Was Gospel more influential on rock & roll music than the blues? Discuss?

That is a great point that highlights one aspect of Gospel. So many fine examples of how Soul and R and B artists incorporated it seamlessly. Aretha does it at 1:21-:22 in the song below.

 

Anytime a rock and roller, or pop singer, says to the audience "put your hands together" (or something to that effect), that is 100% gospel influenced.

 

the problem with this argument is in the very nature of the birth of rock and roll - which is often attributed to several different points along the same timeline - Rocket 88, Thats Alright Mama being two of them, there are others - those songs were originally purely of the blues category.

Gospel was indeed an influence, heavy at times - depending on the artist - but musically, stylistically - rock and roll originated as sped up, amplified blues. It was NOT sped up amplified gospel, in most cases. Please note the word MOST.

 

We've been through this before, 'pop' ws both a term in common usage and a thing well before the '60s. Why harp on this? Because I see a great deal of continuality with pre-rock pop music where others see only a break. Of course, there's elements of both, but which aspect matters in any particular context is another matter.

 

This Small Faces song is made up of just those kind of exhortations, with Steve Marriot on the pulpit.

 

The Animals had plenty of that as well, "Bury My Body", "Talkin' 'Bout You"

https://youtu.be/SealUms_KwE

 

Leon Russell concerts were a tent revival.

 

Don't think they did it that way in the church by law established, nor in most of the others tolerated in that realm.

 

Gospel had its own distribution through churches, the gospel highway, went throughout the US. Performances, records/78s, sheet music, etc., were sold through this system. Thomas A. Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, etc., thus very quietly reached and sold millions.


I believe Cash Box, Record World and Billboard bundled their sales into race/black music.

1947 sells 2 million units, 4 more million selling singles to follow:
Move On Up A Little Higher | Mahalia Jackson

 

Sorry, not sure what you mean. I have heard some recordings and seen footage of black church services and they seemed pretty wild and chaotic if it's that what you are alluding to. And of course I don't think the Small Faces had any pretensión of gospel authenticity but I don't know where that comes if not from the way black preachers interacted with their congregations, subsequently formalized, stylized and incorporated to religious singing.

 

'the church by law established' = The Church of England, an official State Church, the sort of thing the First Amendment was meant to guard against. The Small Faces record has church roots, but not any church those young mods were likely to have attended.

 

That went completely above the head of this non-native english speaker . It's funny you mention that anyway, yesterday I was listening to the Zombies' Odessey &Oracle and the background singing in that record reminded me of the angelical voices of children choirs, certainly a different kind of gospel singing and an under-recognized influence in the English pop of the time.

 

Inasmuch as Ray Charles and Motown are influential. There's a case to be made that gospel was more important than blues. Certainly black styles of popular music which intersected with rock veered from the blues towards gospel over this time frame.

 

I wonder if Sister Rosetta Tharpe has a thing or two to say here?


~Ben

 

I think if you are speaking in generalities, the British bands were far more influenced by Blues than Gospel, and I don't think it would be vaguely close. The Rolling Stones (who, after all, took their name from a Muddy Waters song), Fleetwood Mac (and their veneration of Elmore James), Cream (their first album had one each of Willie Dixon, Skip James, Robert Johnson, Doctor Ross and Muddy Waters/Hambone Willie Newbern), The Bluesbreakers (hello?), and Led Zeppelin (again, Willie Dixon, and Memphis Minnie). Interestingly enough, Zeppelin also covered two gospel blues songs from the great Texas evangelist Blind Willie Johnson: "In My Time of Dying" and "Nobody's Fault but Mine". But on the whole, if you listen to interviews by the Brit guitar greats they all refer in reverence to the blues albums they listened to as teenagers.

 

As much, at least. Rock's rhythm and energy is really the shout/praise break rhythm. The sense of catharsis and ecstatic abandon in rock is right from the sanctified church. It's no accident that songs like "Great Balls of Fire," with its Pentecostal language, came along at the foundation of rock and roll, or the falsetto whoops of Little Richard came from the likes of Alex Bradford, or that a '40s recording of Rosetta Tharpe with Sammy Price's boogie woogie trio like "Strange Things Happening Every Day" is all but formally indistinguishable from rock and roll. But also going back even earlier to the wedding of Texas barrelhouse piano with sanctified congregational singing in the music of Arizona Dranes, you can hear a lot of the foundations of rock and roll's driving rhythms.

