The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church Book

Although gospel music has been a taproot for soul, jazz, and rock-and-roll, it remains a fairly insulated art, with its own venues, audience, and mythology. A good place to start investigating this revelatory music is Michael Harris's The Rise of the Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church. Dorsey (1899-1993), the inventor of modern gospel, began playing the piano in small-town Georgia bordellos at the age of 12. As a young man he wrote more than 2,000 blues songs, including such naughty novelties as "Tight Like That." In the mid-1920s, however, Dorsey began producing a string of sacred-and-profane hybrids, many of which became building blocks of the gospel repertoire. Harris has written a smart, scholarly portrait of a musical giant who continued to perform right through the late 1980s--and who made his feature-film debut at age 84, in the delightful Say Amen, Somebody.