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

An example of heavy gospel influence in Rock and Roll is Descending by The Black Crowes. Rock songs with this much Gospel influence are far and few between though IMO.

 

I agree with those who have been sighting the early Little Richard, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis records as evidence of gospel's influence on rock and pop - but it continued nicely into the '70's. Elton John said, "If in doubt, write a hymn". So many of his songs have that gospel feeling yet result in a pop sound. Yes, I realize "Benny and the Jets" hit on the soul and R&B charts but it was also a very pop/rock song having hit #1 on the Billboard and Cashbox charts. Leon Russell was another who had a heavy gospel touch to a number of his songs in the '70's. Joe Cocker would channel a Ray Charles' gospel influence in much of what he sang.
Does there exist rock and pop that sound to have no gospel influence? Yep - I don't hear much of it in even the most radio-friendly King Crimson numbers.

 

Gospel was very influential on R&B and soul.
For sure

 

Uh oh, now you're gonna make ol' Penniman's big toe shoot up his boot! Maybe you're focusing on the lyrics but I can totally see an inspired congregation singing a more religiously-appropriate lyric on "Tutti Frutti" in joyful jubilation.

 

I'm thinking of a statement by one of the old blues masters, I don't remember which one offhand, who said, "Gospel and blues are just the same, except in Gospel you're singing about Jesus, and in blues you're singing about your woman."

 

The Gospel according to Little Richard.....Let's Have A Party!

 

I think one of Rock's most iconic albums, Exile On Main Street (not incidentally, a formative influence on the Black Crowes), has several songs where the gospel influence is conspicuous.

 

I totally agree. The Stones integration of Gospel into some of the songs on that album is nothing short of astonishing. The integration of other styles is prevalent thru the entire album. I don't think another album by any other band has ever achieved what they did on Exile as far as that goes.

 

Not a chance lol. One look at Chuck Berry's chord progressions, and you'll see early rock music was just the blues sped up.

 

Now just ask yourself where the all-important speeding up, the sense of urgency comes if not from excitement of the black church services: bebop? bluegrass?... nah

 

But that just considers the harmony, which is only one part of music. The rhythmic drive of rock and roll comes very much from gospel music, that four to the floor and straight on until morning backbeat. The sense of ecstatic abandon. Many of the modes of singing and arranging (like I said, listen to Little Richard's "The Girl Can't Help It" and the Alex Bradford tune I posted above, "I Don't Care What the World May Do," from 1953; or listen to Elder Utah Smith's 1953 recording of "Two Wings" or listen to any of the records Rosetta Tharpe made with the Sammy Price trio in the '40s like "Didn't It Rain" or "Strange Things Happening Every Day"). That "sped up" quality -- which wasn't always necessarily a speedier tempo but a kind of hard, pushed forward, on top of the beat rhythm.

When you hear something like Chuck Berry' "Maybellene," which is really one of the first true rock and roll songs, it's a combination of a country two step hokum, with the driving energy and raspy timbres of the likes of Utah Smith and the boogie woogie piano plus guitar soloing of Rosetta Tharpe's records backed by Sammy Price. It's certainly not an example of "blues sped up," it's something else entirely -- a hybrid of multiple musics -- and blues, if its in there, is just one of several antecedent musics, and not the one closet to the surface, not even the one second closest to the surface in a record like that.

 

I'll offer another example, when I hear the piano playing of Arizona Dranes in the 1920s -- it's pounding, almost every note equally accented, percussive rhythmic drive, and hammering solo parts, behind her insistent sort of vocal, I hear the spirit and rhythm that formed the basis of rock and roll, emerging. Dranes stopped recording in the 1920s but she remained a somewhat prominent performer on the Holiness church circuit at least through the 1940s, she was certainly a direct influence on gospel figures who came after her -- like Rosetta Tharpe and Clara Ward -- but hell if Jerry Lee Lewis doesn't sound more like Arizona Dranes at the piano than he does a lot of other pianists.

People need to consider aspects other than the functional harmony of the music to hear where gospel underpins rock and roll -- in the rhythm, in the ecstatic character, in the modes of performance.

 

I dunno, there's SOOO much gospel in rock and roll in the '50s and '60s. Besides all the '50s music, I think of a group like The Band. Their organ-piano sound sounds like it comes straight from the late '50s/early '60s Caravans records. The way they harmonize and trade leads sounds like it comes straight from the Staple Singers Vee Jay records. It seems like there's a lot of focus in this thread on things like the formal harmony of the material, or the compositions themselves, but not so much the mode of performance and the rhythms of the music and arrangement and other characteristic elements -- like that Alex Bradford record I posed before. To me, when I hear Little Richard, maybe he's playing a blues or bluesy composition, with a jump blues kind of combo, but he's playing it in a very Alex Bradford-esque gospel style of performance. It may also be that people are not as familiar with the styles and range of golden age gospel music as they are with these other antecedent musics like blues and boogie woogie, so they don't hear the gospel as obviously.

 

But Chuck was just one contributor/originator, everyone else didn’t then line up to be told what to do by Chuck. Rock and roll didn’t start and progress because of agreed upon linear path. It was a moment that welled up. Everyone rushed in to make money and get heard. So it was layers, collisions and synchronicities of styles and influences: Black, white, brown, etc., jazz country, blues, etc., City and rural, east, west, north, south, etc.,

 

The Stones were one of the (few?) British rock bands that really dug into the gospel flavor -- of course their first self penned hit was paraphrase of The Staples' version of "This May Be Last Time." They did that great praise break ending on "Salt of the Earth." They dug into gospel blues like "You Gotta Move." But really, they were the most idiomatically American-esque of all the big British rock bands of the '60s in terms of all those input musics to rock and roll -- blues, gospel, country, at least for sure. None of the other big British rock bands of the time ever sounded so at home with that music or integrated it so fully into their own conception.

 

So the typical r'n'r rhythm with straight eights, totally dominating by 1958 but already present in vocal melodies in early songs by Chuck Berry and Little Richard, is actually picked up from gospel music? That has never struck me before. Listening to Arizona Dranes, it further strikes me that this is the rag time rhythm (think of e.g. Maple Leaf Rag). The big shift in intensity in popular music around 1957 caused by more rhythm in general and rhythm emphasising straight eights in particular, was thus a change in preferences rather than a new invention.

I wonder which influence the mechanical self-playing piano had on the development of the rag-time rhythm?

 

Forgotten part of the Band’s brown sound roots revival was the as important part Delaney and Bonnie played. With Duane, George, Eric, etc., they toured as essentially a back to roots tent revival with gospel featured prominently. The band became Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen Tour then Derek and the Dominos.

Delaney, Bonnie & Friends (feat. Eric Clapton) Poor Elijah (1969)

 

No. Blues inspired R&R and, to a small degree, gospel.

 

Don’t forget country, jazz, bluegrass, etc.,

Elvis: Blue Moon of Kentucky

 

1969, Worldwide Top 5 hit

lots of tension, release as the lead vocal is restrained, and the choral chorus exalts

Oh Happy Day - The Edwin Hawkins Singers

 

That's great! So nice when you get a little actual clarity about something.

 

Ugh, I can see a rich discussion unfolding here on the relative contributions of blues and gospel to the DNA of rock, but the unnecessarily click-baity provocation of proposing that gospel was more influential and wins some kind of dumb it’s-not-a-competition prize seriously bugs me.

 

Elvis was a fan...

 

"This is better than that" is definitely a recurring theme here.

 

Opera trained, and gospel steeped Lorraine Ellison sings with an intensity that threatens to come apart. Janis was listening.

Lorraine Ellison - Stay with me