Introduction
Producing the third volume of the James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir series of live in-service albums was turning out to be more complicated than anticipated.
For one thing, the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, where James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir recorded the first two volumes of their live Sunday Service collaboration, was no longer standing. Where the little wooden church once stood was the foundation for a larger and more modern worship facility. In a gesture of ecumenical goodwill, Trinity Temple Seventh-day Adventist Church in Newark, a quick drive south of Nutley, invited the First Baptist congregation to use its sanctuary until the new building was completed. The location change meant that the Savoy Records engineer had to recalibrate what he learned from wiring First Baptist Church to meet the acoustic challenges of Trinity Temple.
Then there was the problem of musicians. This time, James Cleveland was going to have to work without organist Billy Preston and choir director Thurston Frazier, both critical contributors to the first two volumes of the Cleveland–Angelic Choir collaboration. Their replacements, albeit skilled players, had not yet worked with the Angelic Choir in a live recording setting. And although the previous two volumes of the Sunday Service series had literally been recorded on Sundays, when the spiritual residue of a morning of soul-stirring worship could bleed into the afternoon’s recording session, for reasons lost to time, this one would take place on a Thursday evening.
On top of everything else, the senses of the nation were deadened by an explosion that had occurred earlier that week. On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, segregationists planted dynamite beneath the stairs of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. The blast killed four young women and injured seventeen others. Was even the church, the epicenter of African American religious and community life, no longer safe? And here was the Angelic Choir, just four days later, fellow Baptists gathered in a church that wasn’t theirs with musicians they hadn’t worked with, in a city with its own history of racial tensions, recording a Sunday-morning service on a Thursday night. By all accounts, neither was the Birmingham tragedy on the minds of the choristers that evening, nor did it deter them from the work at hand. Still, if there was a recipe for a soul-stirring, handclapping, foot-patting live recording session, this wasn’t it.
What the Angelic Choir did have, however, was the energetic presence of James Cleveland. The Chicago-born singer, songwriter, arranger, pianist, choir director, and all-around religious music entrepreneur had a God-given gift for directing a recording session. His deft orchestration of the evening’s activities and the resilience of the choristers and their leader, the Reverend Lawrence Roberts, as well as a resilience forged in the crucible of daily struggles that came with being black in America, were revealed in the singing that evening.
Hours later, the final notes having rung off the walls of Trinity Temple and the last amen uttered, a peace fell on the assembly. The Savoy Records engineer left Trinity Temple, boxes of tape reels tucked under his arms. In the days to come, Roberts and Savoy’s gospel music producer Fred Mendelsohn would transform those tapes into volume 3 of the Sunday Service series, best known by its subtitle, Peace Be Still.
The first two Cleveland–Angelic Choir Sunday Service volumes received glowing praise in the trade press, but Savoy didn’t appear, at first, to have much faith in volume 3. Perhaps it was the absence of Frazier and Preston that most concerned Savoy, or perhaps they felt the novelty had worn off. Whatever the reason, while the liner notes to volumes 1 and 2 treated the albums like historic releases, recognizing the key participants with brief biographies, the back cover of volume 3 contained little more than generic platitudes. Savoy placed scant media advertising for volume 3. The company submitted the standard pressing order of three thousand copies and mailed copies of the album to gospel radio announcers. The announcers placed the opening track, a new arrangement of a long-overlooked eighteenth-century hymn called “Peace Be Still,” on their turntables, set the needle a quarter-turn behind the lead-in groove, started the disc spinning, turned up the on-air volume, and watched, in wonder, as their phones lit up.
Both Peace Be Still and its title track entered Billboard’s Top Spirituals charts in early 1964 and remained there for nearly two years. Sales significantly exceeded Savoy’s curiously low expectations. Quickly exhausting the initial run of three thousand copies, the album sold—sources vary—between four hundred fifty and eight hundred thousand copies.1 This at a time when gospel album success meant selling fifty thousand copies at best. Moreover, the title track is cited by some of today’s most prominent gospel singers, songwriters, and musicians as having had a profound influence on their artistic development. Historian Tom Fisher considers Peace Be Still “the major founding effort of the modern black gospel chorus sound.”2 It was generally considered to be the best-selling African American gospel album until 1972, when Aretha Franklin’s two-disc Amazing Grace (also featuring James Cleveland, this time with his Southern California Community Choir), assumed the title. Amazing Grace, however, appealed to secular and sacred music enthusiasts alike, and particularly to Franklin’s sizable multicultural fan base, but Peace Be Still was purchased primarily by African American churchgoers who heard it played over local religious radio broadcasts, at the local religious book and record store, and in the living rooms of family and friends. Recognizing a hit, music ministers began teaching “Peace Be Still” to their church choirs. Professional gospel soloists, choirs, and groups placed the song on their set list. Dozens recorded their own versions. An eighteenth-century hymn gathering dust in the hymnbook was brought back to life.
