BLUESMUSE39. It’s hard to believe that America’s Father of Black Gospel Music, Thomas A. Dorsey, was once a piano player in a raunchy blues outfit; but, then, isn’t that the unpredictability of pursuing a career in music?
Not to be confused with the white World War Two band leader, Tommy Dorsey, Thomas A. Dorsey was the black composer who not only coined the term ‘gospel music’ in the 1930s, but also finally persuaded the Baptist Church to accept what they previously considered “The Devil’s Music”. On top of that, he wrote over 400 blues and religious songs.
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| Georgia Thomas A. Dorsey: hip young dude. |
We actually mentioned Thomas in last week’s post which looked at the birth of resonator guitars, but during that time he was working with Tampa Red as Georgia Tom. (As a session player in those days, his other pseudonyms included Barrelhouse Tom and Texas Tommy.)
In the 1920s, Georgia Tom and Tampa Red performed as The Hokum Boys, playing a form of comic blues packed with Benny Hill-style sexual innuendo called hokum. Their biggest hit was, ‘It’s Tight Like That’, a link to which features in the previous post. Some sources say the 1928 track sold seven million records. It was certainly one of the biggest sellers of the 1920s.
Georgia Tom, as his name suggests, was born Thomas Dorsey in far west Georgia in 1899, moving to Atlanta in 1908. There, he left school aged 11 to play piano in a vaudeville theatre, no doubt taught by his mother, a respected church organist. Then, aged 17, Tom left his home in Georgia, as the song goes, for Chicago.
By 1924, at the height of what people called the hometown or moaning blues period, Tom was playing in Ma Rainey’s Wild Cats band, alongside Tampa Red.
Then, from 1928, Tom and Red recorded over 60 raunchy blues, most written by Tom, as The Hokum Boys. Produced in Chicago by Lester Melrose, Tom and Red were the original Hokum Boys, not to be confused with later versions which included Big Bill Broonzy, Scrapper Blackwell and Leroy Carr amongst others.
Ironically, even while Tom was pumping out hokum, he was already following a deeply religious path, writing his first fusion of religious music and blues as early as 1922. He tried to get the black churches interested in this new style of music but African-American church leaders wanted no truck with the devil’s music in those days and as Dorsey himself once said, “I’ve been thrown out of some of the best churches in America.”
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| Thomas A. Dorsey: church elder. |
After a couple of nervous breakdowns, Tom Dorsey suffered the grief of having his wife and baby die during childbirth. After this he changed his upbeat gospel blues style to the grief of moaning blues combined with words of religious comfort. Dorsey’s ‘Peace in the Valley’, for Mahalia Jackson in 1937 is the most recorded gospel song of all time while ‘Precious Lord’ has been covered by everyone from Aretha Franklin to Elvis Presley.
As the Rev. Billy C. Wirtz wrote in Georgia Music Magazine in 2008:
"Without him (Dorsey), such groups as the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, The Five Blind Boys and countless others would never have sung with the feeling and emotion his gospel blues allowed them to do.
"Without those groups, such secular singers as Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, James Brown and Al Green (all of whom came from the church) would never have found their voices and styles that turned music around.”
More about the birth of the blues can be found below:
How Blues Evolved in the UK is on the following link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital- text&field-keywords=how+blues+evolved+volume+one
In the USA, please follow this link:http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=how+blues+evolved
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