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♪ A train is a-coming
♪ It's coming 'round the curve
♪ That gospel train is a-comin' ♪
♪ Lord, coming 'round that curve ♪
- It's AM 1560, W-G-O-B 96.1 FM.
You just heard sounds from the Georgia Mass Choir.
Hey, request lines are now open at 414 5781 560.
I was born and raised in church,
and I've been singing practically all my life.
But at the time, I wanted to go and be a singer,
I call myself going to be a singer at UW Whitewater.
They told me I couldn't sing.
That's not good.
- But that didn't stop me though, 'cause I sing at church.
Of course, God had other plans
and the singing thing didn't work out for me.
So, which led me to go into radio.
Well, first of all,
gospel music is food for the soul,
and it feeds us in such a way
that we know where our faith lies.
- Everyone has an appreciation for music.
Music is a soulish thing.
I would tell you emphatically
that everyone has a connection to music.
What type of music may differ and vary,
but everyone has a connection to music.
I sing all day in the car. I just sing.
Voice can be hoarse, and I'm still singing, I love singing.
And so, music, it does a lot.
I think it can touch us consciously,
and I think it does something to us subconsciously.
It's very powerful.
♪ You better start doing everything right ♪
♪ You need to give it up
♪ Lord, God
♪ Sop doing those mean things to hurt your fellow man ♪
♪ You need to give it up
♪ Lord, God is what you need to do ♪
♪ You need to give it up
♪ Listen, church
♪ God wants you to do right
♪ In everything you do
♪ You better start doing everything right ♪
I just really love gospel music.
Yeah, I love that.
That's why I stuck with it so long.
Sometime I sing because I can,
and then sometime I just get the real, just a happy feeling.
It just does something to me.
The group that I join up with,
we call ourself the Masonic Wonder.
Kevin James, which was one of the guys that was a mason.
And they got together,
he and Charles McCullum and Amus McCullum,
back in the '50, like '57, '58.
So, they needed another guy to sing with them.
So, unfortunately,
they picked me up somewhere down the road,
so I was with them ever since then.
I couldn't sing,
I couldn't hold a chair of tune at all.
So, they taught me how to sing.
And then we got together and we'd do a lot of rehearsal
till we got ourselves together.
Then we singing every Sunday,
Sunday evening, Sunday nights,
and it really become like part of our life.
Because you know, you're busy all the time on the weekend,
going different places, singing.
So that kinda kep you from doing things
that you shouldn't be doing.
I never was a lead singer, never did.
I always liked it, but I never did do it.
I was always a background singer,
and that's where I wind up.
I stayed at the background.
So for singing a solo,
you don't want me to do that.
'Cause if you heard me sing a solo, you'll say,
are you sure you sing?
But I grew up in a Catholic church
where there was Gregorian chants sung in Latin,
and believe me, you don't hear a lot of that
on a radio nowadays, and there's a reason.
There's no harmony.
It's just like melody lines, and Et Cum Spiritu Tuo.
Here's the thing,
going into Walden Chapel on 17th and Center
and seeing the same setup I saw
when I went in a nightclub or a rehearsal
with a set of drums and a couple guitar amps,
a bass amp, a PA.
I think if I'd have seen when I was a kid
and heard that music when I was a kid,
there might still be a whole lot of religion in my life.
Because it was a celebration,
as opposed to a lecture, and a feeling of shame and guilt,
and a lot of other things
that weren't necessarily necessary.
It was a social service.
It was a part of the neighborhood and part of the community
that was stressed out, and help was being delivered.
- Gospel music usually hits the soul a little bit different
because of the way it's presented, the way we say it.
So it's like, maybe if you were raised
in a different type of church,
no offense, but like maybe Lutheran or Catholic,
they would sing through the hymn books,
♪ Yes, Jesus loves me
And then, if you go to a gospel or a Baptist,
or a Church of God in Christ it's,
♪ Yes, Jesus loves me
It's a difference, you get it.