But why was Peace Be Still more popular than other contemporary gospel albums? Did the title track grab listeners with its dramatic arrangement, its evocative lyrics, or both? Did the album communicate a 1960s African American religious worldview with more spiritual lucidity than other religious releases of the day?
Despite the commercial success of Peace Be Still and its lasting impact on generations of gospel singers, musicians, and enthusiasts, even the most basic production information has been frustratingly difficult to ascertain. Who were the musicians? Who did the writing and arranging? Who were the soloists? Why wasn’t there more publicity in the trade magazines? Was Thursday, September 19, the date of the recording, as the Savoy files indicate, or was it Sunday, September 15, the same day as the Birmingham bombing, as some have suggested? And who was Harvey, the enigmatic artist whose painting adorned the album’s front cover? This book is an attempt to solve the mysteries, and debunk some assumptions, surrounding the album and its participants.
Peace Be Still remains the most recognizable title in the nine-volume Sunday Service collaboration between James Cleveland, Lawrence Roberts, and the Angelic Choir—the first multivolume collection, in fact, in the history of recorded gospel music. Effective in its employment of biblical metaphor, thrilling in its evocation of eternal life, and groundbreaking in its choral arrangements, Peace Be Still was among the earliest inductees into the Library of Congress National Registry of Historic Sound Collections, which preserves “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” sound recordings. In 1999 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. “Peace Be Still” remains a popular selection to sing at funerals and other important religious occasions—a gospel chestnut that soothes the sorrowful and encourages the discouraged. Churchgoers rejoice upon hearing the first few familiar notes of the song’s iconic piano introduction.
“Peace Be Still” and other album cuts have become cultural touchstones, their sound symbolic of a tumultuous era in U.S. history. For example, “Peace Be Still” and another album selection, “I Will Wear a Crown,” can be heard emanating from a kitchen radio in the 2016 film adaptation of August Wilson’s stage play Fences. “Peace Be Still” is sung at the conclusion of Detroit, Kathryn Bigelow’s 2017 film about the 1967 Detroit riots. Malaco Music Group, which purchased the Savoy gospel catalog from Prelude Records in late 1986, reports that Peace Be Still, now available as a compact disc and in downloadable formats, still sells, sixty years on.
Although it was not the first African American gospel recording to be produced in a church and in front of a live audience or congregation, Peace Be Still is frequently credited as having given birth to the live recording era in African American gospel music because it was the first such album to achieve stupendous sales figures. Today, many African American gospel artists prefer to record in a live worship setting with an enthusiastic congregation for their audience. No studio can replicate the symbiosis between a gospel artist and a church audience. Some gospel vocalists depend so deeply on the interactive exchange with an audience that a recording studio, lacking the instantaneous feedback of live worship, constrains their art.
Eking every ounce of utility from the album’s unanticipated success, Savoy Records became, for more than two decades, the undisputed frontrunner in the production and sales of live gospel choir recordings. Savoy became as synonymous with choirs as Peacock Records of Houston, Texas, was with quartets. Sales figures for Peace Be Still and subsequent Cleveland–Angelic Choir releases confirmed that the African American marketplace particularly, though not exclusively, was willing to pay for a recording of a live in-service experience that it could enjoy anytime, anyplace, anywhere. So much so that soon after the Cleveland-Angelic Choir Sunday Service partnership ended, Savoy launched a James Cleveland Presents series of albums, many made by church and community choirs singing in front of packed churches. Like Peace Be Still, these albums also brought the worship experience into the home. They were particularly effective as the soundtrack to the Sunday morning ritual of preparing for church. They also introduced the effervescence of African American church music ministries to those who might never step inside a church.
Peace Be Still even altered the way record companies conceptualized long-playing gospel albums. No longer were they haphazardly programmed collections of radio singles and fillers—they were developed deliberately to disseminate a live in-service experience that could transcend denominational, cultural, and spatial boundaries. In the 1970s, as gospel albums surpassed singles in popularity, it was not unusual for releases featuring gospel choirs—including the Angelic Choir—to contain songs that ran as long as ten minutes—far longer than radio announcers were accustomed to programming.
Not only did Peace Be Still cement James Cleveland’s star status in the gospel music industry, it converted the Angelic Choir, composed largely of amateur singers, from a church ensemble into a national touring choir not unlike professional prewar African American choruses such as the Hall Johnson Choir, the Eva Jessye Singers, and Wings over Jordan. But whereas these latter groups focused mostly on preservation of the folk spiritual, the Angelic Choir introduced audiences to the latest gospel songs and gospelized hymns, often containing vocal and instrumental techniques drawn from R&B, rock ’n’ roll, and soul. With Roberts’s religious declamations replacing Cleveland’s own, the Angelic Choir gave African American churchgoers a revival experience wherever they appeared. For those unable to travel to First Baptist Church in Nutley, New Jersey, First Baptist Church came to them in the form of Roberts and the choir.