Gospel music -- and by that I mean specifically the African American gospel of the COGIC church and other Holiness denominations that arose in the wake of the Azusa Street Revival in the early decades of the 20th century -- is the most important body of American popular music not to be sufficiently appreciated in terms of its originality and influence and boutiqued by re-issuers. The great Aladdin singles of the Soul Stirrers, one of the most influential bodies of 20th century American music on the development and emergence of soul (and gospel's melissmatic, squalling singing, which entered popular music through soul, is pretty much the way much American pop music of all sorts is sung today), have never received a quality comprehensive reissue in any post 78 format. The brilliant recordings of the astounding Archie Brownlee with the Blind Boys of Mississippi are only available in an semi-homemade Opal Nations edition with such extreme low quality phasey noise correction that it's all but unlistenable.

Of course American popular music --like most of American culture and all of American popular music -- is a hybridized, cross cultural melange, so there's all kinds of source music in it, gospel, blues, Anglo American folk song, shape note religious singing, boogie woogie (lots of boogie woogie), etc. So I wouldn't care to assign more or less importance to one or another source music. But gospel sure is a huge part of it.

 

I don't think that's right. I think when you look at a lot of the input music, it's stuff like Wynonie Harris's "Good Rockin' Tonight" which was kind of a novelty for it's time for hits driving hand claps very much summoning the storefront gospel influence. Chuck Berry's guitar playing bears the mark of Rosetta Tharpe's as much as any other influence (like I said in previous post, Tharpe's "Strange Things Happening Every Day" is all but indistinguishable formally from rock and roll). I also think of someone like Utah Smith, famous for strapping on wings, using a 100 foot guitar cable and running up and down the church aisles, or even sometime swinging over the congregation playing like this in 1953 --



You didn't need to speed up and amplify gospel. It was already sped up and sometimes amplified.

Gospel, as it emerged in the 1920s and 1930s in the sanctified denominations was already blending blues forms -- the "father of gospel Thomas Dorsey of course had been a blues songwriter and Ma Rainey's accompanist before mixing hymn with blues forms -- with ecstatic, high energy music driven by a four to the floor hard backbeat. A hugely influential singer like RH Harris' innovation was bringing country blues singing like that of one of his heroes, Blind Lemon Jefferson, into ecstatic Pentecostal music.

Worth remembering too, when John Work and Alan Lomax did their survey of music on juke boxes in Mississippi juke boxes in the 1940s, alongside big band and jump blues sides and pop songs by Bing Crosby were Rosetta Tharpe records (and not just her records with Lucky Milinder).

I think the influence of gospel is as broad, deep and pervasive on the emergence of rock and roll as any other source.

 

Ray Charles' "I Got A Woman" is literally a rewrite of "It Must Be Jesus."

 

You'd also have to know juke box numbers, as records were expensive in the 78 era and much of a song's popularity came from the jukebox market.

 

I guess my personal take is that Gospel influenced the Blues and the Blues influenced Rock 'n' Roll...

 

That is an interesting point. However, is I Got A Woman rock and roll? Close I guess. I think most folks would say it is not rock and roll. R and B and Soul instead.
Also, I Got A Woman strips out something very important from the song It Must Be Jesus which IMO removes it from Gospel and that is the repeating call and response of the refrain. The lyrics as well.
The song is a good example though of the similarity of Gospel and Rhythm and Blues but not Gospel and Rock and Roll.

 

Depends how you're defining these forms. Blues as we know it today first kind of appears in the historical record in the first decade of the 20th century. Gospel -- as opposed to earlier African American Christian music like 19th century spirituals and early jubilee singing -- really emerges in the wake of the Pentecostal explosion following the Azusa Street Revival and the Pentecostal turn in particular of the Church of God in Christ in the 1910s, and the music blended elements of the blues and related music with Anglican hymn harmonies and sing-song call-and-response preaching (it's easy to forget that records by preachers were big hits. I don't think blues is a tributary of gospel, but they're both related music that emerged around the same time in the same community from the same antecedents and cross fertilized each other.

 

Well, Pops grew up around Clarksdale, MS and saw Charley Patton and others as a kid and never lost touch with that, but if you asked Mahalia Jackson if she was our could have been a blues singer, as Dinah Shore often did on her show, she would have scoffed.

 

Take something like Alex Bradford's music with his background group of singers, The Bradford Specials, and the falsetto whoops, and speed it up, and maybe strip down the harmony to something more I-IV-V, and I think you have "The Girl Can't Help It." The "She can't help it, the girl can't help it" chorus sounds almost like a lift from the "hallelujah, glory hallelujah" chorus on Bradford's "I Don't Care What the World May Do." I can't hear Little Richard's music without hearing the profound impact of gospel on it at it's core as much as any other influence on it.