The "Godfather of Gospel Music"
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2018
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thomas A Dorsey is credited with developing Gospel music into a global phenomenon. He started his own musical career in jazz clubs and blues bars, but personal tragedy led him back to church, and inspired hundreds of Gospel songs that transformed the genre. Rebecca Kesby has been listening to archive recordings of Thomas A Dorsey and his singing partner Willie Mae Ford Smith, and speaking to Professor Albert J Raboteau from Princeton University.
(PHOTO: Thomas A. Dorsey - 1982. Courtesy of National Endowment For Arts/Humanities/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock. Credit REX)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC Sounds hello and thank you for |
| 0:30.9 | downloading this witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me Rebecca |
| 0:36.2 | Kespi and today we head for America in the early 20th century to revisit the origins of a |
| 0:43.0 | form of spiritual music that not only became widely popular in mainstream culture |
| 0:48.0 | but that also changed how Christianity is practiced. |
| 0:52.0 | I've been listening through the archives to the Godfather of Gospel. |
| 0:56.2 | I was standing by the bedside of a neighbor who was just about the cross the swelling tide? |
| 1:05.0 | Thomas A Dorsey died |
| 1:08.0 | in January 1993 at the age of 93, |
| 1:12.0 | leaving behind him a vast collection of music spanning back to the 1920s. |
| 1:18.0 | Many credit him with practically inventing gospel. |
| 1:25.8 | Gospel's good news. |
| 1:27.7 | We had enough bad news and the gospel is supposed to bring good news. |
| 1:33.2 | But it wasn't good news for gospel singers in the early years. |
| 1:36.9 | Musicians like Dorsey were considered revolutionary and not in a good way. |
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