June 24, 2020 • 31 mins
For a long time, Dorsey lived a sort of double life creatively. When he combined the two forms of existing music he played, he created something new, and changed religious music forever.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Trac V. Wilson. I have
been wanting to talk about Thomas Dorsey for a while,
well over a year, because part of his story represents
(00:22):
a scenario for an artist that I find ceaselessly intriguing,
which is that he lived a sort of double life creatively. UH.
I first learned about him when I heard one of
his songs being played by a live band last year.
I was in New Orleans and I asked the band
leader after their set what that song was, and he
was like, do you not know who Thomas Dorsey is?
(00:43):
And then I felt stupid. But then I looked into
a story and he went write on my list, UM,
and I really really love his work, so I thought
that would be a good time let's talk about him. Ultimately,
Thomas Dorsey made his mark by combining existing ideas in
his work and creating something new. UH. And that consequently
changed religious music forever. And Tracy and I actually had
(01:06):
a conversation before we recorded, where she said she asked,
did it change religious music or Christian music? And I said, well,
technically Christian music, but because even people who do not
feel particularly religious or are not Christian respond to it
and find it very spiritual, it gets to be a
little bit trickier to say it's just Christian music or not.
(01:27):
But we will talk about that and the incredibly uplifting
genre of music that he essentially created. Thomas Andrew Dorsey
was born in Villerica, Georgia, on July one, eight nine.
His father, the Reverend Thomas Madison Dorsey, was a Revivalist
preacher and a school teacher, and his mother, at a
(01:47):
plant Spencer Dorsey, was the church organist. The Dorsey family,
Thomas had several siblings, moved around a great deal before
settling in Atlanta in eight Eda and a senior were
both educated tam Dorsey attended Atlanta Baptist College, which eventually
became More House. Eda was a property owner and Villica
(02:08):
starting in before she married Thomas. She made that purchase
with the money she came into after her first husband died,
so they started out in really good standing. But the
Dorsey family's fortunes dwindled. Before they moved to Atlanta, they
had actually fallen into poverty Eda's land had been sold
off in pieces over the years to keep the family afloat,
(02:30):
and then they entered into a sharecropping arrangement which depleted
what little they had left. We have talked on the
show about how sharecropping systems essentially would just keep people
poor and in many cases make them poorer than when
they began. When they moved to the city, both of
Dorsey's parents had to leave their religious jobs behind for
other work just so they could make ends meet. His
(02:51):
mother started working by taking in laundry, and his father
took work as a laborer. This is a really difficult
time for nine year old Thomas. For one, his family
had been well respected back in Villarica, but there were
nobody's in Atlanta. He wasn't really accepted by his peers
at school, and he had to fall back a grade
from the third grade and repeat second grade. It's really
(03:14):
made him the odd man out among all of his
classmates who were younger than he was, and among the
children his own age who were in a grade above his.
And one recollection, he mentioned never getting invited to classmates
birthday parties and sometimes watching those festivities through the windows
of the celebrants homes, and because of that lack of
connection with kids his own age, Thomas started going to
(03:36):
vaudeville performances and hanging out at the theaters. This initially
began because it was popular for kids his age to
go to the kids matinees there. Uh These were theaters
where sometimes there would be a movie, but also there
would be live acts. But he started lingering long past
the matinees intended for children, so that he could see
the musical acts intended for adults. And it was there
(03:57):
in Atlanta's black entertainment scene of the Early Night hundreds
that he finally found a sense of belonging. Watching performers
such as Bessie Smith, who was also very young at
this time, and Ma Rainey inspired him to pursue music
as a career for himself. He had learned a bit
of piano from his mother and learned to play the
blues songs that were popular from some of the regular
(04:18):
piano men and touring performers that he'd come into contact
with at the theater. He started playing first at parties
it's kind of an unpaid fill in, and then he
started to play professionally. Still just a kid, he did
this at some of the saloons and what was back
then the black red light district on Decatur Street that
earned him the nickname barrel House Tommy. And at this point, though,
(04:39):
even though his mother had been very, very musically inclined,
he couldn't read music, and he knew that that was
limiting him. He had basically been learning songs by rote
without having to read music, so as a young teenager,
he decided to seek out music lessons. He took those
from a woman named Mrs Graves, but he had never
really liked struck Char schooling, so he gave up this
(05:01):
enterprise after just a short while, and he started once
again to look to professional jazz and blues pianists to
get the education that he truly wanted. And in some
cases they weren't teaching him actively. He was just watching
them and noting how they performed and what notes they
were playing. But he quickly saw the problem in all
of this. Professional pianists needed to be able to sight
read to get hired to a company acts that were
(05:23):
coming through town, and Dorsey's solution was that he didn't
want to go back to again formal schooling, so he
sent away for an assortment of books on music, and
he taught himself. He continued though, to play theaters and
house parties, but parties in particular were often broken up
by the police, so he would not get paid for those.
As someone who studied piano with a piano teacher and
(05:47):
had a piano teacher to teach me how to to
play and read music, um, the idea of teaching myself
to do it, like, yeah, I'd be difficult for me.
Uh Vers eventually became famous for gospel music, but for
a wide stretch of his early musical career he worked
in the very non religious genre of hokum music. That's
(06:09):
a blues style that's comedic in nature, and usually it's
very sexually suggestive. Dorsey wasn't usually writing the body lyrics
to these songs, though, he was arranging and composing the
music and playing the piano for recordings and occasionally singing,
and as we mentioned a moment ago, he was still
very young while doing this. He started his fill in
jobs when he was eleven or twelve. Before he was
(06:31):
a teenager, he left school to start pursuing a career
as a musician full time. He would work in the
hocum genre until the late nineteen twenties, but as Dorsey matured,
his music did as well. In nineteen sixteen, at the
age of seventeen, he moved from Atlanta to Chicago, Illinois.
He migrated north, like many other black Southerners, in the
hopes that he could build a better life for himself,
(06:53):
he would have more opportunities, and in the hopes that
he would just have to deal with less racism. This
decision was in for in part by the newspaper The
Chicago Defender. This was a black periodical that encouraged migration
north for better opportunities. This has come up in other
shows before as part of the Great Migration. Uh An
incident in which he was assaulted by a white store
(07:14):
owner for standing outside the shop was often something that
Dorsey cited as the moment he decided he was just
done with Atlanta. He had initially been planning to continue
on to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where his father had some family,
but he wound up staying in Chicago. He did, however,
return to Atlanta in the winters the first two years
that he lived there, because he could not handle the cold.
