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

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by beenieman, May 25, 2023.

  1. pscreed

    pscreed Upstanding Member

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    Land of the Free
  2. Nintari

    Nintari Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    I know all that. I'm just saying that when you look at the chord progressions at the beginning of the genre, it's basically just blues bars over and over and over and over again. It was literally the same bars Robert Johnson had used decades prior. So to claim any genre had a bigger influence on rock is absurd, imo. The blues was by far the largest. At least at in its early years.
     
  3. altaeria

    altaeria Forum Resident

    There are multiple layers at play here.

    Musically, Blues was most influential.

    Vocally, however... Gospel is probably much more influential than people realize. Not lyrics. Put aside lyrics and focus on vocal delivery.
     
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  4. Rose River Bear

    Rose River Bear Senior Member

    The rhythmic drive aspect was brought up by another member early in the thread and you have added some other points about the rhythms of rock and roll and gospel. I always thought that the rhythm of most rock and roll songs came mostly from jump blues type rhythms and not really from Gospel. How about a song like Rock Around The Clock? I always thought it sounded like a jump blues swing rhythm and the second chorus is an R and B "Out" section. Before this thread, I never really thought that the rhythms and the tempos of early rock and roll were more closely related to gospel. I always thought of R and B and Jump Blues.
     
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  5. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    No question a lot of early rock and roll had that swinging shuffle feel. Obviously rock and roll was a hybrid of influences. But gospel was a big one. Gospel too at thay point was a hybrid of blues and Anglican hymnal harmony and sing song preaching and in the hands of Rosetta Tharpe jazz and jump blues and boogie woogie. But there's a lot of gospel at the foundation of rock and roll for sure.
     
  6. Rose River Bear

    Rose River Bear Senior Member

    Excellent points. Most of the time I can't tell when there is a gospel type rhythm in a R and B or Rock song. However, when I hear certain melodies and harmonies, some songs scream out Gospel to me. This song for some reason sounds like Gospel harmony and melody. Especially the way it descends in the piano. Maybe I am wrong. What do you think?

     
  7. drad dog

    drad dog A Listener

    Location:
    USA
    Gospel is so ingrained into the rock presentation that it's like it's invisible to people now. There are many things that people think are rock that are actually gospel. (Can I get a witness, the midnight hour, let me hear you say yeah, shout...) Because gospel really rocked. Blues and gospel were separate things. Ray Charles was the person who joined the two.
     
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  8. Swansong

    Swansong From Planet Earth

    Location:
    Idaho
    I think the influence of both gospel and blues played a big role in rock n’ roll music. I feel they were equally important, but soul music was probably the driving force behind the original rockers.
     
  9. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Well, the thing about gospel, as least as I'm referring to it and I think as many are in this conversation to refer to a particular African American Pentecostal music style that emerged and reached first flower in the years between WWI and WWII and held on to a golden age through the early or mid 1960s, is that it's less of a song or composition style but more of a mode or set of modes of performance (in that way it's a little like jazz, you can "jazz" anything -- a Tchaikovsky theme, a tin pan alley pop song, etc).

    All soul music of the '50s and '60s is basically just secularized gospel. After Sam Cooke, who was a young, good looking gospel superstar, left the Soul Stirrers to go pop (and at the same time Ray Charles was adapting gospel material and Alex Bradford's Bradford Specials sound into his Raelettes), there was a talent drain out of gospel into secular music. So many gospel performers became the superstars of soul, basically just performing secularized gospel -- Aretha Franklin (who had been touring since she was 14 with her very famous preacher father), James Brown -- who sang in gospel quartets very much in the style of Archie Brownlee, whose style you could continue to hear in his singing, etc, Wilson Pickett who sang in gospel quartet the Violinaires, I mean it all comes right out of gospel. But even before that, Billy Ward's Dominoes, which variously featured Clyde McPhatter and Jackie Wilson, adapted gospel quartet singing into a kind of music at the border between R&B and soul.

    And though after the 1930s and through the end of the golden age, gospel certainly developed a unique original repertoire and certain formal and harmonic elements that we identify as gospel-y, you could apply the gospel mode of performance to anything (still can, like if you saw Aretha Franklin performing Nessun Dorma on the Grammys some years back), and in fact in gospel practice, people did. You had gospel blues whether that was Blind Willie Johnson or really what Pops Staples brought to the Staples (lots of country in that too)' the hymns of Rev Charles Tindley, although they were written mostly before the gospel era as mainline Methodist hymn with more hymnal harmonies, not blues harmonies, became adapted as standard repertoire in gospel; you might gospelized slavery era spirituals, you might even turn an 18th century Anglican hymn like "Amazing Grace" into gospel. And of course there were lots of forms and inner traditions that gospel developed -- a capella quartet singing (usually involving at least 5 singers, a lead plus four harmony, and using swing leads trading), choir singing, prominent solo female performers, and even preaching which was delivered in a style that could approach song, and congregational singing, etc. As well as a pool of original composers whose work became the foundation of the new gospel repertoire-- Thomas Dorsey, Alex Bradford, Kenneth Morris -- and performing songwriters like Sullivan Pugh, James Cleveland, Cassietta George, etc, but each might have been working idiosyncratically -- Pugh and Staples in a really gut bucket, bluesy style, Bradford wrote so many great slow gospel waltzes that so obviously shaped Ray Charles' music, etc.

