For Fans of Gospel

Before Mahalia Jackson, gospel was largely confined to church walls and traveling tent revivals. Jackson carried it to Carnegie Hall, to Newport, to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where she prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to abandon his prepared remarks and reach for something deeper. Her 1947 recording 'Move On Up a Little Higher' sold over a million copies and made gospel commercially viable for the first time. Every big-voiced singer who followed, in any genre, owes her something.

The contemporary gospel establishment was not initially pleased with Kirk Franklin's drum machines and hip-hop cadences when 'Kirk Franklin and the Family' arrived in 1993. They came around. Franklin understood that each generation needs the music delivered in the sonic language it already speaks. His 1997 'Stomp' remix put gospel on urban radio and MTV. The audience he built created the pathway for later artists like Lecrae and Kanye West's Sunday Service to exist at all.

Say Amen, Somebody, George Nierenberg's 1982 documentary, is the great gospel film. But The Color Purple, both the 1985 Spielberg adaptation and the 2023 musical, captures something the documentary form cannot: the way gospel functions as survival technology for people whose lives allow no other room for transcendence. When Shug Avery leads the juke joint revelers back to her father's church, the music does not stop, it simply reveals what it always was.

Recorded over two nights in January 1972 at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, with the Southern California Community Choir and James Cleveland, Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace became the best-selling gospel album of all time. The 2018 concert film of the same material sat unreleased for decades due to technical problems; when it finally arrived, audiences heard and saw something essential: Aretha at the peak of her powers, not performing for a crossover audience, but singing specifically for God and for the people in that room.