Stones River Baptist Church
From Our Minister Of Music
| Nolan's Notes
As an appreciation for the contribution African-Americans have made to gospel music, our music on Sunday, March 2nd, consists of spirituals which are included in our Baptist Hymnal. A special emphasis in this article is about a giant in gospel music.
Thomas Andrew Dorsey (b. Villa Rica, GA, July 1, 1899) traveled as a boy with his father, an itinerant Baptist preacher, playing the reed pump organ for his services. In 1910 he moved to Atlanta, where in the following year he attended a "Colored Night" service at a Billy Sunday revival and was impressed by Homer Rodeheaver's musical leadership. In Atlanta he also came under the influence of blues pianists and began to play for dances. About 1916 he moved to Chicago where he studied at the Chicago College of
Composition and Arranging, continuing to support himself as a pianist, plus working with record companies and music publishers. His composition Riverside Blues was recorded by King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in 1923, and from 1923 to 1926 he toured with the famed blues singer, Gertrude (Ma) Rainey, accompanying her with his Wildcats Jazz Band as well as composing and arranging music for her performances.
Dorsey was also composing sacred music and, after hearing the Rev. A. W. Nix sing at the 1921
National Baptist Convention, was inspired to write his first gospel song, "If I Don't Get There," published in Gospel Pearls (Nashville, 1921). After several years of involvement in both blues and gospel, he turned in the early 1930s to gospel music exclusively. In 1931 he and Theodore Fly organized the first Black gospel chorus at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Chicago. He and singer, Sallie Martin founded the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses in 1932, the year in which the Dorsey House of Music was established. Between 1932 and 1944, he toured America with "Evenings of Dorsey." Fry and Martin sang with him during the thirties, and from 1939 to 1944 he toured with Mahalia Jackson.
Dorsey reportedly composed nearly 1,000 songs, publishing more than half of them. He was influenced by the gospel hymns of Charles A. Tindley but sought to incorporate in his sacred songs "the feelings and the pathos and the moans of the blues" (Southern, Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians). Three of his best known songs published in The New National Baptist Hymnal (1977) are "Precious Lord Take My Hand" (1932, copyrighted in 1938), "Peace in the Valley" (1939), and "When I've Done My Best" (1939). Among African-Americans, Dorsey is known as "The Father of Gospel Music."
Precious Lord, Take My Hand
Thomas A. Dorsey wrote this hymn in 1932, a few days after the death of his first wife, Nettie, and their infant son. She died in childbirth, and the child died within 24 hours of the mother. Dorsey had been away in St. Louis on a gospel music tour with Theodore Fry when he received the telegram from Chicago about his wife. For several days he was lost in grief.
"I felt that God had done me an injustice. I didn't want to serve Him anymore or write gospel songs. I just wanted to go back to that jazz world I once knew so well," he said. A friend helped him through this period. There he began to play a melody, and as he did, he once again felt close to God and the words to "Precious Lord, Hold My Hand" came to him. It was not copyrighted until 1938. An additional stanza begins with the line, "When the darkness appears and the night draws near." This personal song of consolation has become Dorsey's most popular composition, having been translated into more than 50 languages.
The tune PRECIOUS LORD is Dorsey's arrangement of the mid-19th century hymn tune MAITLAND, commonly sung to the text "Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone." The Baptist Hymnal (1991) is the first
Southern Baptist collection to include this song.
"Sing"cerely,
Psalm 150
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