Catholics and CME, they're more reserved.
You don't have to really do a lot.
But gospel people, gospel music,
we have to give everything that we have.
And so, then when you have other people that come in,
the reason why it's so easy for us to reach
the Catholics and people like that, it's because
it's something that they have not been exposed to.
So when they see this like, oh my God,
like they're doing all this and they sound like this.
It's a completely different.
Not saying, 'cause I like Catholic music as well,
I like hymns.
But with gospel music, it's just so raw and uncut.
You just don't know what you're gonna.
It's so spontaneous, there it is.
It's spontaneous.
And people like that,
opposed to coming to church on a Sunday morning
and just reading out of a book.
Come on, put your hands in the air.
- Well, I think it's a part of southern gospel
that's rooted into me,
and I don't think I can ever get out of that.
I could do other stuff, but it would be,
you drink a glass of water and this,
oh, this is not good, I need Kool-Aid.
So, that's about what it would be.
It's quenched the thirst,
but the Kool-Aid just taste a little better,
just a little more flavor.
But you come to a small church like us,
like this is a big building
but our congregation is kind of small, we be savvy.
People be like, I ain't heard you sing,
like where y'all come from?
Singing with my family,
and it's like I'm used to doing it,
but it's fun to do it because I'm with my family.
Nothing's better than to do something with your family.
It's like, you're like, oh, I'm gonna do this.
But then like when you get up in there and do it,
it's like you're not even worried about it,
or you're not even like gonna think about it
because you're too much in the spirit
more than just thinking about, oh, I gotta do this right,
or I gotta do this wrong.
But it's about what is in front of you,
not what was behind you.
Yeah, I'll practice with everybody.
I'm not really a technical singer.
I really just sing for my heart, like just sing.
Like I said, I never like with the school for it,
nothing like that,
but I just think I just sing whatever I feel.
If I'm peachy I'm peachy, but it's whatever I feel.
I think it's just something natural that I just have.
Music or no music, we just always sing.
We just make up songs.
Just always just like singing, all the time.
We just be hype, clapping our hands up and our feet,
like anything we can find.
If we can find a spoon in the house,
we're banging it on the table.
If we can find a balloon,
we're gonna pop it just to make noise.
I don't think I'm the best,
but I do good at my music, I'll say that.
- And you gotta have a passion to wanna do it.
You can't just get up and say, hey, I wanna do it.
There has to be a genuine connection
with the performer and the audience,
and the only way you can do that
is knowing what's inside of you.
We had an old, old radio where I,
whenever I got my me time that I could get away,
I always listened to a gospel program
that came on one of the station.
I think it was based out of Memphis, Tennessee,
called W-D-I-A, and they had gospel music,
they had an hour where they would have gospel music.
And I remember some of the songs
like from the Swan Silver Tones,
the Dixie Nightingales,
and people like Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers,
and I used to sit at my time and say,
well, I just like that.
It was just something that I got inspired,
I always got this warm feeling
and felt like that I was being a part of this music,
'cause it was like resonating, you know something to me.
Okay, the year I got involved with The Queens Of Harmony
was 1970, I wanna say 1971
that I actually got introduced to them.
And I went to their rehearsal,
and they told me that I had a natural voice for singing.
Okay, my try out with miss Yula Thomas,
better known as miss Honeybunch.
"Honey, we're gonna give you something real simple,"
in that voice, that type of voice,
I can't get as low it's her voice, but,
"We're gonna do something real simple, honey."
And she asked me to try out this song,
"It's all right to have a good time with Jesus,"
"it's all right."
'Cause she had that tone voice that was basically
that deep voice that brought the other voices together
to make the harmony and the melodious sounds in the song.
It's like music to your ears, when they acapella.
I think acapella is better sometimes than music,
'cause you can hear all the voices
and it's just like old school,
hand clapping, foot stomping basically.
