How I Got Over: The History of Gospel Music

Robert Darden (Special Guest)

Robert F. Darden is a Master Teacher and Professor of Journalism, Public Relations & New Media at Baylor University. He is an award-winning teacher, researcher, and author, widely cited, quoted and interviewed on a variety of topics in the international and national media.

He is the author of more than two-dozen books, most recently:

• People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2005)
• Nothing But Love in God’s Water, Volume II: Black Sacred Music from Sit-Ins to Resurrection City (Penn State University Press, 2016) and
• Nothing But Love in God’s Water, Volume I: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement (Penn State University Press, 2014)

In recent years, this former newspaper journalist has been interviewed and featured by the BBC, several NPR programs (including “Fresh Air with Terri Gross”), the PBS series “The Black Church: This is My Story, This is My Song” with Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., and in numerous national magazines, newspapers, podcasts and webpages. His essays, features, editorials and columns have appeared in The New York Times, The Oxford American, Christianity Today, The Dallas Morning News, Huffington Post and hundreds of others.

Darden is the most awarded professor in Baylor University history, having received virtually all of the university’s teaching and research awards, including:

• Outstanding Teacher, College of Arts & Sciences
• Diversity Award (with the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project)
• Cornelia Marschall Smith Award for Outstanding Professor at Baylor University 
• Outstanding Researcher, College of Arts & Sciences
• Diversity Award (on his own)

In 2020, he was named Baylor University’s 27th Master Teacher.

In May 2021, Darden was selected by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation as a Piper Professor for the state of Texas. He is only the 12th Baylor professor so honored.

He was Gospel Music Editor for Billboard Magazine from 1984 to 1998. He was also Senior Editor of The Wittenburg Door from 1988 to 2008. Darden is also the founder of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at Baylor (BGMRP), the world’s largest initiative to identify, acquire, scan, digitize, catalog and make accessible America’s fast-vanishing legacy of vinyl from gospel music’s “Golden Age.” The BGMRP provides the gospel music for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington D.C. 

Darden was named “Wacoan of the Year” by The Wacoan Magazine in 2011. In 2020, he was named “Distinguished Alumni” of the Baylor Line Foundation. He will serve as chief consultation on Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s upcoming four-part documentary series for PBS, “The History of Black Gospel Music & Preaching.”

He and his wife, Dr. Mary Landon Darden, live in Waco, Texas. They have three children and four grandchildren.

 

Black Gospel Music Preservation Program

The Black Gospel Music Preservation Project - Quartex site (quartexcollections.com)

 

 

Richelle Terese (Host)

Richelle is the NAACP New Jersey State Conference Communications, Press and Publicity Committee Chair. and a 2021 Environmental Leadership Program (ELP) Senior Fellow. She is committed to her work as a freelance marketer, assisting community organizations with communications, media, graphic design, community engagement, research, campaigns, and program planning/coordination. Richelle studied at Rutgers University majoring in Africana Studies