Transcript

Derek Smith:

Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in-depth with Baylor leaders, professors, and more discussing important topics in higher education, research and student life. I'm Derek Smith and our guest today is Robert Darden. Bob Darden serves as professor of journalism, public relations and new media at Baylor. He's a writer, author of numerous articles and short stories, published author of more than two dozen books and a nationally recognized expert on black gospel music. Three of his books, People Get Ready!, and the first and second volumes of Nothing but Love in God's Water, are seminal histories of the music and its impact. He's the founder of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at Baylor, which houses thousands of digital copies of classic black gospel music, preserving the historic sounds for future generations. Dozens of news outlets, including The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, and more have covered his work, and selections from the project were included in the permanent exhibit in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. Darden has won numerous outstanding professor awards during his time on the Baylor faculty and he's here with us today on the program. Bob Darden, it's great to have you here on the program.

Robert Darden:

Delighted to be here.

Derek Smith:

You know, we're here in the KWBU studios where I interviewed you over 10 years ago when this was just a dream, and it's amazing to see how far it's come and thousands upon thousands of copies of music preserved.

Robert Darden:

I understand, in October we passed 14,000 items digitized. Which makes us larger than the Library of Congress in this field.

Derek Smith:

That's incredible, and it's receiving that kind of recognition for the impact it's having on preserving this music, and impact has grown in a number of ways. But I want to ask you, if you could go back to 2005, I know you wrote a piece in The New York Times talking about the need to preserve this music. If you could go back then and tell yourself one piece of information from the future about where the project is now or how it's impacted people, how it's impacted the music, what's one fact that if you could have told yourself about 15 years ago would have blown your mind the most?

Robert Darden:

Hold on to your hat. I had no idea how fast, how strong, how comprehensive this project would be in such a relatively short amount of time. I don't want to get too esoteric here, Derek, but clearly, God's hand was on this and I was just the vehicle through which this flowed.

Derek Smith:

You said over 14,000 pieces. I mean, it was 15 years ago that the idea came along. That's essentially over three digitizations a day for well over a decade. That's really incredible. For people who might've heard of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project or maybe haven't, could you give us a little bit of a rundown of the idea and how this came together?

Robert Darden:

Sure. The article in The New York Times said that 75% of all gospel music vinyl from the Golden Age was lost, whether through neglect, attrition, landfills, litigation, racism. When the piece ran, a gentleman named Charles Royce in New York called me and said, "You figure out how to save it and I'll pay for it." So I did the thing that smart academics do. We go to the libraries because the library is the one place everybody trusts in academia. As Pattie Orr says, "They're kind of like Switzerland in the academic universe," and said, "Guys," Bill Hair, Darryl Stuhr, and Tim Logan said, "Guys, what do we do?" And they said, "We can do this." We spent the next many months putting together what was then and now, the world's finest digitization studio to identify, acquire, digitize, catalog, scan, and maybe someday make accessible this fast vanishing legacy of gospel music. The great majority of what we have is vinyl, but we do have some other formats as well. About three years ago we pivoted a bit to include African American preaching as well.

Derek Smith:

In a lot of ways that obviously tells the story of the ... the African American story. The music tells it as well. The preaching does as well, so a natural fit there.

Robert Darden:

Well, all preachers sing and all singers preach in the black church, and in an era when African Americans had maybe a half dozen newspapers, no book publishers, no TV stations, controlled no radio stations, music was one of the few avenues of both expression in recording history. It is a window into a culture we know very little about because of the systemic racism that existed in the country at the time.

Derek Smith:

We're going to dive into that here in a few minutes, but I'm curious for you. When did black gospel music first ... when did it first get ahold of you?

Robert Darden:

I was born in an Air Force family and the United States Air Force was integrated with its founding, lone of all the major services. My friends' houses, which we were in and out of for the first 18 years of my life, that was the music that was being played. It very quickly became the soundtrack of my life, and gospel and soul and R&B together. I would eventually write about it so much that I became gospel music editor for Billboard magazine in New York for 15 years, and later when I went on tenure track at Baylor in 1999, I finally got to write about what had been my passion since childhood and that's where People Get Ready!: A New History of Black Gospel Music came from, and it's been playing in my cars and in my bedrooms and in my life ever since.