Yeah, we bump heads, but that's my momma.
The Holy Gospel Singers, The Masonic Wonders,
The Queens of Harmony,
those really like was the top, coldest groups singing.
With Spiritual Tones, which is a group that I had made,
it's actually been changed about three times.
At first it was The Spiritual Charms,
The Spirit of Charms,
and we started when we was like five, six.
It was me, my best friend, her little sister and my sister.
When I'm performing one of my favorite songs, I feel good.
'Cause if it's my favorite song, I feel like it speak to me,
so I feel like it'll speak to somebody else in the audience.
I wouldn't say I'm good at the song.
That that's kinda cocky.
I would just say, I know everybody get a different feeling,
so they of course wouldn't feel what I feel,
but I would hope they feel something
God wise or spiritual wise that'll be like,
oh, you know what I'm saying,
like this just touched me,
or this just touched my little soul or something.
Audrey is my god-granddaughter.
Audrey is the little miss spiritual tone.
She comes in and she does her own thing.
She likes to sing.
Gospel music came here from west Africa.
It came when Africans were stolen from Africa,
brought here against their will
and put into chattel servitude.
They couldn't take anything with them
except their cultural history.
There, you would celebrate with music and dance,
the harvest, a ceremony that was a secular ceremony
as well as a worship of the gods.
When we came here, we came bonded,
and the spiritual aspects of the message
allowed us to become free, because it was a message of song.
Many of the spirituals that were generated during that era
that allowed the slaves to send the message.
So, it wasn't just a message of song
that allowed us to send signals
and to identify certain things
that would or would not be happening.
It was also the heart of the individual coming out of them
that said, I care about you enough to sing to you
in a dialect or in a message
that no one else understands but us.
- The spirituals were subversive
in that they could sing a song called Wade in the Water.
And while the plantation owners thought
they were just doing this to pass the time,
what they were signaling was
tonight, if you go across the river, wade in the water,
that's where you'll be able to join the underground railroad
and escape to freedom. ♪ Wade in the water
♪ God's gonna trouble the water ♪
And that's how it came here.
Now, that's how it came to the south.
And after emancipation and the development
of more African American churches in the south,
these migrants came to the north
and they got the same kinda jobs they had down south.
They were porters, and they were maids, and they were cooks,
and they were doing all these menial jobs for others.
But on Sunday morning
when they could get in their gospel choir robe
and march down that aisle of the church,
they were a coloratura, they were a tenor,
they were a soprano, they were somebody.
I always say that there are so many
forgotten heroes in music,
and there are so many forgotten heroes in music
just in Milwaukee,
quartets that struggled,
probably didn't make much money singing, but loved it,
did it for the love and the love of God,
who endured things,
who if they had a chance perhaps to travel to the south
in the 50s and 60s to sing,
who probably couldn't eat at the restaurant,
couldn't stay at the hotel,
couldn't stop to use the restroom at the gas station
'cause it wasn't allowed,
kidney problems because they couldn't use restrooms,
issues with regard to diabetes
'cause of the kinda foods you had to eat,
and got pulled over just because they were
four black men or four black women in a car
driving through Mississippi.
And in the worst cases said,
"You're a singing group, sing for us,"
and had to sit there
in the middle of the road in Mississippi,
singing for some sheriff or some deputy
who just thought he was so much better.
Sometimes would get all the way down to a program
and there was no money.
So, you had to love doing it.
They paved the way.
These are their forgotten heroes of music.
It takes a little bit of prayer,
and I would say a little bit of love too,
to hit that one spot.
But for the most part, people just can't afford to travel.
'Cause you gotta stay in a hotel, you gotta eat.
And you go on the road,
sometimes you get paid, sometimes you don't.
Sometimes they might promise your money,
and sometimes the person that promise you money
go out the back door.
Now, that there's the truth.
This was a community within a community
that gave people dignity.