(07:37):
Chicago winters do not mess around they are brutal. As
someone who lives in Atlanta and has a best friend
in Chicago, I completely understand this arrangement. Uh. You may
notice that we are are edging up into the First
World War going on, and Dorsey registered, but he was
not drafted, and the thing that kept him from being
(07:59):
called up up was the flu pandemic. Thomas got sick
in the first wave, and he did eventually recover. He
returned to Atlanta again that winter, but he did not
go back to Chicago in the spring. He waited until
the violence of the Red Summer in nineteen nineteen had subsided.
Dorsey kept working during this time and claimed throughout his
(08:19):
life that he had walked into a club one night
and asked the woman playing the piano if she wouldn't
like a break. According to this story, she said yes,
she would like a break. He took over, and by
the end of his set he was established on the
Chicago scene. One of his most sought after skills was
his ability to play the piano quietly. That meant that
he could play it illegal after hours parties and not
(08:42):
attract unwanted police attention. That was particularly valuable during Prohibition.
Thomas found the Chicago music scene to be really competitive.
There were simply a lot of piano players and other
musicians with a lot more education and technique than Dorsey,
and he realized that while he initially seemed really popular
and he felt like he was successful, he kind of
(09:04):
started to notice that he was only popular in the
lowest socioeconomic wrong of black society. There So the parties
he was getting booked at were kind of like the
parties that poor people were throwing, and he wanted bigger,
more lucrative bookings. So he decided once again to give
formal training ago, and this time he enrolled at the
Chicago School of Composition and Arranging. Becoming more skilled in
(09:28):
composition and arrangement ended up being vital to Dorsey's long
term career. Dorsey started copyrighting his music in nineteen but
he was an outlier on the blues scene in that regard.
He spoke later in his life about how the blues
men at the time were really casual and cavalier about
their original work, saying, quote, well, all the blues sounded
alike for a while, anyway, so we never bothered about
(09:50):
the other fellow. If he got something of yours out
that's okay. I just let him take me out to
dinner or something like that, and if he thought I
infringed on him, there was no any transaction. Now, in
a moment, we're going to talk about an unfortunate detour
that caused success to elude Thomas in the early nineteen twenties.
But first we are going to take a quick sponsor
break the time that Dorsey spent in school and a
(10:20):
surgeon popularity for blues music really helped improve his standing
on the Chicago music scene. But as his reputation grew
and his career seemed poised to really take off, Thomas
had what is usually described as a nervous breakdown at
the age of twenty one. He had been working day
jobs and then playing at night, and the NonStop schedule
(10:40):
and not taking care of himself had caused him to
drop a lot of weight. His mother went to Chicago
to get him, and when she saw him, she found
him gaunt and exhausted. I think I read one one
account that said he weighed less than a hundred and
thirty pounds, and he was a grown man at this point,
so that's quite lean. Uh. He went home to Atlanta
with Eda to recover and during his time there, though,
(11:03):
she was very vocal about her disdain for the type
of music that he had been playing for a living,
and she really really urged him to turn to religious music.
He was still just a young man in his early twenties,
and Dorsey did not take his mother's advice. Once he
was feeling better, he went back to Chicago, But once
he was there he had a profound spiritual experience. Thomas
(11:23):
believed in God, but he didn't want to belong to
any one church when his worship was a little haphazard.
But while he was attending the National Baptist Convention in Chicago,
in one with his uncle, he heard W. M. Nix
sing I Do Don't You? And, as Dorsey would later say, quote,
my inner being was thrilled. My soul was a deluge
(11:45):
of divine rapture. My emotions were aroused, my heart was
inspired to become a great singer and worker in the
Kingdom of the Lord. In nine two, Dorsey copyrighted his
first sacred song, if I Don't Get There and more
and followed. He also became the music director at the
New Hope Baptist Church on the south side of Chicago,
(12:05):
and this was a really good fit because the New
Hope Congregation was open to some of the experimentation that
Dorsey wanted to try out musically. That was something that
a lot of churches probably would not have accepted. As
he put it, quote, I had the prerogative to take
a church song and put more into it. The New
Hope job only lasted a few months before Dorsey's interest waned.
(12:26):
He took a job with a band called the Whispering
Syncopaters at forty dollars a week, and the band became
really popular at clubs around Chicago. But after a few
months of that he moved on to the booming blues
recording business. Dorsey was able to assess the music industry
and its audience and then write songs that had mass appeal. Yeah,
some music historians will say these are clearly not his
(12:49):
best works because he was like, what will make money,
what will sell the most records? Uh In Thomas started
touring with famed blue singer Ma Rainey, who he had
watched for and when he was a kid, and he
performed under the name Georgia Tom with her Wildcats jazz band.
That's the name he also used as a recording artist,
and Dorsey was putting away money that he made on tour,
(13:10):
and he made a little nest egg for himself with
the intention that his next step in life was to
start a family. While Dorsey's star was on the rise,
his uncle Joshua, who also lived in Chicago, had taken
on two new household members. They were Frankie Harper, a
nurse that Joshua had hired to work in his drug store,
and Frankie's sister, Nettie. When Thomas and Nettie met, they
(13:32):
started a courtship immediately. In spring of Thomas proposed but
Nettie did not give him an answer. He also wrote
to Nettie's mother and asked for her blessing and did
not get a reply. But after several months of making
him wait, uh, Thomas would would describe later on that
there was another man in the mix also courting Nettie,
(13:53):
and he wondered what was going on there and who
would win her affections. But Nettie did accept Thomas's proposal
of marriage. They got married on August one of n
and they left Chicago together on August two, not on
a honeymoon, but on tour with Ma Rainey. Morainey had
made Nettie her wardrobe mistress, even though she had no
experience in that career, so that the newlyweds could travel
(14:16):
together again. It seemed like his life was in a
good place and his career was as well. But in
nineteen six Dorsey had a second nervous breakdown, and this
one was worse than the first had been. It had
started while he was touring. He noticed one night on
stage that his playing had what he called an unsteadiness.
That unsteadiness persisted and got worse until he wasn't able
(14:39):
to play at all. So Dorsey had no income, and
Nettie took a job in a laundry to keep them afloat.
This went on for more than two years. He had
sought the advice of all manner of doctors. They could
not find anything wrong with him. He rested, but no
improvement came, and Dorsey described feeling quote perplexed, sick, disturbed,
(15:00):
in a bundle of confusion. The thought of losing his
musicality forever was a particularly dark thing. He considered suicide
during this time, and he told a biographer years later, quote,
I was just standing out there ready. Maybe to jump
in Lake Michigan if it wasn't nothing else to do.
