Take My Hand, Precious Lord—Thomas A. Dorsey and the Invention of Modern Black Gospel Music

 

                        Take My Hand, Precious Lord by the Rev. Thomas A, Dorsey sung by Aretha Franklyn.

As a mostly humanist Unitarian Universalist. I am skeptical of the theology behind Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey’s gospel song Take My Hand, Precious Lord.  I am not into anthropomorphic gods benign or otherwise who personally respond to petitionary prayer.  I am more of an unknowable spiritual Greater that reflects a harmony of all existence in the Cosmos kind of guy.  But there is no denying that millions take great comfort in a personal and loving God.  And who am I to naysay them.

Moreover, when I experience a great and soaring gospel song, I am on board with any Black Baptist congregation and for those moments reach out my hand with theirs.  I’m all in.

                         Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson.

Thomas A. Dorsey was a Georgia born former juke joint bluesman who once had fronted Ma Rainey’s Wild Cats Jazz Band.  In the mid-1920’s he began to record gospel music in addition to blues.  After his wife died in childbirth in1931 he wrote Take My Hand, Precious Lord and decided to devote himself exclusively to gospel.  The next year he became music director of Chicago’s Pilgrim Baptist Church, the city’s oldest and most prestigious Black church and remained in that position for more than 40 years.  He also organized his own gospel quartet, founded the first black gospel music publishing company, Dorsey House of Music, was a founder and the first President of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses.  He regularly appeared on Black radio and mentored dozens of musicians and groups including Albertina Walker, the Caravans, and Little Joey McClork.  But his greatest protégé Mahalia Jackson came out of his Pilgrim Baptist choir.

Dorsey singing and leading his Pilgrim Babtist Church gospel choir. 

Dorsey virtually invented modern Black gospel music which combined Christian praise with the rhythms of jazz and the blues and by referring explicitly to the person and his/her relation to faith and God, rather than the individual subsumed into the group by belief.  He used the call and response forms of blues and like jazz encouraged his soloists to improvise on the melody.  Female soloists like Mahalia Jackson were often the center piece of an animated choir.  He composed over 400 songs, many of them gospel praise including Take My Hand, Precious Lord—Martin Luther King’s favorite—and Peace in the Valley, It’s a Highway to Heaven, and When I’ve Done My Best.

Dorsey died in Chicago in 1993 at age 93.   

Many artists covered Take My Hand— including country and rock and roll artists Red Foley, Jim Reeves, Elvis Presley, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Nina Simone, Al Green, and Mavis Staples.  More recently several White contemporary Christian artists have recorded it with somewhat bland results.

One of several original or compellation Aretha Franklyn gospel albums.

When Mahalia Jackson died in 1972 at age 60 Aretha Franklyn sang Take my Hand at her funeral—the YouTube video we are sharing today.  Franklyn may have been known as the Queen of Soul but she grew up singing gospel at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan, where her father the Rev. C. L. Franklin was minister.  She continued to return to gospel music through her long and storied career.  When she died in 2019 Beyoncé sang it at her funeral.