It was a democratization of church goers.
Radio.
Radio was extremely important
in disseminating gospel music throughout the country,
in part because of the power of radio at that time.
Particularly the African American community
received much of its news and information from radio.
So you could be sitting in your living room
in Milwaukee in 1948 and hear Mahalia Jackson
sing at Greater Harvest
and then advertise her program down the street
and hear her selling raffle tickets.
This is the kind of experience you would have.
- Let me grab a guitar, if you don't mind.
And if you play a major chord,
and you add that seventh,
and then you add the other blue note, the third one,
where do you think that comes from?
That didn't come from Europe.
How do I put this?
Like soul wise, when you listen to a quartet,
it got some kind of funk in it.
And gospel's going,
♪ Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do ♪
That did not come from Europe.
I feel like having a good church tonight.
Now come on, put your hands together like this.
It's an art form.
It's American and it's African American.
I think gospel music in particular
helped influence a lot of these British invasion music.
I mean, the Rolling Stones were singing,
"This may be my last time."
That was a song that not only was sung
by The Staple Singers in gospel,
but was a song that was sung
during the civil rights movement,
and so much of the music that was called the devil's music
really came out of the church.
And it's interesting, if you listen
to the Million Dollar Quartet session from 1956,
the famous session with Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis
and Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash,
what do they start singing?
Gospel songs.
And not just the white gospel songs,
they're singing black gospel songs as well.
This is their jam session.
They're just jamming on the church songs.
Elvis loved gospel music.
He loved white gospel music, southern gospel,
and he liked black gospel music.
And he would go and listen to East Trigg Baptist Church
and absorb this music.
The best school of singing was the African American church,
'cause you were in the choir
and you learned how to sing in those choirs.
Maybe you had a chance to solo.
So you have people like Clyde McPhatter of "The drifters,"
learned everything he did in church.
Once you go gospel you, you just don't go back.
Even when you try to go back, it just comes out.
It's a sound, it's a feeling, a vibe, a swag
that just comes with the church,
and everybody that has come up through it has it.
The pop artists, they've got their style from the church,
and gospel music doesn't get the credit for it.
Like the Bee Gees,
their sound came from gospel music.
They might not wanna say it, you know?
Michael McDonald.
Most of the people who sing soul music
came outta the church.
I mean, and it's pretty evident in their art form,
you can tell.
Like you can tell when you listen to music
and they hit a certain lick, like a certain musical tone.
You like, ooh, that's church right there, right there.
And you like, you know that's just,
she just went to church on that one, or he just, you know?
Or even when they're singing,
they could be singing about love
but you know they took it to church.
'Cause that's where they got her from.
- Ray Charles, "I Got a Woman,"
that's a gospel song converted.
So, he's number one.
Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield,
ostensibly one of the very first soul records
to come outta Chicago, "For Your Precious Love,"
based on their experience growing up in a spiritual church.
- Otis Redding.
Boys Tamin.
Tina Turner grew up in the church.
You know who I wanna keep thinking of is Beyonce,
she grew up in the church.
Of course, Michael Jackson.
Dionne Warwick.
- Stevie Wonder.
Frankie Beverly and mates.
Etta James.
Jill Scott.
Brandy.
James Brown, gospel singer.
Little Richard came from the church.
I would say probably Patti LaBelle.
India Arie.
Ledisi.
Prince.
Walter Beasley.
- Toni Braxton.
Joda C.
- Gladys Knight.
- Usher.
Jennifer Hudson.
Jazmine Sullivan.
- Well, Aretha Franklin, she started off gospel.
Aretha Franklin's a real good example
of a woman dripping with gospel.
Ben E. King.
- New Addition.
- The Chantels.
Justin Timberlake.
O. V. Wright, Johnny Taylor.
Bobby Brown.
- Joe Henderson, the soul singer, he grew up in the church.
Like Sam Cooke.
