Download [PORTABLE] Gospel Song My Soul Say Yes

The documentary will cap the educational performance project as a wellspring for music lovers who listen to WXPN, or anyone who listens to music and might be curious about the beginnings of their favorite songs and sounds.

Lewis, who says he went in with a fairly limited knowledge of gospel, walked out of the experience as an admirer of the music, and excited to share stories that have gone largely untold in this unique audio format.

Download Gospel Song My Soul Say Yes

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Whether this phone call really ever happened is unknown, but King really did adore Thomas A. Dorsey's elemental plea for divine intervention. He frequently requested it of the gospel greats he ran across at benefits and other gatherings, and told Jackson she should sing it at his funeral if he died before she did. The song is fatefully linked to King's last night: Right before he was shot by a vicious racist on a Memphis balcony, he called out to the saxophonist Ben Branch to play it "real pretty" at an upcoming meeting. Jackson did end up wailing the hymn at King's funeral, and Aretha Franklin did so at his memorial service. In the narrative he left behind, King lived, died, and was spiritually resurrected through Dorsey's glorious hymn.

But Martin Luther King, Jr. could hardly claim "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" only for himself. It is the composition that changed gospel music, setting the terms for the miracles of personal transformation within performance that define the Golden Age of Gospel that Jackson, Clara Ward, Dorothy Love Coates and so many other profound artists inhabited. Written at a time when singers in storefront churches and on city streets were pouring urgency into gospel music, but when the songs that formed the genre's canon still avoided the gut that the blues had accessed, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord," showed how music floating toward heaven could also be frank about the pain and pleasure of physical life. And the story of how the song was written, it turns out, is one that would make for a perfect Ava DuVernay vehicle.

In 1932, Dorsey, a Chicago-based gospel choir director and composer, wrote the song that changed his life and gospel's course. But it was inspired by a terrible loss. For years Dorsey had written dirty blues to pay the rent, under the name Georgia Tom, even as he tried to shore up his career as a man of God. He was doing pretty well by 1930, planning to leave sin behind: he had a home church, Ebenezer Baptist, where he was the musical director and had sold some hymns to songbook publishers. But he still hadn't figured out how to bring the urgency and sensuality he found in the blues into his sacred work.

Nettie Dorsey, then 24, was nearly due to deliver the couple's first child when Thomas decided to jump over to St. Louis to promote his songs among the local choirs there. In a postcard dated August 24, 1932, Dorsey wrote: "Dear Nettie, old dear, I'm having a pretty good time and success. I'll be home about the last of the week. Take care of yourself, bee [sic] sweet." Before he arrived back, Nettie died in childbirth. Dorsey rushed home in horror and grief and was able to hold his son before the infant perished the next morning. Dorsey, already prone to depression, fell into a tailspin. "I became so lonely I did not feel that I could go on alone," he later told his biographer, Michael W. Harris.

Yet bereft as he was, Dorsey wasn't alone. Like DuVernay's King, he found his strength and ultimately his artistic vision in community. The women members of his church sent him a steady stream of condolence letters and made countless visits to the Dorsey home, bringing covered supper dishes and enveloping the young sacred songwriter in healing compassion. And Dorsey also still had his muse, the blues, though it was dragging him into dark places.

"Take My Hand, Precious Lord" would go on to be recorded by virtually every major gospel star and countless secular ones before becoming forever associated with Martin Luther King. Within its legend, that one word means everything. Dorsey used the possessive, glittering adjective "precious" to step away from transcendence and to live fully in a complicated private moment, in pain and the desire to stop that pain. As both Jackson's and Franklin's versions prove, "Precious Lord" requires a singer to stay within her body while reaching heavenward, calling to God as a bereft blueswoman calls to a straying lover. Spirituals and hymns are meant to soothe need, promising experiences beyond it. "Precious Lord" comes alive within need, showing that need is, in fact, desire: yearning for a union so deep it might dissolve you.

The writing of "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" showed how a believer like Dorsey could find, in music, a passageway reconciling the separate realms of flesh and spirit. The holy music acknowledges that flesh and spirit are, after all, intertwined. This song, so seemingly simple, created a space where the beauty and poeticism of longing was revealed, and where the physicality of spiritual longing could be manifest. As in the mid-century milieus DuVernay portrays in Selma, the spaces where this song rules are private ones that open up into something bigger. There, women act in kind ways to point men toward revelations. Women also experience revelations, of course, as Jackson did whenever she sang, no matter if her audience was one person or thousands. Take my hand: In history told this way, the small gestures that unite people can build new artistic moments, new movements, new Americas.

Join our Gospel and Soul Choir, directed by singer Carla Jane! Sing a range of songs from contemporary classics to traditional gospel and soul songs, learn how to get the most out of your voice by acquiring new techniques whilst making new friends. 006ab0faaa