Shirley Caesar: the Durham evangelist who became the First Lady of Gospel
Shirley Caesar, born in Durham, North Carolina, in 1938, joined the Caravans in 1958 and went on to a solo career as a singer and evangelist.…
Category
America
Gospel music releases and Christian news from the United States.
“Never Would Have Made It”: the Marvin Sapp song his wife saved for the album
Marvin Sapp's "Never Would Have Made It", from the 2007 album Thirsty, spent 43 weeks at number one on Billboard's Hot Gospel Songs chart and crossed…
James Cleveland: the “King of Gospel” who built the modern choir sound
James Cleveland, known as the King of Gospel, founded the Gospel Music Workshop of America in the late 1960s and played on Aretha Franklin's 1972 album…
A farmhand picking cotton hummed a secular song and thought of heaven: “I’ll Fly Away”
Albert E. Brumley wrote "I'll Fly Away" in 1929 while picking cotton on his family's farm in Oklahoma, reportedly humming a secular ballad about a prisoner…
Written for 500 schoolchildren in 1900, it became the Black national anthem: “Lift Every Voice and Sing”
James Weldon Johnson wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing" in 1900 for schoolchildren in Jacksonville, Florida, to perform at a celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birthday. His…
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was a spiritual about going home. It became a rugby anthem, and a debate
"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", a spiritual attributed to Wallis Willis, an enslaved man in the Choctaw Nation, was popularised by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the…
Formerly enslaved students sang spirituals to save their university. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, 1871
In 1871, a group of students from Fisk University in Nashville, most of them formerly enslaved, set out on a tour to raise money for their…
Before Elvis and Chuck Berry, there was Sister Rosetta Tharpe and her electric guitar
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel singer who played electric guitar with fire, took church music into nightclubs in the 1930s and 1940s. Her 1944 hit "Strange…
“On a hill far away”: George Bennard, a travelling evangelist, and the story of “The Old Rugged Cross”
George Bennard, a Methodist evangelist, wrote "The Old Rugged Cross" in 1912 and it was first sung publicly in 1913 in Michigan. It became one of…
Andraé Crouch wrote “Soon and Very Soon” and “My Tribute”. His choir also sang for Madonna and Michael Jackson
Andraé Crouch, the Los Angeles songwriter and choir leader behind "My Tribute", "Through It All" and "Soon and Very Soon", helped bring contemporary gospel into the…