Derek Smith:

Obviously, the music got a hold of you as a young person. When did you start to realize its significance as a chronicle of the African American experience and really in so much of the 20th century?

Robert Darden:

That's a good question. I don't think you can tell the story of American popular music without beginning with the music of Africa. African rooted music is the foundation of all American popular music. And if you watched the Ken Burns thing, the series on country music, you know it's one of the legs of the stool that formed Country and Western music as well. But you can't get to rock and roll or rap, or hip hop, or jazz, or anything else if you don't go through African American music.

Derek Smith:

Visiting with Bob Darden here on Baylor Connections, and you mentioned your experience, gospel music editor at Billboard. I'm guessing somewhere in there is when you began to start talking to the people who lived the music, who created it, who were influenced it. Take us inside some of those stories, what was that like?

Robert Darden:

That was amazing. I'd say coincidence, but I feel in retrospect now God's hand was on all of this. My first job out of the University of North Texas where I got a graduate degree, was at the Waco Tribune-Herald. At the time, 1978 Waco also happened to be home with Word Records, which was the world's largest Christian music record label and book publisher. And because it had divisions that included African American music, these artists would periodically come to town. I had friends at Word, particularly Lois Ferguson and Jarrell McCracken, who would say, "Hey, Shirley Caesar's coming into town to talk about contracts or something, would you like to interview her?" And so, when I got the call from Billboard about 1984 I think, I already had a pretty good portfolio of interviews with some of the legends of gospel music. And so, the Billboard column called, the Gospel Lectern, pretty much required me to spend a week on contemporary Christian music, which is what Word was most known for, and then gospel. Each week I would do one or the other and it enabled me to talk to everybody from Pop Staples to Albertina Walker on the gospel side, and on the contemporary Christian side, which was less of a passion but was emerging at the time, Amy Grant and Russ Taff, and the others.

Derek Smith:

This is Baylor Connections visiting with Bob Darden, Baylor professor and founder of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. As you began talking to the people involved with the music, what were some of the themes that really deepened your appreciation, whether it be stories or just things you heard repeatedly?

Robert Darden:

Well, getting to talk to some of my heroes. I'm sure I sounded like just a babbling fanboy to some of them, but it was striking to me that without exception, all of them had had some ties in the civil rights movement. I don't think you could be an African American from the 1940s '50s and '60s without it either touching you or in most cases becoming in some way an active participant. One of the things that struck me was reading the great histories of the civil rights movement. I've read all of them, believe me, including Taylor Branch's towering, the King Years, how little the artist and the music are mentioned and when they are, it's often erroneous. A well-intentioned white reporter from The New York Times at a church service doesn't know the difference between a classical hymn, a spiritual, a gospel song, and yet as I began to do these first-person interviews, I began to find out that gospel music, freedom songs and spirituals were at the heart of everything that happened, and that's how the books, Nothing But Love in God's Water: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, came about. Say Birmingham, the epicenter of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, the mass meetings at night in multiple churches because they didn't want people to know where they were going to be because of getting bombed, would start about 3:00 in the afternoon, people would start gathering to get a seat. They would start singing spontaneously. They would sing to about seven o'clock when the pastor would come and give them some instructions, "We need 50 people arrested tomorrow. We need a hundred people to raise bail. We need 30 of you to go downtown at this time." Then King or Abernathy or Shuttlesworth would show up on this route of different churches and preach for about 45 minutes, and then they would sing, and they would sing sometimes with song leaders, sometimes spontaneously, often with gospel artists in the congregation until roughly 10 o'clock at night. Then they would go out in that hot Alabama, sultry night surrounded by every paramilitary organization, racist sheriff in the world, to find their automobile sabotaged and salt in their gas tanks, and they would sing all the way home. So at the pivotal time in African American history in this country, they're spending 75% of their time singing. And it's not without purpose. You don't devote that much time unless it matters, and that's what I found from these artists over and over again.