Sam Cooke came right outta gospel and into secular.
Bruno Mars.
How can I not say Bruno Mars?
Eulaulah Hathaway.
Wilson Pickett.
Fantasia.
Like when she be seeing her little love songs,
I'll be like, that don't even match.
That's what she was created to do.
That's why Fantasia, she, I think she is church.
- Otis Clay is another one, great soul singer.
Grew up singing quartet music.
And Whitney Houston.
Whitney Houston, that's church,
you know, all of these artists.
Because when I hear it, oh man, what church does she go to?
That's the first question I ask somebody,
or who's their mother and father?
- It'd probably be hard to know
what secular artist didn't come out of the church.
A lot of these people I know they,
they sang in their churches
and they changed over from gospel to the R&B
because they were inspired and made more money.
So the church provided this sort of
essential experience in singing in front of an audience,
a congregation that gave individuals
who were interested in getting in the music business
this opportunity to then take that and promote it.
The gospel is no different when Jay-Z or Beyonce,
all them get on stage and people start carrying out.
They're reaching 'em.
They're reaching them and they're connecting with them,
let me put it that way.
With the gospel, it's the same thing.
And that's just where it starts.
And you can kinda, sometimes you'll see it, it'll come out,
and you are like, whoa, where did that come from?
But it's because of their roots,
and it started in the church.
You can kinda tell who come from church and who doesn't
because there's just a different component there.
In church.
I always tell people it's so much easier to sing R&B music,
'cause it don't take.
But in church, you cannot leave outta here and say you sang
if you're not drenched in sweat.
You have to put it all on the line.
When you think of Jennifer Hudson,
she puts it all on the line.
When she's talking, she sound like a tenor.
But by the time she get done singing,
she sound like a first soprano.
That's because she puts it all on the line,
and you learn that component of singing in church.
- It just has a swag to it that everybody wants,
everybody tries to duplicate.
And if you've not been to church on Sunday morning,
you can't get it.
♪ God's grace
♪ Amazing grace
I was a concert once
and some guy was on the stage singing,
and I'm like, man, I'm really sitting here enjoying this.
And I said to myself, I said,
and I know I could do the same thing.
I said, so if I'm sitting here enjoying these guys,
why are you sitting down not doing anything
and somebody could be enjoying you?
And I started a group,
I started my group back up just from that thought,
and that's the absolute truth.
But none of us had any actual formal training
of how to sing.
It's just something we just developed naturally.
We just started singing.
We found out people liked it so we kept doing it.
So gospel always lift the person up.
And if you are in a sad state,
the gospel always gonna try to tell you
you can come out of that state.
And far as the blues,
blues try to leave you in that spot sometime.
They'll say, this is where it is
and I've gotten used to this,
and it just don't bother me anymore.
Well, gospel is different.
Gospel try to pull you up on another level
to where, as I said before,
I don't think it's even possible
to leave somebody sad singing the gospel.
You might reach 'em sad, but it always lift them up,
because gospel music always encourages a person
that they can do better, or things can get better,
or things will be better,
and that's what I think gospel's all about.
Just like my daughter said,
she was shy, she was afraid to sing.
One man changed all of that.
I started when I was 12 at Mount Vernon Baptist Church.
We was on 6th and North Avenue then before we moved here.
And that's when I started singing.
I didn't sing much, but it was just little parts.
I was more so very shy,
and I've just started to kinda open up singing,
and then things that I went through in my life
just inspired me to sing.
And that's why I sing so hard every time I do sing,
because that's my testimony.
'Cause sometimes when you sing,
you just don't know if you gonna see the next day
so you gotta give it all you got.
And this man named Nwajei came, he was from Nigeria,
and he came and he was saying like,
there's a woman in the crowd,
and he was just like describing me but I didn't get it.
I'm like, you talking about me?
Then he said something where I had
like an encounter one night,
and nobody knew that but me and the Lord,
and he said that up there.
