“Just a Little Talk With Jesus”

“Just a Little Talk With Jesus” is a famous old gospel song.  Last night, our band, Shades Mountain Air, had a grand time at the American Gospel Quartet Convention in Birmingham and sang this crowd favorite.  I knew that it was a song that black and white audiences in the South had shared since it was written.  It’s been covered by just about everybody—Bill Gaither, Elvis Presley, the Stanley Brothers, and innumerable mass choirs, quartets and Sunday night gatherings around the piano in little country churches.   (click this link to listen to the song by Shades Mountain Air)

It’s so heartfelt, so soulful—are you in trouble?  Look in and up—just a little talk to Jesus will make it right.  This song first found me in my seminary church, where I was minister of music and youth (a lofty, long title for a part-time staff member in a blue-collar white church).  My church was southern, small-town North Carolina Southern Baptist folk, barely scratching to stay above the black folk in the town—marginal at best.  Ever Sunday night we gathered around the piano and pulled out our “Number 8s” our name for the red songbooks we loved full of familiar gospel music.  Anyone who wanted to be in the “kwarr” (choir) would gather with us, and people would call out a favorite.  “My God is Real,” was the one Mr. Jernigan always requested.  “They Tore the Old Country Church Down,” “Whisper a Prayer,” “Troublesome Times Are Here,” Mansion Over the Hilltop,” “If That Isn’t Love,” “Hide Me, Rock of Ages,” and, of course, “Just a Little Talk with Jesus,” because the bass singers got to show out.

I’ll never forget the day that a black family showed up at our church door and one of the men sent his little boy back to tell them they couldn’t come here.  I tried to get the church to put up a basketball goal in our parking lot for the little black children who were always playing when we drove up for Sunday night church.  But it was 1978, and our world was cracking but the walls hadn’t come down.  I lost my first church vote of my career as one family who barely came to church brought their entire extended clan to vote my proposal down.  It was a hard lesson for a 24 year old future preacher.

It was our little church, where we came for comfort.  We didn’t want change, just the comfort of “a little talk with our

Rev. Lister Cleavant Derricks, author of "Just a Little Talk With Jesus"

Jesus.”  Lawd, we loved that song.  What a trip to find out that this white gospel favorite was written by an African American composer named Cleavant Derricks.

The website “Southern Edition” has a fine biography about Rev. Cleavant Derricks.  He was a wonderful musician who was born in Chattanooga in 1910 and had a stellar career as a minister, musician and pastor.  A gentle, kind man, his songs were sung by tens of thousands.   The website says that

The same songs that ministered to impoverished blacks enduring discrimination in the Jim Crow South spoke to the hearts of disadvantaged whites whose lot seemed similarly dismal due to hardships spurned on by the Great Depression and the World War II years. Like Dorsey, Tindley and Morris, Derricks would write songs that addressed daily hardships, praised a loving, sustaining God and spoke of the heavenly reward believers would gain following their labour on earth. Butler adds, “And, too, his songs were sung in the Pentecostal churches back in those days. Those people were considered the poor class—you know, the common man. They were struggling, and so his songs were accepted very rapidly because they did have that hope.”

Butler points out that “most people didn’t know [Derricks] was a black man when his songs first started being published by Stamps-Baxter.” James R. Goff Jr. concurs in his book, Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel, stating, “With an unmistakable influence from the shape-note convention arrangements and a style that often featured the bass part on the chorus, Derricks’s songs found their way into Southern shape-note hymnbooks, though few in the South would probably have guessed the author’s racial origins.”

The colossal stupidity and sinful ignorance that was racism kept us apart, but music and common suffering ignored what our systems and conscious minds erected to supposedly “protect our way of life.”  We always were one and the same.  Thank God we at least sang his songs.  So today’s song, in honor of Rev. Derrick, is “Just a Little Talk With Jesus.”  Thank God Almighty, we are further down the road to being “free at last.”  Free to love one another and sing the songs of Zion.

Shades Mountain Air last night at the More Than Conquerers Church in Birmingham, hosts of the American Gospel Quartet Convention

 

“Precious Lord,” Georgia Tom and the War with the Blues

Tonight our band is going to perform in one of the most prestigious gospel venues around our region—the American Gospel Quartet Convention, here in Birmingham.  Here many of the great African American gospel groups gather to sing, worship and honor fellow performers each year.  It’s meeting at the More Than Conquerors Church in Birmingham.  I like the names a lot of the independent churches give themselves.  It says something about “who we want to be.”  I heard about a midwestern church that actually named itself “Christ Memorial Church.”   What in the WORLD!  Ain’t you people heard about Easter???!!!!

Anyway, many of the greats of gospel have played here over the years—the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Blind Boys of Alabama, the Fairfield Four (remember the quartet singing in “O Brother Where Art Thou” when the boys are about to meet their maker at the end of a rope?)  Gospel and Blues have often conflicted with each other.  Some in the church even disapproved of the blues, feeling that it conflicted with the joy of the gospel.  I read once that the magnificent Mahalia Jackson, who died in 1972, refused to sing the blues.  “’Blues are the songs of despair,’ she declared. ‘Gospel songs are the songs of hope. When you sing gospel you have the feeling there is a cure for what’s wrong, but when you are through with the blues, you’ve got nothing to rest on.’”

Mahalia Jackson may be one of the greatest singers EVER.  Her rendition of the song of the day I posted today, “Precious Lord,” plays at the Lorraine Motel while you stand at the spot where Martin Luther King died, at least it did when I visited, and the tearful experience I had there inspired my song “Lorraine.”  I have to gently disagree, though.  The blues, they are Bible songs, too, if we read the Psalms right.  There is a whole section scholars call, “Psalms of Lament.”  Over sixty of the psalms are considered “laments,” mingling despair and hope as a prayer calling on God for help.  Somehow, to win victory by denial is a diminishment of the spiritual journey.

Still, the fork gospel music became offers a place of respite, joy, and at least a chance to voice the vision of victory.  Thomas Dorsey, the author of “Precious Lord,” embodied this contradiction and conflict between blues and gospel.  Son of a pastor, he rebelled against his raising early in life and went to Chicago in the early blues scene and gained some renown under the name “Georgia Tom,” but he struggled financially and spiritually.

“Precious Lord’ was born out of his own tragedy.  The preacher’s kid who had the foundation, whose parents prayed for him, who drifted away, into the nightclub world and secular success, then, two mental breakdowns, and finally, surrender to the gospel ministry and a long, long career at the famous Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago nevertheless suffered terribly.

In 1932, in the midst of his transition back into gospel for good, his wife Nettie died during childbirth, along with their firstborn, Thomas Andrew, Jr., who died the next day.  Thomas was away at a gospel meeting, and got the news.  Out of the anguish of that song came “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”  It was the end of his blues singing for good, oddly enough.

His gospel greatness came out of that crucible of suffering.  There is no guarantee about life.  If the Bible is any guide, the blues will be the way to Gospel Joy.  They are different parts of the same journey.  I hope you’ll enjoy a listen to a version of Dorsey’s song I recorded with my bandmate, Nancy Womble of Shades Mountain Air.  We recorded it at my house, with me playing bass, guitar and mandolin and simply a lead vocal.  It is spare, recalling the hallowed, bluesy, holy crucible of Tom Dorsey’s suffering.  Ann Lamotte says there really are only two kinds of prayers:  “Thank you, thank you, thank you” and “help me, help me, help me.”  One is gospel, the other blues…