Excerpts

Off the Shelf: If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me by Bernice Johnson Reagon

Reagon Read from the opening essay, "Twentieth-Century Gospel: As the People Moved They Sang a New Song" in If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me: The African American Sacred SongTradition by Bernice Johnson Reagon:

"I joined my first and only gospel choir when I joined the church at eleven years of age. It was the first gospel choir at Mt. Early Baptist, a small rural church in Dougherty County pastored by my father, Rev. Jessie Johnson. My sister Fannie, who played the piano, organized the choir. It was 1954—gospelwas everywhere. Most of the Baptist and Pentecostal churches inside the city of Albany, the county seat of Dougherty, already had gospel choirs. However, the country churches were sometimes a decade behind the city churches."

"We loved gospel music, and the coming of our own gospel choir, our own choir standing in white gospel robes (which my mother made), was so exciting! We learned our songs off the radio, and sometimes Fannie would order sheet music from the Chicago-based gospel publishing companies. Every Sunday morning the local radio station, WGPC, was reserved for Black gospel music. This is where we heard the latest hits on the radio. Mahalia Jackson was one of my favorite singers; the Five Blind Boys of Jackson, Mississippi, were my favorite quartet. I loved the music of the Roberta Martin Singers from Chicago, Illinois, and the Davis Sisters from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In addition to a gospel DJ playing the nationally renowned groups, Sunday morning was also the time when we heard local quartets, who presented fifteen-minute programs sponsored by funeral homes or a local store.

African American gospel music began as the exciting new congregational and composed sacred music in urban Pentecostal, Baptist, and some Methodist churches. The congregations of these churches were made up of people who had moved to the city from the rural South. By midcentury, gospel was completing a circle of sorts, as the old home country churches whose families had been impacted by migration to the north began to organize their gospel choirs."

Bernice Johnson Reagon is the dynamic founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, a Grammy Award–winning African American female a cappella ensemble. She is Distinguished Professor of History at American University and curator emeritus at the National Museum of American History, and she has worked at the Smithsonian Institution for many years. She is the editor of We'll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers and other works.
 
To read a longer excerpt or to purchase If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/If-You-Dont-Go-Dont-Hinder-Me,673513.aspx.

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