Derek Smith:

Obviously, it formed the soundtrack, if you will, of the civil rights movement. You know think of some of the songs that tell of joy amidst the pain, in what way do you think those songs steel the people involved for that pivotal moment in history?

Robert Darden:

I look back at some of the interviews we did in Birmingham, in Chicago and other places, and I would ask them questions about the events of what was going on and they could remember a little. I'd ask them about politicians, they could remember a little. I'd ask them about sermons, they could remember a little, but as soon as I got into the music, they could tell me what they sang, where they sang it, and why they sang it? The specific songs that came up over and over again, particularly in say Birmingham, which is probably the best known, would be songs like, Ain't Nobody Gonna Turn Me Around. They sang it in times of defiance. They sang it in times when they needed hope. In Selma after the horrible events of Bloody Sunday, meeting in Brown Chapel, most of them bleeding. John Lewis with a fractured skull sitting there and somebody from a pew lying on their back when it was stone silence at midnight, started singing once again, Ain't Nobody Gonna Turn Me Around. Then there are others like Steal Away, Steal Away to Jesus, which is a spiritual, had been a really defiant song. They thought they were talking about religion, the slave owners, but what they were talking about was getting across the Ohio River. Then, of course, the one that we know best today, We Shall Overcome. Where now is always sung standing with arms linked, and a direct tie back to those times, we shall overcome, can be both hope and defiance and a spiritual cry.

Derek Smith:

It's incredible to think about the way the songs, you know, the impact they've had on American history, and also incredible to think that in a lot of ways this music was in danger of being lost. Some of the big name songs you've mentioned obviously have lasted, but there's so many that obviously you realized were important, that were in danger of being lost. You mentioned this a little at the top of the show, but what were some of the challenges in making sure this music was preserved and not, like you said, locked away on a dusty shelf somewhere or thrown out by a family moving into a new house?

Robert Darden:

Well, the digitization lab and the extraordinary engineers that we have there, and when I say, "We," I'm talking the royal we, I don't actually play with any of the toys. They don't want me anywhere near when they're doing the work. But when Darryl Stuhr or Steve Bolech or Travis Taylor, or the original Tony Tadey, would start working through this, as we would find a disc in a certain kind of condition that we wanted, which is all of them, and we didn't have the tools to fix it, different angels would step forward and pay for it. Sometimes Baylor, but almost always individuals. Ella Prichard, for instance, has made sure that we have had what we've needed to make this happen. More than the actual physical reclamation of these discs, and now tapes and those terrible 8-tracks and cassettes, is that changing the mindset of people. Where now, most of the heroes of the civil rights movement are great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, and so the kids don't always know the value of the stuff that's in the piano bench or up in grandma's attic. So one of the reason when any organization ask me to speak, no matter how small, I always say yes because I never know if in that box that somebody went and grandma's attic spying, is a song that we've never seen, we've never heard, but I have heard about it, spoken of in reverent terms for 40 years. I don't know what percentage of all gospel music we have. There's no way to know because there's no database ever created. There's one on every other kind of music, but not gospel music. So I don't know that our 14,000 items are 1%, 10%, 20%. I just know when I find a disc by an artist I don't know, on a label I've never heard of, that means there's another long line of disc that we don't have. So the idea that we need to let people know the value of this music, this eternal record, if you'll let us save it, just let us harvest the music. I don't want to own your vinyl. Keep that. If that's any kind of sentimental value to you. And looking at these discs, some of which had been played down to they look like glass, they've been worn down so much. Just let me harvest that music before it's gone forever. If I could get that message across, these other issues are just technical issues. The main one is to change minds of people of what's value.

Derek Smith:

Obviously, the work you're doing and the music itself got I think a symbol of its value with The Smithsonian recognition a few years back with the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington. One day you got a phone call. Tell us about that.