I didn't feel exactly like that, but something had to happen. Ultimately,
(15:22):
it was an encounter with a faith healer, Bishop H. H. Haley,
that restored Dorsey's vibrance. Thomas had been convinced by his
sister in law to attend church with her. Dorsey had
always felt like he was a man of God, although
his relationship with the church had become less consistent as
he grew up. But that Sunday with his sister in law,
he met H. H. Haley, who said to him, quote,
(15:44):
Brother Dorsey, there's no reason for you to be looking
so poorly and feeling so badly. The Lord has too
much work for you to let you die. And according
to Dorsey's account of what happened next, Haley pulled a
live serpent out of Dorsey's throat, and having been for
need of that, his suffering ended, and on the spot
he pledged to do the Lord's work from that moment on.
(16:06):
So this is when Thomas decided to heed his mother's advice,
and he turned his regained talents to writing sacred music.
In Dorsey published his first piece of gospel music. If
you see my Savior sparks a desire creatively that would
define the musician's entire career, although he really struggled with
his identity musically for a while. Dorsey had planned to
(16:29):
work exclusively in religious music genres from the time of
his healing, but the religious songs that he was writing
were not well received. Churches simply didn't want them. They
were too modern, They used an eight bar blue structure,
and they had displaced syncopated notes, and some ministers even
called his work double music. Even though the lyrics were
(16:49):
very devotional and affirming, uh they were a departure in
that they were not so much about pain and sorrow
as they were about hope and sort of affirmative connection
with religion, and Dorsey thought this would catch on, and
he even tried sending free copies of some of his
songs to churches in the hopes that they would like
(17:10):
them and that they would buy more. But that did
not work, and for a brief period, just needing to
find work, Dorsey went back to playing non religious blues.
We're about to talk about a song that was just
wildly successful for him, but which he was ambivalent about
and we will get to that. After a sponsor break in,
(17:35):
Dorsey collaborated with Chicago based guitarist Hudson Whittaker, better known
by his stage name of Tampa Red on a hocum
song filled with sexual double entendre called It's Tight Like That. Initially,
when Whittaker approached Dorsey with the lyrics, which needed a melody,
Dorsey told him he didn't quote do that kind of
music anymore, but Whittaker convinced him and Dorsey really needed
(17:57):
the money. He very quickly that night wrote a tune.
They recorded it the next day, and the record was
a huge hit. They also recorded two other versions of it,
and the money did indeed come in. Dorsey's first royalty
check for It's Tight Like That again was two thousand,
four hundred dollars and nineteen cents, and Dorsey felt that
(18:19):
this sort of income justified his move back to secular
music because it meant that he could pamper Nettie in
a way that showed his thanks for her sticking with
him through his darkest times. But then Thomas lost a
lot of money when the bank that he had been
depositing his checks in went bust. He and Nettie both
believe that this is the work of God to remind
(18:39):
him that he had promised to devote his talents to
sacred music. But the sudden financial loss put him in
a position where he had to take paying jobs in
secular music, as his gospel tunes were still struggling to
find an audience, and as a consequence, Dorsey began living
something of a double life. He was still working on
his gospel songs, and he was uggling to get churches
(19:01):
to accept him, and he was trying all kinds of
ways to try to get a foot in that door,
but he was also working as a road musician playing
hocum songs. He said at one point quote, I wasn't
giving all my time to the church. See, I was
kind of straddling the fence, making money on the outside,
you know, in the band business, and then going to
church Sunday morning helping what I could do for them,
(19:23):
but they wasn't able to pay nothing. I could make
money out there. In Dorsey's life changed completely. He and
Neddie were expecting their first child do in August. The
schedule was tight. Thomas was supposed to be on the
road very close to Nettie's due date, but her pregnancy
had gone really smoothly and they decided it would be
okay if he traveled. Her sister, who was a nurse,
(19:45):
was also going to be with her. Neddie and Thomas
had arranged for the birth to be at a hospital,
but the hospital had no beds when she arrived in labor,
and she had asked to be taken home for the
birth rather than being admitted elsewhere. There were complications during
the earth, and Nettie died. Thomas had received a telegram
before his concert started that night that the baby's arrival
(20:06):
was imminent, and it did mention that Nettie was sick,
but it did not really communicate the grave nature of
the situation. So he did the concert and he called
immediately after they had wrapped the show, and that was
when he was told that Nettie was dead. He and
the bandleader that he was on tour with immediately left
uh and the bandleader drove him all the way back home.
(20:26):
He met his baby, a son named Thomas Andrew, who
was a large, seemingly healthy infant, but Thomas Andrew Junior
died the night after his mother. In the depth of
his grief, Thomas turned to music. He found a piano,
and he wrote a song that he would later claim
had come directly from God. It was called take my Hand,
Precious Lord. The lyrics were Dorsey's rewritten version of George
(20:49):
Allen's him must Jesus Spare the Cross alone? In a way,
this was really where he brought his two lives into one,
combining the rhythms of the blues with the words of faith. Yeah,
in some ways he had been toying with this idea
earlier in his career. Obviously, those early gospel songs were
not catching on. But this was like a point where
you could not argue that it was not a combination
(21:11):
of the two. And it was not accidental that Dorsey
chose to blend blues with a religious message. He had
noticed early in his career that the reactions that audience
gave it blues performances were often very similar to the
way people responded when they felt deeply moved in church.
He described the similarity in the nineteen seven interview quote,
(21:33):
I've seen women in the audience jump up, so touched,
jump up like you shouting in church. I've seen that
right in the theater. Whatever it is that touches them.
They jump up and ring and shout, just like we
would in church. It gets low down. Now what we
call low down in Blues doesn't mean that it's dirty
or bad or something like that. It gets down into
(21:54):
the individual to set him on fire, dig him up
or dig her up, way down there until they come
out with an expression. Verbally, if they're in the church,
they say amen. If they're in the blues, they say,
sing it now. And we should note that this was
not a style that was instantly popular or viewed positively.
Aside from his earlier work, this was also not across
(22:17):
the board something that people welcomed. There were some members
of black churches where this music first started appearing that
felt that it represented a step back, and they feared
that embracing something that felt like old culture and tradition,
that they were signaling to the white majority that they
were not interested in fitting in or assimilating, and that
in doing so, they were going to stunt the potential
(22:38):
for upward mobility for the entire Black community. Was concern
and discussion was not new, and it did not relate
only to music. Debate about the balance between adopting white
cultural norms or retaining a connection to their own Black
culture rooted all the way back to enslavement had been
happening for some time, especially in cities, and particularly as
(22:59):
more Black people we moved from rural areas to those cities.