And I'm like, he talking to me, oh my God.
And I stood up, and then he had me come up for prayer.
He told me, he said he was gonna remove the fear,
and he said, every time you going sing, it's gonna be fire.
I'm singing it to him.
When I'm singing, I act like Jesus standing right there
and I'm singing.
That's how I sing every time.
I don't care if it's three people in the crowd,
one person, if it's myself,
I'm acting like Jesus is standing right there.
Milwaukee Gospel Jubilee was actually an idea
from a few of our board members
at progressive community health centers.
It would tie right into the mission
of what I do for my career,
which is provide healthcare for everyone,
quality healthcare for anyone,
no matter your insurance level, lack thereof,
and to have a facility and have staff and providers
that can give you the same healthcare
that you would get anywhere, quality.
So that's what I do to serve the community
for which I was raised,
this is where I practice medicine,
but to all also marry that with singing,
which is the other half of my life
with what I do with, with singing with our group
and singing in church.
Gospel music is a huge part of my life,
being raised on it.
Quartet music was heavily played in my household
with my dad.
He was a quartet, he is a quartet singer.
And just learning the different history on that
and who is who, and going to different programs,
local programs that would happen with him
was like huge for us growing up,
wondering what the choir's gonna sing,
how are we gonna pack it out or what's going,
or the fellowships that we have with other congregations.
So it was a lot of, it's a lot of fun.
How many of y'all holding out there?
♪ Holding on
♪ I gotta keep on holding on
I'm gonna say that again.
♪ Holding, yes
♪ Holding on
♪ I gotta keep on holding on
Listen.
♪ When I was just a little boy
♪ I didn't know what was true
♪ But since I found you, Jesus
♪ I know he gonna lead me through ♪
♪ I'm holding on
♪ Holding on
If you down and you need to hear it,
why don't you put on some good music?
And then it changes the atmosphere,
it changes your spirit,
and can change me from feeling down to feeling up again,
because it reignites the hope that you already know,
but sometimes with the challenges of life and the trials,
things can get you down.
♪ Holding
♪ Holding on
What I wanna know today, is there anybody out there?
♪ Holding on
♪ holding on.
I can go back to when I was a kid packing it, I was like,
we going over to this church, it's gonna be packed.
I wonder how we gonna do?
We gonna throw down, you know?
A healthy competition.
And you never know, just because you're up there
smiling and singing, doesn't mean you day is going great,
doesn't mean you're at the right place,
but you keep the fact that you still do the work
and you find yourself being ministered too as well,
in the midst of ministering to others.
♪ Oh, it's all right
♪ Listen, it's all right to have a good time ♪
♪ It's all right
♪ You can clap your hands
♪ You can stomp your feet
♪ You can shout if you wanna
All we gotta do is just praise.
♪ Praise God
♪ It's all right to have a good time ♪
♪ It's all right
- How many of y'all come to have a good time?
When we come here, I got five brothers, one sister.
So, we all come at the same time in 1956.
And you might want to know what made us move.
If anybody would remember the Emmett Till case?
He went down from Chicago, I guess,
went down to stay with his grandfather or grandmother.
Anyway, they accuse him of making some kind of
sex advance with this white girl.
They taken him after then and arrested him for that,
and they lynched him just terrible.
After they beat him up,
they put a big weight around his neck
and throwed him in what you call the Yasu River,
and that was all broadcast everywhere.
So, that's what made us leave.
When my mother went to the mailbox
and she got the Jet magazine out of the mail
and she opened it up and she saw his picture,
and that was terrible for us.
'Cause we had no idea of leaving Mississippi
until this happened.
And my mother couldn't be satisfied,
she couldn't be happy,
'cause she just cried all the time because of this,
because she could see her boys
would be caught up in something like that.
So, everything was just like a 360 degree turnaround
when we come here.
It was just, everything was different.
