin Hawkins. ♪ Come to go, let me do my part ♪ ♪ With my heart, with my heart ♪ And there was a young man that was the work in the warehouse where the records were distributed from. And he happened to play the album and played the tune "Oh, Happy Day" took it to a friend of his that was an underground rock DJ in San Francisco. And that's where the song "Oh, Happy Day" hit first. - Again, Dorothy Colmes. So he called in all of his other disjockey friends and had them to come to his, wherever he was in San Francisco. And they listened to "Oh, Happy Day." It was in the hippie days. So everybody kind of went on and got, you know, got stoned, got whatever you're gonna do. And everybody brought pillows. And they were lying around on the floor. He explained this to me. He told me this. And I was like, what? And he said, "When I played that song, after it was over, everybody was like, "Wow, all of these disjockeys." So they all got, went back to their radio stations and started pushing the song. And so the song stopped playing every hour on the hour. "Oh, Happy Day." And people were calling me and saying, "Dot, I heard your song. I heard your singing." And I was like, "No, you didn't." And then before I could finish, I'm hearing it myself and, oh my God. ♪ And you we know ♪ ♪ And here we know ♪ ♪ See it in the clear ♪ ♪ That you were causing ♪ ♪ And you ♪ ♪ I am, I am, I am ♪ ♪ I am ♪ ♪ What happy day for everything ♪ Kinda like, oh, that's nice. But at that time, it makes you kind of bounce your neck, bop your neck, you know, kind of get with the groove type of thing. And that was the bidding in the church. You kind of on the line of being a sinner. The age old story haunted Edward Hawkins. The gospel recording artist, Richard Small, would told us how he studied, "Oh, Happy Day." With his Howard University classmate, Donnie Hathaway. We went downtown and brought the record and took it up to the Howard Music Library and put on the earphones and listen to it over and over. And the imaginative arrangements that Edward had come up with, but just, you just didn't hear that in the church. And even though, you know, Donnie and I discussed it in the practice room, you did not hear it at 11 o'clock on Sunday mornings in the church. You just did not. And to see people actually dancing to the music, not the sacred dance, but doing the secular dances to music. Again, Joyce Jackson. When you see dancing in the church, you know, it's like individual dances. And you know, you're having the spirit, or choir, or swing. And this is one of the aesthetics of the music. So it wasn't that it was so hard that these things had never happened before. But the main thing was the fact that it was going out to a wider audience. You know, and some people in the black community really didn't like that. You know, they really ostracized Edwin Hawkins and his group for doing that. Please welcome Edwin Hawkins. Here's Edwin Hawkins with Gospel Recording Artists, Eric Cacamble on TV in 2012. A lot of criticism from the church, first of all, we're raised in the grand of church of God in Christ. Yeah, me too. And there are very, very strict rules about everything. Everything. We were pretty okay until we started to do the music that was a little different from what they were used to hearing. Chord changes at this. We sang Gospel, but it was not in the church. So, well, I said, we do enough coming to church testifying to each other. Yeah. You know, I'm saying the saying to fight. Who you're telling? You know, somebody who says that. Somebody who says that. Somebody that already knows Jesus Christ about those who don't know Him. Yeah. And that what you taught us to do. So we had to reevaluate and talk about motives and all that while we're doing what we're doing. Richard Smallwood recalled for us the personal toll of this criticism on the Hawkins family. I remember Edwin's brother Daniel, who is an another amazing musician who played for Edwin for years and played for the Hawkins family for years. Said, "He didn't want anything else to do with church because he was so hurt by what, you know, these traditional so-called, quote, saints, unquote, had said about them. And these were just young people who were trying to take their music to young people." Whether the church liked it or not, Joyce Jackson told us, "This worldly gospel sound inspired and ushered in a new generation." But I mean, it made them famous too. A lot of people didn't know about it when Hawkins and the Hawkins sing as except within the black community. But when that piece went out to the majority audience, you know, they became well-known and the numbers that it sold was just astronomical. Richard Smallwood maintains the success accomplished what the Bible asked of its followers. It says, "Go out there to the clubs, go out there and to, you know, other places where it's not heard, where it's not taken and sing the message." And that's what they were doing. They were singing the message of the gospel. They were singing the message of love, loving each other regardless of what your culture was, what your race was, what your background was. And this is what they were doing. He really changed, he changed music. The Beatles liked "Oh, Happy Day." How about that? Singer Dorothy Holmes. They sent me a letter. George, he said he liked "My Oh, Happy Day so well" and I inspired him to do "My Sweet Lord." Now the door is open, you can sing about, you know, amazing grace and all of those kind of good old songs, you know, that you're hearing it out of the hymn book. You know, and now they're going to the hymn book and sprucing up some of those songs. And just like "Oh, Happy Day" was from the hymn book. Although "Oh, Happy Day" has become a gospel standard, some church people don't believe the wider world has a place in the sanctuary. No matter, gospel DJ and scholar Deborah Smith-Polar told us the world will always steal in somehow. And, you know, to point out to someone that, a song that they love is built upon an R&B song or a rock song, or a popular song from back in the day, is to have people just sit there and stare you like that emoji with the big eyes. It's like, that can't be true. Something about God's grace is built upon something in the way she moves by the Beatles. And to tell people that they would just give you the look. If gospel music's purpose is to inspire people, change is part of the natural order. Blurring boundaries and breaking rules made this music a vital part of American culture. A month after Woodstock in September 1969, Dorothy Colmes performed the song at the Big Sur Festival in California with a few other singers. Joni Mitchell, John Baez, Crosby Nashville's "Young" and out by the ocean. And it was just wonderful singing "Oh, Happy Day" to them. ♪ Oh, Happy Day ♪ Next time, as Dr. Martin Luther King say, "Walk together children, don't you get rid of it?" There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land. And this Promised Land is right here in America. I was born yet and ain't going yet. Expect to die right here today. This hour of Saturday night and Sunday morning, the gospel roots of rock and soul was written and produced by Alex Lewis. For more stories, visit our website at xpngasperoost.org. The gospel roots of rock and soul has been supported by the Pueu Center for Arts and Heritage. The executive producers are Roger LeMay and Bruce Warren, senior producer Alex Lewis, assistant producer Whitney Jones, editor Cheryl Devall. Mixing by Jeff Town, our production assistant is Rachel Isshikawa. Archival audio courtesy of MPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," the Stutt's Tercol Radio Archive, the Library of Congress, and Seattle Pacific University. Special thanks to Anne Powers, Robert Merovitch, Jerry Zolton, and Donald Dubson. I'm CC Winons. Thanks for listening. The gospel roots of rock and soul is presented in collaboration with NPR Music and is produced in Philadelphia by WXPN at the University of Pennsylvania.