Say amen, somebody!
I’ve never fancied myself a gospel singer. That’s not in my cultural DNA, frankly. Not, that is, until last Sunday at United Church, Chapel on the Hill, the church I grew up in.
I can’t carry a tune in a hand basket. The best I can do in church is help my kids follow along in the hymnal during Sunday service by pointing to the lyrics, like “follow the bouncing ball.” More of a reading lesson than singing together. I mean, I don’t want to confuse them. What comes out of my mouth is a long way from singing. There’s really no word for it. Keening, maybe.
But there I was, on the first Sunday of November, standing next to my beaming 5-year-old daughter, Patti June, belting out (well, sorta) Hezekiah Walker’s “Lord Do It, Do It For Me.” It was like I had time-traveled 40 years into the past and found myself in George Neirenberg’s documentary film, “Say Amen, Somebody,” about the foundational gospel creators Thomas Dorsey and Willie Mae Ford Smith.
And then the time machine skipped back another 20 years, to 1962, when Jim Spicer and Roy Colby arrived at Chapel on the Hill ... two guys from Chicago who had no way of knowing they were paving the way for another young Chicagoan to become President of the United States a half century later.
Willie Mae said gospel is the Christian blues. And Thomas Dorsey, who wrote thousands of songs, was a bona fide blues singer. (In 1920, he became the first bluesman to copyright one of his songs, “If You Don’t Believe I’m Leavin’, You Can Count the Days I’m Gone.”) Jim Spicer and Roy Colby introduced the blues of Sweet Home Chicago to the pastural hill where the United Church sits, as if it has been there as long as the towering poplar trees that surround it.
And what are the blues, but the blood-deep realization that pain is color blind. Want, need, disappointment, aching, aspiration, love, lying, cheating, dying and dreaming are all color blind. Dr. Spicer and Dr. Colby, who are barely remembered now by the dwindling congregation at Chapel on the Hill, shook this church to its backbone. In a nearly silent, revolutionary way, they forced this town to look straight into the cold eyes of Jim Crow ... and stare him down into total submission. They threw the cover off the moldy carpet of segregation and let the sunlight do what sunlight does.
Lord, do it. Do it for me. Last Sunday, the Chapel on the Hill’s young music director, Matthew Fisher, a recent University of Tennessee grad, arranged for the UT Music Department’s Artist-in-Residence, jazz pianist Eric Reed, to bring his new gospel project to our church for their first public performance. I had no idea this was happening. As the 10 a.m. service began, Pastor Suzanne Blokland introduced the group and said we’d all get a chance to sing together later in the hour.
Then it hit me. Eric Reed? The Eric Reed? The Monday evening host of WUOT’s “Improvisations”? Eric Reed, who has played with Cassandra Wilson, Elvin Jones, Ron Carter, Christian McBride, and Wynton Marsalis?
Yeah. That Eric Reed. And when his gospel students stood at the front of the church, in front of the same altar and cross that have been there since I was born, and Eric sat at our powerful grand piano, something remarkable happened.
I heard the voice of a woman who is probably long gone. She manned the entry booth of a swimming area on Watts Bar Lake where Jim Spicer and Roy Colby took a group of several dozen of us very colorful United Church kids and our friends on a weeklong camping adventure 50 years ago, braving encounters with threatening deputies, Klansmen, mysterious flashlights in the middle of the night, and round-the-clock uncertainties.
When we made it through the week, that woman looked at Roy and Jim and said, “Do you know that you’ve just integrated all the State Parks in Tennessee?”
Eric Reed’s singers filled this historic little chapel with the thunderous swinging “Savior, Savior, Do Not Pass Me By,” and when Patti June clapped with them in perfect rhythm, my face was streaked with tears.
Go to YouTube, search “United Church, Chapel on the Hill,” select “Morning Worship, Nov 6, 2022,” and jump ahead to time code 36:15. Enjoy the Christian blues the way Willie Mae would want you to.
And tell me why this Chapel on the Hill isn’t overflowing on Sunday mornings with every color and creed of people who make up this town. Say amen, somebody.
John Job is a longtime Oak Ridge resident and frequent contributor to The Oak Ridger.
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Say amen, somebody!
