gospel music, a genre of American Protestant music, rooted in the religious revivals of the 19th century, which developed in different directions within the white (European American) and the black (African American) communities of the United States. Over the decades, both the white and the black traditions have been disseminated through song publishing, concerts, recordings, and radio and television broadcasts of religious services. In the later 20th century, gospel music developed into a popular commercial genre, with artists touring worldwide.
White gospel music
White gospel music emerged from the intersection in the19th and early 20th centuries of various European American musical traditions, including Protestant Christian hymnody, revival-meeting spirituals, and assorted popular styles. This musical combination yielded a form that—despite many developments—has maintained some distinct qualities. The music is generally strophic (in verses) with a refrain, and its texts typically depict personal religious experiences and stress the importance of salvation. Most of the repertoire is set in a major key and is arranged in four-part harmony—similar in style to barbershop singing—with the melody in the top voice. Early gospel hymns had a relatively straightforward rhythmic and harmonic structure (using three basic chords: I, IV, and V), but as the tradition absorbed more influences from popular music, both its rhythmic and its harmonic vocabulary expanded.
In the first decades of the 19th century, gospel songs were transmitted through Sunday-school hymnbooks. Among the most widely used song collections during this period were those compiled by Lowell Mason, William B. Bradbury, Robert Lowry, and William Howard Doane. Fanny Crosby was the leading writer of gospel hymn texts. After the American Civil War (1861–65), the Sunday-school repertoire was appropriated and expanded to serve the Protestant revival movement, especially in urban areas. Singer and composer Phillip D. Bliss was among the most important figures in this endeavour, as were evangelist Dwight L. Moody and his musical collaborator Ira D. Sankey. Together, Moody and Sankey employed the Sunday-school hymns and new gospel compositions in their church services as major instruments of edification and conversion, thus playing a critical role in the establishment of gospel music as a legitimate means of ministry.
Until the early 20th century, gospel hymns were generally serious in their tone, but by the 1910s and ’20s they had begun to lose some of their austerity. Largely through the work of evangelists such as Billy Sunday, working with musicians such as Charles McCallom Alexander and Homer Rodeheaver, the music acquired a more upbeat character. The organ was replaced by the piano, which in turn was joined by other instruments. (Rodeheaver’s musical presentations often included his own trombone solos.) The vocal component of the music also took on a more demonstrative, lively quality, with lyrics that conveyed a more positive message. In the 1930s and ’40s, rural musicians such as the Carter Family infused their gospel music performances with elements of local Appalachian and other country music traditions, effectively blurring the boundary between sacred and secular styles.
In the second half of the 20th century, gospel hymnody again played a major role in a Protestant religious revival, becoming even more heavily influenced by popular styles and employing greater harmonic variety. In urban areas the popularized gospel music emerged as the foundation of many Protestant services—especially in Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and various fundamentalist churches. The most productive composer of this new gospel repertoire was John Willard Peterson, while Billy Graham was the most prominent—and internationally recognized—evangelist of the period.
In the rural South, gospel gained a new identity as a type of popular country music, sometimes called country gospel, that was both practically and stylistically a fully secular tradition (not intended for use in church), with such exponents as the Oak Ridge Boys and the Statler Brothers. Such secularized gospel music continued to enjoy a wide audience in the 21st century, through the work of many other artists, among the most notable of whom are the Lewis Family, Patti Sandy, Pat Boone, and Dolly Parton.