And after having that little bit of bringing up from young,
so it had come back to me, and it was just a blessing to me.
That singing saved me 100%.
The Dalai Lama says, "Man is a great troublemaker."
And so, no matter how sophisticated we get,
how much more affluent we get,
there are always going to be people
that can't pay the light bill,
can't pay the car bill, can't pay the rent,
hungry, hurt,
family dying, disease,
shooting, killing, whatever the thing is
and need to express that,
and the music is a means to express that.
And this is probably the most emotional thing
you can think about, your life and your death,
and gospel expresses both of them
from the gut, and from the heart and the soul.
Being in these churches and knowing the people I knew,
like Charles McCullum,
who lost two grandchildren to gun violence.
And he's up on stage, he said,
"I woke up this morning on the green side of the grass.
Thank you, Lord."
If that doesn't impress you, what does?
The music comes from such a stressful place.
I mean, it's like the way you make a diamond out of coal.
There's so much pressure on that culture.
God's music, what it has done for me,
it really changed my life
after the things that I've been through.
And then when I hear the songs and I hear a particular song,
they singing exactly what I went through,
I'm like, oh my God.
It just inspired me to wanna sing and help other people
how when I listened to the song it helped me.
And that's the way I wanna do it.
When I'm singing, I wanna bring somebody in.
- Gospel music is my whole life.
I don't know where I would be without it, actually.
When it comes to African Americans,
we have always been the bottom of the barrel.
We have always had to work extra hard
to get the respect and gain the that we deserve.
If we did not have the component of music,
we probably would die quicker than,
we probably would not be able to take
as much as we could take on,
but music is so strong that.
When I get mad, I turn Michael Jackson on.
And by the time that thriller album is over, I am okay.
I'm okay, seriously.
All right, fellas, let's do this.
- There's a lot of irony and cleverness in music,
done by people who you suspect
haven't been tested to the degree
people in the black community have.
If you're gonna generalize,
you could say it's a bit complainy, a bit whiny,
and it's a bit suburban,
and what's so bad about growing up
in a nice house in the suburbs?
So you're not getting along with your parents, welcome.
I think that's one of the big things I learned from gospel
is like, give it up a little bit, stop whining,
don't be so clever, say what you mean,
and help somebody.
- I've had some very, very bad,
I don't wanna say bad things,
but some very things that happened to me in my life.
I was shot.
I'm a survivor from meningitis.
I had a problem happen where my spinal fluid
started to leak out of my ear
because I had a pinhole leak at my base of my skull.
I was going through a lot of these bad things.
So, you know what, on my radio,
I was sitting there and the radio was on
and this song came on, and it was called
"I'm So Glad That The Lord Let Me Live On,
but this song ministered to me.
I just kinda transformed.
And it would just uplift me.
I would a strange feeling come over me.
It's it's just a heartbeat,
it's the thing that's been keeping me.
I've gone through some crazy stuff this year,
but I thank God for my heartbeat, which is the music.
There've been the number of hardships in my life
that had it not been for music,
I really don't know where I would be.
In the transition of my husband,
the music, the song is what kept me.
In your most isolated moment, you still have a song.
And so, allow that song and that expression
to come from your heart
and it will always keep you positive.
So, have there been pressures in my life? Every day,
but I manage them through prayer and song.
The other thing I like about gospel
is that you can measure it
by subtracting it from our culture.
If it wasn't there, what would we have?
And I think the answer is almost nothing.
We wouldn't have rock and roll,
we wouldn't have jazz, we wouldn't have blues.
And I'm appreciating things out of the folk tradition,
and gospel definitely is.
It's a homemade music that was made out of necessity.
It's like food.
You have to eat.
So we went to sing at Shank Hall.
Well, they was playing
all of the other kind of dancing music.
So when they called us up,
we didn't know nothing to do but sing gospel, so we sang.
