Gospel night

[TC Chris]

My friend Robert Barclay is hosting his annual gospel music tonight in honor of MLK's birthday. It has started off strong with 90 minutes of gospel and a bit of Bob Dyan. It's live online now but also archived after a day; you can stream it here for the next 2 weeks:

https://radio.wcmu.org/how-to-listen

At any rate, I was sitting in my chair, eyes closed, soaking up Dorothy Love Coates and listening closely to the rollicking gospel piano behind her and the Gospel Harmonettes, and that the end Robert announced the tunes and said, "I bet Chris in Traverse City is listening to those Dorothy Love Coates tunes." I had been composing an email to him in my head--he acknowledges all the emails he gets during the show--and I laughed out loud before sitting down to type it up.

Yeah, Dorothy Love Coates is an old favorite. Maybe it's some sort of genetic connection from Birmingham, AL, where my Mom grew up (but on the other side of the racial divide).

Gospel music, like country music, always reminds me of Duke Ellington's dictum that if it sounds good, it is good. When I was growing up, country and gospel were both outside the range of what responsible people listened to. It was an age of Perry Como and other white crooners, and then early rock. I've told the story before of buying the Patsy Cline 45s and discovering that she was good, even if we weren't supposed to like it, and I had the same response to gospel music when it caught my ear.

Chris Campbell