Besides its contribution to gospel music, the Angelic Choir also served as a musical model of the American spirit of individualism. The rugged individualist is portrayed in American history, literature, and mythology as an ordinary person who musters the courage and cunning to overcome extraordinary odds and accomplish extraordinary things. Whether it is Huckleberry Finn challenging the tradition of chattel servitude to save his friend Jim, Captain Ahab battling a whale of enormous proportions, or John Henry and Casey Jones defying death, the Angelic Choir, whom the Reverend Lawrence Roberts once described as “Mary, Jane, and John Doe from up the street, down the street, and around the corner,” surmounted their modest status to become something akin to “America’s gospel choir” during the 1960s and early 1970s. Not that they might have become famous without ample direction from James Cleveland, whose instincts for presenting a gospel song was without parallel in his era. But Cleveland, too, was a rugged individualist, his economically impoverished migrant parents barely teenagers when they gave birth to their famous son. A gospel gadfly with an unquenchable desire for success, Cleveland used streetwise hustle to assert himself into the good graces of the music mainstream—a particularly difficult thing to do in Chicago, where the genre’s first generation of leaders reigned as a seemingly intractable hierarchy. It was a frustration with this glass ceiling, as well as a commitment to educating hundreds of thousands of lesser-known but no less talented church singers and musicians, most of them young, that led Cleveland to adopt for his Gospel Music Workshop of America the egalitarian motto “Where Everybody Is Somebody.”
For centuries, black sacred music, and particularly the folk spiritual, contained coded expressions of protest against the status quo. During the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign of nonviolent resistance, protesters railed against a resistant white majority not with fists and weapons but with prayer and song. Spirituals and gospel hymns such as “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” “We Shall Overcome,” and “This Little Light of Mine” were sung zestfully by protesters. Singing gave them the courage to face unknown dangers. But nobody sang “Peace Be Still” on the front lines of freedom. It was not a freedom song or a protest song, at least in the conventional sense. It worked on a different plane of consciousness, as we shall explore in this book.
No matter that “Peace Be Still” was from another century—what Savoy Records captured in a Seventh-day Adventist church in Newark that Thursday evening in September 1963 was the transcendent spirituality of a choir of young, cosmopolitan Baptists singing their troubles over as a believing community. They sang not from a feeling of helplessness or victimhood, the kind implicit in the lyrics of gospel songs from an earlier era, but from the 1960s standpoint of hopefulness. Not from the passive “Lord, have mercy, if you please,” as articulated in the hymn “Let Us Break Bread Together,” but from an optimistic outlook of overcoming. Not if, but when. This was gospel music in the era of Dr. King and President Kennedy. Endowing the hymn with the energy of human desire, the Angelic Choir seized it, like a sword and shield, and carried it into spiritual battle against evil forces known and unknown. “One of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves,” scholar bell hooks wrote, “is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.”3 Using its collective voice to represent the broader believing community, the Angelic Choir sang of a resistance and resilience that no oppressor could overpower.
On the other hand, by evaluating recorded versions of “Peace Be Still” from 1963 to the present, one discovers that, like black music in general, the song evolved from a coded statement of resilience into an explicit call for direct action. Even James Cleveland would come to use it to communicate his own perspective on the state of race relations in America. As recently as February 2020, African American activists in St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis, Illinois, called their anticrime marches Peace Be Still.4 Gospel singer Yolanda “Yoli” DeBerry explains why she included “Peace Be Still” on her August 2020 EP, My Worship Playlist: “It was the Sunday after something extremely violent happened in our country. Spiritually, I was just sick of it all. I shut everything out and for a moment, I just asked God to bring peace to the world. We need everyone to put these guns down, put these prejudices down, put down everything that is causing the world to turn in a crazy way.”5
Protesters may still turn to the freedom songs of the 1960s for inspiration, but in churches, whenever “Peace Be Still” is sung, it reminds everyone that a superhuman force has the ultimate authority to quiet the storms of discrimination and disenfranchisement and heal emotional wounds. Just as freedom songs or repurposed folk spirituals prepared the marching people to confront violence and even death with steely resolve, the gospel songs and hymns of Peace Be Still encouraged the church, irrespective of its appetite for direct social action, to prevail by placing its destiny in the capable hands of Jesus, assured in the belief that it will not only survive the winds and the waves but emerge victorious.