Heilbut — The Gospel Sound

Author: Anthony Heilbut
Title: The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times
Year: 1971
Type: Book (Simon and Schuster)

The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times is a book by Anthony Heilbut, published by Simon and Schuster in 1971. It is a history of Black gospel music told through its singers, among them Mahalia Jackson, Sallie Martin, Dorothy Love Coates, R. H. Harris of the Soul Stirrers, Julius Cheeks and Marion Williams, by a writer who had attended gospel programs at the Apollo Theater since his teens. Heilbut defines gospel as the music of people in terrible conditions singing about them in an attempt to escape them, and he calls its singers and audiences “the best-kept secret of ghetto culture.” Robert Christgau called it in 1991 the definitive study of its subject, and Bob Marovich wrote in 2012 that it remained indispensable and credited Heilbut with the term “Golden Age” for gospel’s great period. The historian Claudrena Harold wrote that it and Robert Darden’s history extend their analysis past that era but give the later years less attention.

Heilbut was born in New York in 1940 to German-Jewish refugees and earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1966. He had attended gospel programs at the Apollo Theater since his teens in the 1950s.¹ Simon and Schuster published the book in 1971.² Heilbut dedicated it to “all the gospel singers who didn’t sell out.”³

The book is built on the careers and words of gospel singers, among them Mahalia Jackson, Sallie Martin, Dorothy Love Coates, R. H. Harris of the Soul Stirrers, Julius Cheeks and Marion Williams, and one chapter presents Cheeks and Claude Jeter as “the fathers of soul.”² Heilbut writes that gospel singers and their audiences “remain the best-kept secret of ghetto culture,” and that “gospel is simply the only music sung by people in terrible conditions about those conditions, in an attempt to get out of them.”² He reports Harris’s claim to have been “the first male ever to sing falsetto,” and writes that if Harris is right, “the falsetto sound that traveled from gospel to soul to the Beatles began as a Texas birdsong.”²

Heilbut’s later book The Fan Who Knew Too Much (2012) returned to the place of gay men and women in the gospel world, “the children,” in the parlance. Douglas Harrison, interviewing him for Religion Dispatches that year, wrote that Heilbut had already written about them in 1971, and the Limelight editions of The Gospel Sound from 1985 speak of “the gospel homosexuals.”⁴

An updated edition of The Gospel Sound, the fifth Limelight edition of 1997, uses Heilbut’s term “gospel-gargle” for a busy, mannered style of singing.⁵

Robert Christgau, writing in the Village Voice in 1991, called the book, twenty years after it first came out, still “the definitive—and damn near only—study of the subject.”³ Bob Marovich, in the Journal of Gospel Music in 2012, wrote that it “remains indispensable” and “helped jumpstart serious writing” about gospel, and that Heilbut originated the term “Golden Age” for the music’s great period.⁶ The historian Claudrena Harold, who dates gospel’s “golden era” from 1945 to 1965, wrote that Heilbut’s book and Robert Darden’s People Get Ready! extend their analyses past that era, but that their discussion of the later years lacks the detailed attention given to the earlier period.⁷

Key contributions

• A history of Black gospel built on its singers’ careers and words.
• Gospel defined as the music of people in terrible conditions singing about those conditions, in an attempt to get out of them.
• The passage of gospel vocal technique, such as the falsetto R. H. Harris said he introduced, into soul and pop.

See also

• The Death of Rhythm and Blues — Nelson George’s 1988 history of Black music and crossover
• People Get Ready! — Robert Darden’s 2004 history of Black gospel