Uh yeah, I read one note in a biography of
him that the people from rural communities that had moved
into more metropolitan areas kind of got looked at with
suspicion like, Oh, they're going to ruin it now, um,
because they didn't know quote how to act right. Um.
(23:20):
So this was a big conflict that was going on.
But Dorsey's Gospel Blues emerged as that debate was dividing
a number of congregations. But the combination of blues music
and the words of sacred text kind of became a
musical expression of that conflict, and to some degree it
was a modern blend of those two positions, and it
offered for a lot of people a sort of unification.
(23:43):
Decades later, in nineteen John Lovell Jr. Who wrote extensively
about Black music history, said that the creation of gospel
blues was quote an effort to give the spiritual a
modernity inform, content and beat the first time Dorsey and
his friend and fellow musician Theodore Fry performed to Take
My Hand, Precious Lord, which was that the Ebenezerer Missionary
(24:04):
Baptist Church in Chicago, just a few days after it
was written. The congregation very obviously loved it, and initially
that response confused Thomas Dorsey. He wasn't sure if people
were responding to the song itself or to the performances
of the art of the artists. But it became apparent
over time that he had created something new that truly
moved people. And as he said, this was not exactly
(24:28):
an instant hit due to all of that conflict that
we just mentioned. But over the next several years, Thomas
Dorsey's new brand of sacred music gained a following and
momentum as more and more churches started to welcome it.
He and Fry performed it in a lot of different
churches as kind of an introduction, and that's how most
people heard it for the first time. Soon, Thomas Dorsey
became the gospel choir director at Chicago's Pilgrim Baptist Church,
(24:52):
which became the epicenter of gospel blues. He continued in
that position into the nineteen seventies. He also started traveling
more and more to teach music to other choir directors,
and after doing that for just a short while, Dorsey
realized that there needed to be a governing body to
manage the growing need for education in this genre. In
nineteen thirty three, the National Convention of Gospel Choirs was chartered.
(25:15):
Once again, Dorsey was at the center in this organization,
which continues today, set up resources for churches that wished
to form their own gospel choirs. The National Convention would
send people out to churches and help them get their
choirs up and running. Dorsey remained the national president of
that organization for four decades. As it travels and administrative
(25:37):
responsibilities added up, Dorsey stopped performing on recordings. His last
session was in ninety four as a popularity as a
songwriter continued to grow. Take My Hand Precious Lord became
a standard that was sung and recorded over the years
by a lot of luminaries in the music world, including
Elvis Presley, Rtha Franklin, Mahelia Jackson, and John Cash. Many
(25:59):
of Dorsey's more than four hundred songs have similarly been
sung by popular musicians, both in and out of religious contexts. Yeah.
He also started his own publishing company because music publishers
did not want to publish gospel music written by black composers,
and he was like, Okay, I'll put my schooling to work.
Um in one. Dorsey also remarried, this time to a
(26:24):
woman named Catherine Moseley, and they went on to have
two children together. Dorsey's career was unique because he was
able to see that his music was important to people
during his lifetime. One of the last things that Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. Said before he was assassinated in
Memphis in nineteen sixty eight was that he wanted to
take my hand Precious Lord to be played that evening.
(26:45):
It was one of the civil rights leader's favorites. The
song was performed at Dr King's funeral. Thomas Dorsey died
on January twenty three, ninete in Chicago, after a lifetime
of giving music to people. He was ninety four years
old and he had developed Alzheimer's disease in the last
years of his life. In two thousand six, Pilgrim Baptist Church,
where Dorsey worked with its choir, burned that an accidental
(27:08):
fire that destroyed all but the exterior masonry. The church
had already been declared a historic site back in nineteen
seventy three, and there was a massive effort to raise
funds to rebuild the entire structure to what it had
looked like in the nineteen twenties and thirties. The focus
of reclamation efforts have shifted somewhat. The side is now
earmarked to become the National Museum of Gospel Music, and
(27:31):
fundraising efforts to fulfill that mission continue. Dorsey's many songs,
both secular and sacred, continue to be performed. Among other
notable recent instances Beyonce saying take My Hand, Precious Lord
at the fifteen Grammy Awards. You can hear that performance online.
It's quite touching. Earlier this year, the documentary Say Amen Somebody,
(27:51):
which covers the work of pioneers and gospel music, was
restored and re released. It features interviews and performances, and
includes Thomas Dorsey's speaking about writing Take My Hand, Precious Lord.
It's currently available to stream as a purchase or a
rental from Milestone Films. Writing about Mr Dorsey, author and
music producer Anthony Hilbut summed up the musicians contributions perfectly
(28:14):
when he wrote quote, A few composers dominate their genre
so dramatically as Thomas Andrew Dorsey, father of the gospel
song The Lion's share of the most popular gospel compositions
are his. That's Thomas Dorsey. I like him a whole bunch. Uh.
He's really really fun to go listen to interviews with
(28:36):
and I I really really love watching him speak because
you know, he's very open about his life being this
sort of duality for a long time, and that his
start was not in sacred music. Um. And you know
why he loves the loved the blues his entire life,
(28:57):
and it kind of um, even though it was born
of obviously very great tragedy, it's sort of wonderful that
he finally found success when he stopped trying to keep
those parts of his life siloed and let them be together. Um.
My listener mail is not entirely related, but it is
(29:17):
a little bit related because the person who wrote it
is a choir director, which is why I picked it. Uh.
It is from our listener, Libby, who writes, Dear Tracy
and Holly, I've been looking for a reason to write you,
and I think I finally have one. I started listening
to your podcast almost four months ago, but early in
February I started to earn my pH d and stuff
you missed in history class, and I vowed to listen
(29:38):
to every podcast from the beginning, no matter what. I
am a middle school choir teacher, so anytime I had
a break or I stayed after school degrade papers, I
listened to it a little bit as an aside thank
you for being an educator. Uh. Then in March we
left for the spring break that never ended and my
schedule opened up. Since March, I have listened to the
podcast whenever I've had free time. I've been working on
(29:59):
that PhD. UH, cooking sewing on my daily run. The
infrequent times have been in the car. My family made
sure that I did not miss a lot in history.
I grew up in the historic town of Hannibal, Missouri,
and my grandmother was a Mark Twain historian. But your
podcast fills the gaps that I missed, and honestly, I
don't know what I would have done without you guys
in the last four months. Uh, this is so sweet, Libby,
(30:20):
Thank you so much. It is always a great honor
for us to help people through any sort of difficulty
UM and to be their companions when they need a
little something to fill that that void. So thank you,
thank you so much. If you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcast at
iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us everywhere
on social media as Missed in History, and you can
(30:41):
subscribe to the show on the I heart Radio app,
at Apple podcasts, or wherever it is you listen. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Trac V. Wilson. I have
been wanting to talk about Thomas Dorsey for a while,
well over a year, because part of his story represents
(00:22):
a scenario for an artist that I find ceaselessly intriguing,
which is that he lived a sort of double life creatively. UH.
