A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music

by Robert Marovich

In A City Called Heaven , Robert M. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through its growth into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. Marovich mines print media, ephemera, and hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and historians--as well as relatives and friends of gospel pioneers--to recover forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and granted social mobility to a number of its practitioners. As Marovich shows, the music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. Yet it also helped give voice to a people--and lift a nation. A City Called Heaven celebrates a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.

Genres: Music, History

488 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2015

Reviews

[Joseph DeBolt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly detailed and excellent account of the beginnings of gospel music in Chicago, IL, with history of the great northern migration, of church plantings, church history, how early gospel music was published and sold, and personal histories of gospel artists born in or who lived in Chicago, like Mahalia Jackson, Sallie Martin, Roberta Martin, James Cleveland and Thomas Dorsey.

[Shannan Harper · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a pretty thick book, but it gave great information regarding the history of Gospel music that came out of Chicago and how it started. It also gave information that I was unaware of regarding Music icons like Rev. Clay Evans and others.