59

Take My Hand, Precious Lord

music: Anon. (adapted by Thomas A. Dorsey)

words by Thomas A. Dorsey

THOMAS A. DORSEY (1899–1993) WAS the W.C. Handy of gospel music. He didn’t invent it any more than Handy invented the blues, but he helped to codify, package and sell it. And he created some of its lasting standards. ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ is Dorsey’s ‘St Louis Blues’.

‘Precious Lord, take my hand, / Lead me on, let me stand. / I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.’ This consoling song is so central to gospel music – sung at various times by Sister Rosetta Tharp and the Blind Boys of Alabama, Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Elvis Presley and Lawrence Welk – that it can seem as though it’s a spiritual, part of an oral tradition. But Dorsey was nothing if not professional.

Here’s another sample of his work: ‘I wear my britches up above my knees, / Strut my jelly with who I please.’ The lines come from ‘It’s Tight Like That’, which Dorsey recorded with blues guitarist Tampa Red in 1928 under the pseudonym Georgia Tom (he seems to have had a dozen such alter egos). It’s a catchy ragtime number and it sold a million.

A darker side of Georgia Tom emerges in ‘If You Want Me to Love You’, where the singer makes a list of demands to his woman, of which this is the last: ‘Take a butcher knife, cut off your head, / Send me a telegram that your heart is dead.’

It was a telegram that inspired ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’. In 1932 in Chicago, Dorsey’s wife Nettie Harper died in childbirth while he was on stage in St Louis, their baby son dying the following day. Dorsey buried them in the same coffin and went home to write ‘Precious Lord’. It is an agonising story and one the songwriter himself often told in old age, speaking of the words to the song coming to him ‘like drops of water from a crevice of a rock above’.

The story would be even better had Dorsey, at this very moment, seen the light and abandoned the blues, but this was no road to Damascus. Alongside the blues, Dorsey had been writing and singing gospel songs since the mid-1920s, and by the time of ‘Precious Lord’ he was already director of music in a couple of Baptist churches. His St Louis gig had been a revivalist meeting. Moreover, the success of this song now led him to establish his own publishing company, the Dorsey House of Music. He knew the business: earlier in his career, he had been an arranger for the Chicago Music Publishing company and a talent scout for Vocalion Records.

What Dorsey achieved in ‘Precious Lord’, however, and in other songs such as ‘Peace in the Valley’, is a personalisation of musical worship, in the Pentecostal tradition. It’s why he’s sometimes called the father of gospel music. His inspiration, no doubt, was the old spirituals, but where those songs had tended to speak on behalf of a whole people – even when employing the first-person singular – Dorsey’s songs are about a one-to-one relationship between the singer and his or her ‘precious Lord’.

While the words of ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ might have dropped on Dorsey from above, the tune already existed, though it’s hard to say where it came from. It seems like an old hymn tune – indeed, it resembles more than one. So, in terms of originality, it is hardly inspired, yet in its very ordinariness it gets the job done, a musical conveyor of Dorsey’s words. Moreover, the simplicity of the tune has provided a springboard for any number of musical elaborations, some of them elaborate indeed. To hear Aretha Franklin sing it at the memorial service for Martin Luther King Jr – ‘sing’ is such a poor word for what she does; she is possessed by the song – is to leave the tune a long way behind, lost in a cloud of vocal roulades and ululations, cries of anguish and shouts of hope.

‘Precious Lord’ had been King’s favourite. It was sung at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, on the eve of his assassination, the night of one of his most famous speeches. ‘I’ve been to the mountain top,’ King told his congregation, as though the promise of the song had been fulfilled. ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.’ According to Jesse Jackson, who was on the motel balcony the following evening when King was shot, the civil rights leader’s last words were about the song. They were addressed to band leader, Ben Branch, who was due to perform at an event that night – an event King was meant to attend. ‘Ben,’ he said, ‘make sure you play “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.’