I first learned about him when I heard one of
his songs being played by a live band last year.
I was in New Orleans and I asked the band
leader after their set what that song was, and he
was like, do you not know who Thomas Dorsey is?
(00:43):
And then I felt stupid. But then I looked into
a story and he went write on my list, UM,
and I really really love his work, so I thought
that would be a good time let's talk about him. Ultimately,
Thomas Dorsey made his mark by combining existing ideas in
his work and creating something new. UH. And that consequently
changed religious music forever. And Tracy and I actually had
(01:06):
a conversation before we recorded, where she said she asked,
did it change religious music or Christian music? And I said, well,
technically Christian music, but because even people who do not
feel particularly religious or are not Christian respond to it
and find it very spiritual, it gets to be a
little bit trickier to say it's just Christian music or not.
(01:27):
But we will talk about that and the incredibly uplifting
genre of music that he essentially created. Thomas Andrew Dorsey
was born in Villerica, Georgia, on July one, eight nine.
His father, the Reverend Thomas Madison Dorsey, was a Revivalist
preacher and a school teacher, and his mother, at a
(01:47):
plant Spencer Dorsey, was the church organist. The Dorsey family,
Thomas had several siblings, moved around a great deal before
settling in Atlanta in eight Eda and a senior were
both educated tam Dorsey attended Atlanta Baptist College, which eventually
became More House. Eda was a property owner and Villica
(02:08):
starting in before she married Thomas. She made that purchase
with the money she came into after her first husband died,
so they started out in really good standing. But the
Dorsey family's fortunes dwindled. Before they moved to Atlanta, they
had actually fallen into poverty Eda's land had been sold
off in pieces over the years to keep the family afloat,
(02:30):
and then they entered into a sharecropping arrangement which depleted
what little they had left. We have talked on the
show about how sharecropping systems essentially would just keep people
poor and in many cases make them poorer than when
they began. When they moved to the city, both of
Dorsey's parents had to leave their religious jobs behind for
other work just so they could make ends meet. His
(02:51):
mother started working by taking in laundry, and his father
took work as a laborer. This is a really difficult
time for nine year old Thomas. For one, his family
had been well respected back in Villarica, but there were
nobody's in Atlanta. He wasn't really accepted by his peers
at school, and he had to fall back a grade
from the third grade and repeat second grade. It's really
(03:14):
made him the odd man out among all of his
classmates who were younger than he was, and among the
children his own age who were in a grade above his.
And one recollection, he mentioned never getting invited to classmates
birthday parties and sometimes watching those festivities through the windows
of the celebrants homes, and because of that lack of
connection with kids his own age, Thomas started going to
(03:36):
vaudeville performances and hanging out at the theaters. This initially
began because it was popular for kids his age to
go to the kids matinees there. Uh These were theaters
where sometimes there would be a movie, but also there
would be live acts. But he started lingering long past
the matinees intended for children, so that he could see
the musical acts intended for adults. And it was there
(03:57):
in Atlanta's black entertainment scene of the Early Night hundreds
that he finally found a sense of belonging. Watching performers
such as Bessie Smith, who was also very young at
this time, and Ma Rainey inspired him to pursue music
as a career for himself. He had learned a bit
of piano from his mother and learned to play the
blues songs that were popular from some of the regular
(04:18):
piano men and touring performers that he'd come into contact
with at the theater. He started playing first at parties
it's kind of an unpaid fill in, and then he
started to play professionally. Still just a kid, he did
this at some of the saloons and what was back
then the black red light district on Decatur Street that
earned him the nickname barrel House Tommy. And at this point, though,
(04:39):
even though his mother had been very, very musically inclined,
he couldn't read music, and he knew that that was
limiting him. He had basically been learning songs by rote
without having to read music, so as a young teenager,
he decided to seek out music lessons. He took those
from a woman named Mrs Graves, but he had never
really liked struck Char schooling, so he gave up this
(05:01):
enterprise after just a short while, and he started once
again to look to professional jazz and blues pianists to
get the education that he truly wanted. And in some
cases they weren't teaching him actively. He was just watching
them and noting how they performed and what notes they
were playing. But he quickly saw the problem in all
of this. Professional pianists needed to be able to sight
read to get hired to a company acts that were
(05:23):
coming through town, and Dorsey's solution was that he didn't
want to go back to again formal schooling, so he
sent away for an assortment of books on music, and
he taught himself. He continued though, to play theaters and
house parties, but parties in particular were often broken up
by the police, so he would not get paid for those.
As someone who studied piano with a piano teacher and
(05:47):
had a piano teacher to teach me how to to
play and read music, um, the idea of teaching myself
to do it, like, yeah, I'd be difficult for me.
Uh Vers eventually became famous for gospel music, but for
a wide stretch of his early musical career he worked
in the very non religious genre of hokum music. That's
(06:09):
a blues style that's comedic in nature, and usually it's
very sexually suggestive. Dorsey wasn't usually writing the body lyrics
to these songs, though, he was arranging and composing the
music and playing the piano for recordings and occasionally singing,
and as we mentioned a moment ago, he was still
very young while doing this. He started his fill in
jobs when he was eleven or twelve. Before he was
(06:31):
a teenager, he left school to start pursuing a career
as a musician full time. He would work in the
hocum genre until the late nineteen twenties, but as Dorsey matured,
his music did as well. In nineteen sixteen, at the
age of seventeen, he moved from Atlanta to Chicago, Illinois.
He migrated north, like many other black Southerners, in the
hopes that he could build a better life for himself,
(06:53):
he would have more opportunities, and in the hopes that
he would just have to deal with less racism. This
decision was in for in part by the newspaper The
Chicago Defender. This was a black periodical that encouraged migration
north for better opportunities. This has come up in other
shows before as part of the Great Migration. Uh An
incident in which he was assaulted by a white store
(07:14):
owner for standing outside the shop was often something that
Dorsey cited as the moment he decided he was just
done with Atlanta. He had initially been planning to continue
on to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where his father had some family,
but he wound up staying in Chicago. He did, however,
return to Atlanta in the winters the first two years
that he lived there, because he could not handle the cold.