As I was singing,
we were watching the people at the table that were drinking,
and there were one table I watched while I was singing,
they guys had got a beer
and he didn't take another drink out of that
long as we were singing.
And I watched him after we sang.
So after we finish,
he and a lady came behind now crying.
She said, I never heard nothing like this
And I'm looking at her, I say,
what do you mean you never heard nothing.
She said, "Oh, you guys, it's so warm feeling," she said,
and she was just really crying.
And I said, well, my God, this is.
And that made me feel that we might've been
doing something that was good,
that maybe would change somebody's mind as to how they live.
I'll never forget that, that was just fantastic to me.
Well, I've been singing since five.
For some reason music it spoke to me.
While everybody else was out playing
and doing sports and all of those other activities,
it just connected to me, it was where I felt comfortable.
And so, I did it regularly.
And with me doing it regularly, it became what I could do.
Some people could play basketball,
some people were books smart.
Music was just what I could do.
Didn't really get taught in the aspect
of going to school for it or any of that.
It was just a natural talent that I had.
In working with music,
I decided to work with a gospel choir at high school
at John Marshall High School.
And at first I was a little hesitant about it,
because I had just graduated from north division
and the young lady that I was dating at the time
had asked me to come work with her choir.
And I was just like, I don't have time for these kids,
even though I graduated like six months prior too,
but I looked at them like they were kids.
So at first it took me a minute,
and I decided to start working with them,
and it just grew and grew.
Music became my best friend.
It became my comfort.
When I didn't feel like I could relate to anybody,
I could always relate to music.
You know, it's like singing a love song
and you never been in love, you hear the lyrics.
But if you've been in love and you hear the lyrics,
hey, now it's saying something to you.
- It feels magnificent.
You don't real, but with any ministry,
I mean, you're helping others but it's helping you, too.
- If you're not doing music to reach someone,
then there's no, you're not, why are you doing it?
Gospel music is amazing.
Love, like all of that, all those good things.
Like it's just, gospel music is amazing.
- Gospel music has a way of speaking directly to the heart.
It has a way of conveying a message with such intent
that it always hits this mark.
But when you hear gospel music
and it's the real gospel music,
it definitely just opens your eyes
to colors that you've never seen before.
Gospel music is an American art form.
It deserves as much respect as blues, jazz, swing,
every other kind of American music, but it doesn't get it.
Every form of music changes your emotion.
When you get to gospel music,
it gives you inspiration, it gives you life.
Just by its name alone,
gives it authority over every other form of music.
This is the original soul music.
This was the music of people who could not
express themselves publicly for fear of backlash.
It is a voice for the voiceless.
That's what stands out.
We have a voice that no one else has,
no other, in my opinion, no, it's factual,
in any other genre there is no other,
it can't be, it's not comparable.
Can I get a amen?
Amen.
♪ I'm gonna hide behind the mountain ♪
♪ I'm gonna hide behind, hide behind the mountain ♪
♪ Every time I try to excel in you ♪
♪ My past keeps on beating me down, Lord ♪
♪ I need your strength, Lord, I need your power ♪
♪ So no longer will I be bound
♪ Save my life, Lord
♪ With my hands lifted up
♪ And my mouth filled with praise ♪
♪ With a heart of thanksgiving
♪ I will bless thee, O Lord
♪ I just wanna be like Jesus
♪ And I wanna walk right
♪ I wanna talk right
♪ I wanna live right and I wanna give right ♪
No, I'm not gonna sing.
♪ Four seasons to a year
♪ Winter, spring, summer and fall ♪
♪ You created so many things
♪ I know that you did it all just for me ♪
♪ I just wanna sing praises to the king ♪
♪ Lifting up my voice while I have the choice ♪
♪ You and I must make
It's terrible.
♪ Why am I treated so bad
♪ One by one we'll gain the portion ♪
♪ And they will dwell with the immortals ♪
♪ And when they ring the golden bells ♪
♪ Bells for you and me