Robert Darden:

The director, Dwandalyn Reece, who's still there, who was the head of the division of music of the new museum, had heard about us and over a period of days we talked back and forth, let her know what we had. She came down here to Baylor at one point, and Tim Logan and I went to Washington, D. C., showed what we had, in what form we could make it available. The assistant director looked at it and looked at the people in the room and said, "Make it happen," and had to go on to another meeting. And so, for the next couple of years back and forth trying to find out in what form they needed this, how could we get that to them? Did they want originals? Did they just want digital copy? At one point they were going to put an actual surviving African American record store in the museum, and that got modified later. But in the end, asking me to start with a hundred of the most significant, important gospel songs, spirituals, freedom songs. Then the next few years, "Oh, how about just the most 50?" Boy, that is difficult to come narrow it down further and further, until finally they had to choose. And so, when my wife Mary and I went to the museum on the day before it opened, and went up to the room where the gospel music is, for the first time to see the disc that we had given them on the wall. To see the big table in the middle of the room where you could touch a picture of an artist or a song and have it come up through the giant speakers that filled the room. Find that five songs that we had carefully preserved. One of which in this particular case, we have the only known copy. By the way, we think about 70% of what we have, we have the only known copy, would be preserved forever at the most popular museum in the world, which now you still have to get tickets for, even though it's free, four months in advance. And for these artists who went in and sang for virtually no remuneration was one of the highlights of my life.

Derek Smith:

Which song was that, you can hear there, that is the only one?

Robert Darden:

The Old Ship of Zion, and it has become something of our theme song because it was that one that when we all heard it the first time, it was a vanity song that the group of guys went into their church and sang, paid money, made a few disc copies, and ever since there's something haunting about it, partly because of circumstances. It's in a part of the country, Aquasco, Maryland that had terrible times for African Americans in both the Civil War and the civil rights movement. And yet these guys, some of whom are still living, we finally tracked him down, could go in a studio and say, "There's nothing but love in God's water, get on board, white or black," touched us and most people who hear it in a way that's hard to explain.

Derek Smith:

Well, that's amazing and we hope people will take the time to go out there, The Smithsonian. As we head into the final couple of minutes on the show, Bob. As we're visiting with Bob Darden, professor at Baylor and founder of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, I want to ask you, from having been immersed in this music for so long, it contains, and I think you've kind of painted this picture, but I want to ask specifically, there's a lot of hope in the music, but also a great deal of suffering and injustice of the people who wrote it, that they experienced. How should we now, years later as we listen to the music, process everything that went into it as we listen to and think about this music?

Robert Darden:

A couple of years ago, there was an assault on the Civil Rights Act in Congress, and a group of African American Congressman led by John Lewis, unable to stop what the vote was going to be, began singing, We Shall Overcome. And immediately some of the politicians on the other side and on certain TV networks began to making fun of it, making fun of them, making light of it. I think we should process this music when we hear it now with an understanding that this music has survived. Some of it for hundreds and hundreds of years, particularly the old freedom songs and spirituals, because first off it works, but we should understand that it survives because God wills that it survive when a million other songs have been lost. These songs have been burnished and been through the flame, and all the dross has been burned away. There's nothing left but an instantly rememberable lyric and an instantly rememberable song, music that people of any age, of any era, can sing and tap into this 400 years search for human dignity and civil rights, and know that this stuff matters. And you make fun of it or you dismiss it at your own peril.

Derek Smith:

Thanks to your work, it can't be dismissed like it would have been earlier. And as we close out the program, I say if people would like to learn more or hear some of this music, they can Google, Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. Hear some of the selections. If they Google, Heaven 11, Bob Darden, Heaven 11, they can also find your seminal selections.

Robert Darden:

They can go to kwbu.org and Shout! Gospel Music Moments every week on here, on the radio station.

Derek Smith:

That's right. kwbu.org, great partnership that you have with them and that we have with them as well for this program. Thanks so much, Bob Darden, and as we close out the program here on Baylor Connections, we'll do so with just a moment of the song he mentioned earlier, Old Ship of Zion. (Old Ship of Zion singing)