(07:37):
Chicago winters do not mess around they are brutal. As
someone who lives in Atlanta and has a best friend
in Chicago, I completely understand this arrangement. Uh. You may
notice that we are are edging up into the First
World War going on, and Dorsey registered, but he was
not drafted, and the thing that kept him from being
(07:59):
called up up was the flu pandemic. Thomas got sick
in the first wave, and he did eventually recover. He
returned to Atlanta again that winter, but he did not
go back to Chicago in the spring. He waited until
the violence of the Red Summer in nineteen nineteen had subsided.
Dorsey kept working during this time and claimed throughout his
(08:19):
life that he had walked into a club one night
and asked the woman playing the piano if she wouldn't
like a break. According to this story, she said yes,
she would like a break. He took over, and by
the end of his set he was established on the
Chicago scene. One of his most sought after skills was
his ability to play the piano quietly. That meant that
he could play it illegal after hours parties and not
(08:42):
attract unwanted police attention. That was particularly valuable during Prohibition.
Thomas found the Chicago music scene to be really competitive.
There were simply a lot of piano players and other
musicians with a lot more education and technique than Dorsey,
and he realized that while he initially seemed really popular
and he felt like he was successful, he kind of
(09:04):
started to notice that he was only popular in the
lowest socioeconomic wrong of black society. There So the parties
he was getting booked at were kind of like the
parties that poor people were throwing, and he wanted bigger,
more lucrative bookings. So he decided once again to give
formal training ago, and this time he enrolled at the
Chicago School of Composition and Arranging. Becoming more skilled in
(09:28):
composition and arrangement ended up being vital to Dorsey's long
term career. Dorsey started copyrighting his music in nineteen but
he was an outlier on the blues scene in that regard.
He spoke later in his life about how the blues
men at the time were really casual and cavalier about
their original work, saying, quote, well, all the blues sounded
alike for a while, anyway, so we never bothered about
(09:50):
the other fellow. If he got something of yours out
that's okay. I just let him take me out to
dinner or something like that, and if he thought I
infringed on him, there was no any transaction. Now, in
a moment, we're going to talk about an unfortunate detour
that caused success to elude Thomas in the early nineteen twenties.
But first we are going to take a quick sponsor
break the time that Dorsey spent in school and a
(10:20):
surgeon popularity for blues music really helped improve his standing
on the Chicago music scene. But as his reputation grew
and his career seemed poised to really take off, Thomas
had what is usually described as a nervous breakdown at
the age of twenty one. He had been working day
jobs and then playing at night, and the NonStop schedule
(10:40):
and not taking care of himself had caused him to
drop a lot of weight. His mother went to Chicago
to get him, and when she saw him, she found
him gaunt and exhausted. I think I read one one
account that said he weighed less than a hundred and
thirty pounds, and he was a grown man at this point,
so that's quite lean. Uh. He went home to Atlanta
with Eda to recover and during his time there, though,
(11:03):
she was very vocal about her disdain for the type
of music that he had been playing for a living,
and she really really urged him to turn to religious music.
He was still just a young man in his early twenties,
and Dorsey did not take his mother's advice. Once he
was feeling better, he went back to Chicago, But once
he was there he had a profound spiritual experience. Thomas
(11:23):
believed in God, but he didn't want to belong to
any one church when his worship was a little haphazard.
But while he was attending the National Baptist Convention in Chicago,
in one with his uncle, he heard W. M. Nix
sing I Do Don't You? And, as Dorsey would later say, quote,
my inner being was thrilled. My soul was a deluge
(11:45):
of divine rapture. My emotions were aroused, my heart was
inspired to become a great singer and worker in the
Kingdom of the Lord. In nine two, Dorsey copyrighted his
first sacred song, if I Don't Get There and more
and followed. He also became the music director at the
New Hope Baptist Church on the south side of Chicago,
(12:05):
and this was a really good fit because the New
Hope Congregation was open to some of the experimentation that
Dorsey wanted to try out musically. That was something that
a lot of churches probably would not have accepted. As
he put it, quote, I had the prerogative to take
a church song and put more into it. The New
Hope job only lasted a few months before Dorsey's interest waned.
(12:26):
He took a job with a band called the Whispering
Syncopaters at forty dollars a week, and the band became
really popular at clubs around Chicago. But after a few
months of that he moved on to the booming blues
recording business. Dorsey was able to assess the music industry
and its audience and then write songs that had mass appeal. Yeah,
some music historians will say these are clearly not his
(12:49):
best works because he was like, what will make money,
what will sell the most records? Uh In Thomas started
touring with famed blue singer Ma Rainey, who he had
watched for and when he was a kid, and he
performed under the name Georgia Tom with her Wildcats jazz band.
That's the name he also used as a recording artist,
and Dorsey was putting away money that he made on tour,
(13:10):
and he made a little nest egg for himself with
the intention that his next step in life was to
start a family. While Dorsey's star was on the rise,
his uncle Joshua, who also lived in Chicago, had taken
on two new household members. They were Frankie Harper, a
nurse that Joshua had hired to work in his drug store,
and Frankie's sister, Nettie. When Thomas and Nettie met, they
(13:32):
started a courtship immediately. In spring of Thomas proposed but
Nettie did not give him an answer. He also wrote
to Nettie's mother and asked for her blessing and did
not get a reply. But after several months of making
him wait, uh, Thomas would would describe later on that
there was another man in the mix also courting Nettie,
(13:53):
and he wondered what was going on there and who
would win her affections. But Nettie did accept Thomas's proposal
of marriage. They got married on August one of n
and they left Chicago together on August two, not on
a honeymoon, but on tour with Ma Rainey. Morainey had
made Nettie her wardrobe mistress, even though she had no
experience in that career, so that the newlyweds could travel
(14:16):
together again. It seemed like his life was in a
good place and his career was as well. But in
nineteen six Dorsey had a second nervous breakdown, and this
one was worse than the first had been. It had
started while he was touring. He noticed one night on
stage that his playing had what he called an unsteadiness.
That unsteadiness persisted and got worse until he wasn't able
(14:39):
to play at all. So Dorsey had no income, and
Nettie took a job in a laundry to keep them afloat.
This went on for more than two years. He had
sought the advice of all manner of doctors. They could
not find anything wrong with him. He rested, but no
improvement came, and Dorsey described feeling quote perplexed, sick, disturbed,
(15:00):
in a bundle of confusion. The thought of losing his
musicality forever was a particularly dark thing. He considered suicide
during this time, and he told a biographer years later, quote,
I was just standing out there ready. Maybe to jump
in Lake Michigan if it wasn't nothing else to do.
