This history of gospel charts the shift from then to now, from faith to fighting.
The musical history How They Got Over: Gospel Quartets and the Road to Rock & Roll opens with an automobile cruising through a colorful pastoral scene while a voiceover describes black church singers traveling the South. At first, it looks like the insipid Green Book, but be prepared: It’s followed by a collection of black-and-white performance footage of those gospel groups, all of it miraculous and mysterious.
Who were these people dressed in suits, dresses, or robes presenting themselves decorously yet revealing their souls, deep beliefs, and strong passions? Any relationship to today’s agitated, oversexed, hyper-political black showbiz is undetectable. Interest in the basis of contemporary black pop discovers something richer: The self-motivated perseverance — and artistry and creativity — preserved in these images is stunning.
Director and editor Robert Clem collates mid-20th-century African-American gospel quartets (often from 16mm kinescopes), once considered a subculture, but here seen as a vital expression of American life: the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Fairfeld Four, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Soul Stirrers, Inez Andrews & the Andrewettes, Gospel Harmonettes, the Davis Sisters, Blind Boys of Mississippi, Meditation Singers, Highway QCs, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and so many others with glory-seeking names represent a background of training and communion, not that dreaded activist term “community,” but restorative behavior, ritual, practice, and cultural tradition.
Ira Ticker of the Dixie Hummingbirds relates, “Gospel is what many of us came here singing. It was whipped into us,” a terse recall of slave history plus spiritual awareness. That’s epitomized by a duo called the Consolers (Iola and Sullivan Pugh) singing “I don’t know. It must have been the grace of God.” Then the Consolers smile, noblesse oblige.
Clem includes commentary from scholars Opal Nations, Otis Clay, Jerry Zoltan, and historian Joyce Jackson on how black life was formerly centered around the church. This complements testimony from aged performers (most recorded just before passing on) who recall the hardships and verify their endurance. Clarence Fountain of the Five Blind Boys remembering the blind schools “didn’t know nothing about nothing put enough whoopins on us to last a lifetime” or Tucker assessing an incident of police abuse (“If you just listen, they wasn’t saying nothing no way”) adduces those offenses with folk wisdom.
When Clem inserts questionable black-and-white footage of a white cop with gun, it’s a PBS trope, but Tucker’s saintly judgment prevails: “It wasn’t being a coward, it was just maintaining that I wanted to live. We had a determination second to none.” That’s when Emily Brams and the Sensational Nightingales sing “Then we tell the story how we overcome / We’ll understand our troubles by and by.” Consonant with the ’60s civil-rights struggle heating up, the next performance of singer Jimmy Walker and a quintet harmonizing, with arms spread like wings, is breathtaking.
How They Got Over illustrates gospel as a vehicle for these people, but it was artistic expression as well. As different styles developed, from smooth gospel to the techniques of the Pentecostal church, with shouting, more passionate testimony, and more drama, we see celebratory “Jubilee” singing mixed with hard gospel. The legendary group The Soul Stirrers perform “Lord Built a Shelter for Me” so fervently that sweat flows like tears.
Dennis Edwards, who eventually jointed the Motown pop group The Temptations, describes the special skill: “Singing hard, singing your heart out. In the intensity, everything was based on emotion. You got to feel it, and that’s what they were masters at.” “Reaching some sort of spiritual epiphany,” Zoltan affirms.
Singers Charles Johnson and Joe Ligon were stars in their own right, adding personality flourishes that Clem sees as the step before rock and roll secularized a spiritually authentic music. So the film’s title is from a gospel song about transcendence (Mahalia Jackson’s “How I Got Over” is the most powerful version), but its secular meaning alludes to the street-hustler rationale in which success and deception are synonymous. The doc’s history is interrupted by a quick, contrasting photo of Jay-Z — standing for rock and hip-hop commercialization that turned black musical sincerity into an obsession with narcissism, power, and political approbation. Unlike Sister Rosetta Tharp singing “I ain’t gonna study war no more” (a vintage term expressing pragmatic release), today’s secular pop has resulted in sour grasping after social advantages that are never satisfying.
How They Got Over implies an additional story about the shift of black moral power to today’s activist black pop, which replace spirituality with politicized rhetoric (as in Quest Love’s pandering pseudo-doc Summer of Soul). “For most of the groups, their commitment really was singing spiritual music,” Ira Tucker confirms. They sang with what Green Gartside of Scritti Politti called “the force of illocution.” Dennis Edward remembers, “It gave us a sense of pride. It made us better people.” This is what made gospel the backbone of the civil-rights movement and why it succeeded.