    Any and all '60s soul is heavily marked by gospel, and though Motown conspicuously and deliberately maybe pop-ified the arrangements a little more, the lead singing, the swing leads in groups like the Tempts, the harmony singing, the prominent tambourine (associated with storefront sanctified churches), it's all right up out of gospel and would have certainly be recognizably so to pretty much any African American in that era, certainly any who grew up in or even just had neighborhood exposure to Holiness Pentecostal services. This was music that was ubiquitous in certain communities. (And that doesn't begin to touch on white gospel traditions.)

    Like I said earlier in this thread, gospel music is one of the most important, pervasive and influential traditions in American music and really shaped American music in the 20th century, but it's been mostly left out of being boutiqued and reissued and celebrated by the typical record label and record buying producers and public they way jazz and blues, for two, have. It's been studied and written about a fair amount, but it's information that's mostly not drawn the attention of the music universe outside of gospel. But if audience today were as immersed in gospel music of the golden age and the traditional modes of gospel performance of that time as people who created rock and roll (and soul) like Little Richard or Elvis Presley or Bo Diddley and all of them really were -- encountered both at the level of professional performers, but just as importantly, congregationally -- the impact of gospel on rock and roll would seem much more obvious to them. We wouldn't have some of the ludicrous responses we've seen in this thread utterly dismissing the very reasonable proposition of the OP.
     
    Last edited: May 27, 2023
  10. If I Can Dream_23

    If I Can Dream_23 Forum Resident

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    United States
    Indeed. Especially on this favorite of mine...

     
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  11. If I Can Dream_23

    If I Can Dream_23 Forum Resident

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    United States
    I just want to say, chervokas, how much I appreciate your always educational and informative posts. I know I, for one, have learned a great deal from so many of your posts here and my musical knowledge at large has been enriched by your always well-written and substantial posts.

    Just wanted to say thank you because I know not everyone will. :)
     
    Last edited: May 27, 2023
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  12. If I Can Dream_23

    If I Can Dream_23 Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    I think the beautiful thing about rock and roll as its own artform is its "melting pot qualities".

    As seen, not just by this thread but by others, even defining "rock and roll" can be a challenge.

    Safe to say that all mentioned qualities played an integral role.
     
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  13. beenieman

    beenieman Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    New Zealand
    I did think about headlining this thread as "as influential" rather than "more influential". But as I thought about it and thought about rock & roll, as it originally arrived, I decided on "more" because that was my opinion. Not to be click-baity but because that's what I thought. If you disagree you are welcome to "discuss" as per the headline. But don't mistake what I think by falsely assuming I made it up to get your attention.

    While I expected some reflex reactions disagreeing with my premise (the notion that the blues birthed rock and roll has been the standard) it's good to see a number of posters giving thoughtful responses and both agreement and disagreement. And a number of people saying they are equal.

    Sorry you were bugged
     
  14. Mylene

    Mylene Senior Member

    Tin Pan Alley was the most important. When a couple of hack songwriters wrote a 'novelty foxtrot' called Rock Around the Clock Blues and Gospel went straight out the window.
     
  15. wore to a frazzel

    wore to a frazzel Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dala, Sweden
    Good point. The novelty aspect of r'n'r may be downplayed quite a bit.
     
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  16. HfxBob

    HfxBob Forum Resident

    This is a little reductionist perhaps?
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2023
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  17. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Thanks for the nice words. But really I'm no gospel expert. I always loved gospel music from my limited exposure to it as a child, but I realized at some point both how little of it and its traditions I was actually familiar with, and how profoundly its traditions and repertoire and modes of performance undergirded all this other music I loved and was familiar with, so I tried to learn a little bit about it but listening to lots of it obviously, but also by delving into the work of those who have tried to catalog and examine it a little -- Tony Heilbut, Horace Boyer (both a singer and a scholar), Opal Nations, Michael Harris' book on Dorsey, Mark Burford's book on Mahalia Jackson, Daniel Wolff's Sam Cooke book, Michael Corcoran's little monograph on Arizona Dranes, etc. But I feel like I've barely scratched the surface, in part because this is a music that, as I say, on the whole, really hasn't gotten the kind of popular and comprehensive repackaging, or the Ken Burns documentary treatment, or comprehensive scholarly histories, it deserves. I certainly feel like I have a lot to learn on the subject.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2023
  18. lazydawg58

    lazydawg58 Know enough to know how much I don't know

    Location:
    Lillington NC
    Amen to that.
     
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  19. lazydawg58

    lazydawg58 Know enough to know how much I don't know

    Location:
    Lillington NC
    The discussion leads me to wonder about the role if any played by Southern (White) Gospel music in the development of Rock? I know there was a great deal of musical back and forth between Black and White Gospel groups. I heard a lot of Southern Gospel music growing up and a lot of Gospel Bluegrass up to the present. While my Methodist upbringing didn't include the inspired highly emotional expressions of Gospel (though many songs in our hymnal were transformed into Gospel numbers) it was none the less all around me. Sunday mornings growing up included a local TV show featuring Gospel groups from the area. There were Gospel Sings over in Benson regularly, and there were as many Gospel Quartets locally as there were garage rock bands. To me there isn't anything better than a Quartet singing a cappella. So did Southern Gospel play a role?
     
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  20. cwitt1980

    cwitt1980 Senior Member

    Location:
    Carbondale, IL USA
    Hard to say now that we know Elvis was bit by the gospel spider to become the superhero he was. However, his best friend in the world was B.B. King.
     
  21. If I Can Dream_23

    If I Can Dream_23 Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    It's awesome hearing Elvis himself discuss this very topic on his "Comeback Special" in 1968...

    The "Saved" section at around 5:30 really shows the range that was Elvis Presley...

     
  22. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    My first exposure to gospel music was "Oh Happy Day" by The Edwin Hawkins Singers in 1969.:shrug:
     
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