I didn't feel exactly like that, but something had to happen. Ultimately,
(15:22):
it was an encounter with a faith healer, Bishop H. H. Haley,
that restored Dorsey's vibrance. Thomas had been convinced by his
sister in law to attend church with her. Dorsey had
always felt like he was a man of God, although
his relationship with the church had become less consistent as
he grew up. But that Sunday with his sister in law,
he met H. H. Haley, who said to him, quote,
(15:44):
Brother Dorsey, there's no reason for you to be looking
so poorly and feeling so badly. The Lord has too
much work for you to let you die. And according
to Dorsey's account of what happened next, Haley pulled a
live serpent out of Dorsey's throat, and having been for
need of that, his suffering ended, and on the spot
he pledged to do the Lord's work from that moment on.
(16:06):
So this is when Thomas decided to heed his mother's advice,
and he turned his regained talents to writing sacred music.
In Dorsey published his first piece of gospel music. If
you see my Savior sparks a desire creatively that would
define the musician's entire career, although he really struggled with
his identity musically for a while. Dorsey had planned to
(16:29):
work exclusively in religious music genres from the time of
his healing, but the religious songs that he was writing
were not well received. Churches simply didn't want them. They
were too modern, They used an eight bar blue structure,
and they had displaced syncopated notes, and some ministers even
called his work double music. Even though the lyrics were
(16:49):
very devotional and affirming, uh they were a departure in
that they were not so much about pain and sorrow
as they were about hope and sort of affirmative connection
with religion, and Dorsey thought this would catch on, and
he even tried sending free copies of some of his
songs to churches in the hopes that they would like
(17:10):
them and that they would buy more. But that did
not work, and for a brief period, just needing to
find work, Dorsey went back to playing non religious blues.
We're about to talk about a song that was just
wildly successful for him, but which he was ambivalent about
and we will get to that. After a sponsor break in,
(17:35):
Dorsey collaborated with Chicago based guitarist Hudson Whittaker, better known
by his stage name of Tampa Red on a hocum
song filled with sexual double entendre called It's Tight Like That. Initially,
when Whittaker approached Dorsey with the lyrics, which needed a melody,
Dorsey told him he didn't quote do that kind of
music anymore, but Whittaker convinced him and Dorsey really needed
(17:57):
the money. He very quickly that night wrote a tune.
They recorded it the next day, and the record was
a huge hit. They also recorded two other versions of it,
and the money did indeed come in. Dorsey's first royalty
check for It's Tight Like That again was two thousand,
four hundred dollars and nineteen cents, and Dorsey felt that
(18:19):
this sort of income justified his move back to secular
music because it meant that he could pamper Nettie in
a way that showed his thanks for her sticking with
him through his darkest times. But then Thomas lost a
lot of money when the bank that he had been
depositing his checks in went bust. He and Nettie both
believe that this is the work of God to remind
(18:39):
him that he had promised to devote his talents to
sacred music. But the sudden financial loss put him in
a position where he had to take paying jobs in
secular music, as his gospel tunes were still struggling to
find an audience, and as a consequence, Dorsey began living
something of a double life. He was still working on
his gospel songs, and he was uggling to get churches
(19:01):
to accept him, and he was trying all kinds of
ways to try to get a foot in that door,
but he was also working as a road musician playing
hocum songs. He said at one point quote, I wasn't
giving all my time to the church. See, I was
kind of straddling the fence, making money on the outside,
you know, in the band business, and then going to
church Sunday morning helping what I could do for them,
(19:23):
but they wasn't able to pay nothing. I could make
money out there. In Dorsey's life changed completely. He and
Neddie were expecting their first child do in August. The
schedule was tight. Thomas was supposed to be on the
road very close to Nettie's due date, but her pregnancy
had gone really smoothly and they decided it would be
okay if he traveled. Her sister, who was a nurse,
(19:45):
was also going to be with her. Neddie and Thomas
had arranged for the birth to be at a hospital,
but the hospital had no beds when she arrived in labor,
and she had asked to be taken home for the
birth rather than being admitted elsewhere. There were complications during
the earth, and Nettie died. Thomas had received a telegram
before his concert started that night that the baby's arrival
(20:06):
was imminent, and it did mention that Nettie was sick,
but it did not really communicate the grave nature of
the situation. So he did the concert and he called
immediately after they had wrapped the show, and that was
when he was told that Nettie was dead. He and
the bandleader that he was on tour with immediately left
uh and the bandleader drove him all the way back home.
(20:26):
He met his baby, a son named Thomas Andrew, who
was a large, seemingly healthy infant, but Thomas Andrew Junior
died the night after his mother. In the depth of
his grief, Thomas turned to music. He found a piano,
and he wrote a song that he would later claim
had come directly from God. It was called take my Hand,
Precious Lord. The lyrics were Dorsey's rewritten version of George
(20:49):
Allen's him must Jesus Spare the Cross alone? In a way,
this was really where he brought his two lives into one,
combining the rhythms of the blues with the words of faith. Yeah,
in some ways he had been toying with this idea
earlier in his career. Obviously, those early gospel songs were
not catching on. But this was like a point where
you could not argue that it was not a combination
(21:11):
of the two. And it was not accidental that Dorsey
chose to blend blues with a religious message. He had
noticed early in his career that the reactions that audience
gave it blues performances were often very similar to the
way people responded when they felt deeply moved in church.
He described the similarity in the nineteen seven interview quote,
(21:33):
I've seen women in the audience jump up, so touched,
jump up like you shouting in church. I've seen that
right in the theater. Whatever it is that touches them.
They jump up and ring and shout, just like we
would in church. It gets low down. Now what we
call low down in Blues doesn't mean that it's dirty
or bad or something like that. It gets down into
(21:54):
the individual to set him on fire, dig him up
or dig her up, way down there until they come
out with an expression. Verbally, if they're in the church,
they say amen. If they're in the blues, they say,
sing it now. And we should note that this was
not a style that was instantly popular or viewed positively.
Aside from his earlier work, this was also not across
(22:17):
the board something that people welcomed. There were some members
of black churches where this music first started appearing that
felt that it represented a step back, and they feared
that embracing something that felt like old culture and tradition,
that they were signaling to the white majority that they
were not interested in fitting in or assimilating, and that
in doing so, they were going to stunt the potential
(22:38):
for upward mobility for the entire Black community. Was concern
and discussion was not new, and it did not relate
only to music. Debate about the balance between adopting white
cultural norms or retaining a connection to their own Black
culture rooted all the way back to enslavement had been
happening for some time, especially in cities, and particularly as
(22:59):
more Black people we moved from rural areas to those cities.
Uh yeah, I read one note in a biography of
him that the people from rural communities that had moved
into more metropolitan areas kind of got looked at with
suspicion like, Oh, they're going to ruin it now, um,
because they didn't know quote how to act right. Um.
(23:20):
So this was a big conflict that was going on.
But Dorsey's Gospel Blues emerged as that debate was dividing
a number of congregations. But the combination of blues music
and the words of sacred text kind of became a
musical expression of that conflict, and to some degree it
was a modern blend of those two positions, and it
offered for a lot of people a sort of unification.
(23:43):
Decades later, in nineteen John Lovell Jr. Who wrote extensively
about Black music history, said that the creation of gospel
blues was quote an effort to give the spiritual a
modernity inform, content and beat the first time Dorsey and
his friend and fellow musician Theodore Fry performed to Take
My Hand, Precious Lord, which was that the Ebenezerer Missionary
(24:04):
Baptist Church in Chicago, just a few days after it
was written. The congregation very obviously loved it, and initially
that response confused Thomas Dorsey. He wasn't sure if people
were responding to the song itself or to the performances
of the art of the artists. But it became apparent
over time that he had created something new that truly
moved people. And as he said, this was not exactly
(24:28):
an instant hit due to all of that conflict that
we just mentioned. But over the next several years, Thomas
Dorsey's new brand of sacred music gained a following and
momentum as more and more churches started to welcome it.
He and Fry performed it in a lot of different
churches as kind of an introduction, and that's how most
people heard it for the first time. Soon, Thomas Dorsey
became the gospel choir director at Chicago's Pilgrim Baptist Church,
(24:52):
which became the epicenter of gospel blues. He continued in
that position into the nineteen seventies. He also started traveling
more and more to teach music to other choir directors,
and after doing that for just a short while, Dorsey
realized that there needed to be a governing body to
manage the growing need for education in this genre. In
nineteen thirty three, the National Convention of Gospel Choirs was chartered.
(25:15):
Once again, Dorsey was at the center in this organization,
which continues today, set up resources for churches that wished
to form their own gospel choirs. The National Convention would
send people out to churches and help them get their
choirs up and running. Dorsey remained the national president of
that organization for four decades. As it travels and administrative
(25:37):
responsibilities added up, Dorsey stopped performing on recordings. His last
session was in ninety four as a popularity as a
songwriter continued to grow. Take My Hand Precious Lord became
a standard that was sung and recorded over the years
by a lot of luminaries in the music world, including
Elvis Presley, Rtha Franklin, Mahelia Jackson, and John Cash. Many
(25:59):
of Dorsey's more than four hundred songs have similarly been
sung by popular musicians, both in and out of religious contexts. Yeah.
He also started his own publishing company because music publishers
did not want to publish gospel music written by black composers,
and he was like, Okay, I'll put my schooling to work.
Um in one. Dorsey also remarried, this time to a
(26:24):
woman named Catherine Moseley, and they went on to have
two children together. Dorsey's career was unique because he was
able to see that his music was important to people
during his lifetime. One of the last things that Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. Said before he was assassinated in
Memphis in nineteen sixty eight was that he wanted to
take my hand Precious Lord to be played that evening.
(26:45):
It was one of the civil rights leader's favorites. The
song was performed at Dr King's funeral. Thomas Dorsey died
on January twenty three, ninete in Chicago, after a lifetime
of giving music to people. He was ninety four years
old and he had developed Alzheimer's disease in the last
years of his life. In two thousand six, Pilgrim Baptist Church,
where Dorsey worked with its choir, burned that an accidental
(27:08):
fire that destroyed all but the exterior masonry. The church
had already been declared a historic site back in nineteen
seventy three, and there was a massive effort to raise
funds to rebuild the entire structure to what it had
looked like in the nineteen twenties and thirties. The focus
of reclamation efforts have shifted somewhat. The side is now
earmarked to become the National Museum of Gospel Music, and
(27:31):
fundraising efforts to fulfill that mission continue. Dorsey's many songs,
both secular and sacred, continue to be performed. Among other
notable recent instances Beyonce saying take My Hand, Precious Lord
at the fifteen Grammy Awards. You can hear that performance online.
It's quite touching. Earlier this year, the documentary Say Amen Somebody,
(27:51):
which covers the work of pioneers and gospel music, was
restored and re released. It features interviews and performances, and
includes Thomas Dorsey's speaking about writing Take My Hand, Precious Lord.
It's currently available to stream as a purchase or a
rental from Milestone Films. Writing about Mr Dorsey, author and
music producer Anthony Hilbut summed up the musicians contributions perfectly
(28:14):
when he wrote quote, A few composers dominate their genre
so dramatically as Thomas Andrew Dorsey, father of the gospel
song The Lion's share of the most popular gospel compositions
are his. That's Thomas Dorsey. I like him a whole bunch. Uh.
He's really really fun to go listen to interviews with
(28:36):
and I I really really love watching him speak because
you know, he's very open about his life being this
sort of duality for a long time, and that his
start was not in sacred music. Um. And you know
why he loves the loved the blues his entire life,
(28:57):
and it kind of um, even though it was born
of obviously very great tragedy, it's sort of wonderful that
he finally found success when he stopped trying to keep
those parts of his life siloed and let them be together. Um.
My listener mail is not entirely related, but it is
(29:17):
a little bit related because the person who wrote it
is a choir director, which is why I picked it. Uh.
It is from our listener, Libby, who writes, Dear Tracy
and Holly, I've been looking for a reason to write you,
and I think I finally have one. I started listening
to your podcast almost four months ago, but early in
February I started to earn my pH d and stuff
you missed in history class, and I vowed to listen
(29:38):
to every podcast from the beginning, no matter what. I
am a middle school choir teacher, so anytime I had
a break or I stayed after school degrade papers, I
listened to it a little bit as an aside thank
you for being an educator. Uh. Then in March we
left for the spring break that never ended and my
schedule opened up. Since March, I have listened to the
podcast whenever I've had free time. I've been working on
(29:59):
that PhD. UH, cooking sewing on my daily run. The
infrequent times have been in the car. My family made
sure that I did not miss a lot in history.
I grew up in the historic town of Hannibal, Missouri,
and my grandmother was a Mark Twain historian. But your
podcast fills the gaps that I missed, and honestly, I
don't know what I would have done without you guys
in the last four months. Uh, this is so sweet, Libby,
(30:20):
Thank you so much. It is always a great honor
for us to help people through any sort of difficulty
UM and to be their companions when they need a
little something to fill that that void. So thank you,
thank you so much. If you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcast at
iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us everywhere
on social media as Missed in History, and you can
(30:41):
subscribe to the show on the I heart Radio app,
at Apple podcasts, or wherever it is you listen. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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