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In Search of the Authentic: The Live In-Service Recording

Attempts to capture on phonograph records the authenticity of the African American worship experience go back almost as far as the African American sacred recording industry itself. According to historian Lerone Martin, between 1925 and 1941, approximately one hundred African American preachers took advantage of the “new method [of recording for the phonograph] to preach an old gospel message.”¹ Singles by the Reverends J. M. Gates, F. W. McGee, D. C. Rice, and other recording preachers attempted to simulate the live worship or revival experience by forming a studio “congregation” of two or more singers to participate aurally on the session. The small assembly assented to the minister’s demonstrative sermonettes with the rhythmic fidelity characteristic of a church congregation. Their responses included improvisatory interjections of “Hallelujah,” “Amen,” “Yes,” and occasional wordless moans. Before or after the recorded sermonette, a song leader or group from the simulated congregation would raise a familiar hymn, gospel song, or spiritual, and the rest would pick it up, sometimes clapping along to the rhythm. While sermonettes with singing were typically recorded in a studio, Martin notes that Gates’s 1926 disks were recorded in his Atlanta church, with members of the congregation on hand to respond to the sermon and sing congregational hymns.² If so, they represented the first live recording audience in modern gospel music history.

Just like radio broadcasts of religious services, writes Martin, these sermon recordings carried religious messages to consumers who might not have heard them otherwise.³ Ironically, religious leaders used the same media—radio and recordings—through which popular culture was disseminated to fight back against the spread of popular entertainment in the African American community, all the while shepherding their community back within the confines of traditional Protestant values.⁴ Seeing the potential of radio and records to promote their ministries beyond their sanctuaries, African American pastors, and especially those from the Holiness and Pentecostal sects, pursued them aggressively to attract more members and money to their churches and also to build new levels of prestige for themselves.⁵ Whether the disks were recorded in a studio or a church, the record company’s marketing efforts hyped their authenticity. For example, a 1927 Chicago Defender ad for the Reverend F. W. McGee’s famous sermon, “Jonah in the Belly of the Whale,” boasted that the side would “make you feel that you’re right in the church. You hear it all just as it actually happens.”⁶ It was a studio recording.

Although the Great Depression devastated the record industry and ended the recording careers of many preachers, a few continued to produce recorded sermons into the 1930s and the 1940s. Some even began their recording careers during the period. For example, beginning in 1933, the Victor Talking Machine Company pressed and sold disks by Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux. A preacher in Newport News, Virginia, Michaux (1885–1969) originated his popular broadcast from radio station WJSV. On sides waxed in 1934 for the Conqueror label, Bishop Oscar “Sin-Killing” Sanders simulated the in-service experience of his racially integrated Christ Temple Apostolic Church in Muncie, Indiana.⁷ The preaching, the piano- accompanied congregational singing, and the spirited rhythm of Sanders’s disks—he even covered Michaux’s trademark song, “Happy Am I”—gave phonograph listeners a taste of a soul-stirring worship service in a rural southern church transplanted to 1930s northeastern Indiana. In 1935, Decca artist Reverend Nathan Smith and his Burning Bush Sunday School evoked the Sunday school experience, with adults leading children in singing and instruction.

The Reverend Benny C. Campbell, whose recording career began on Conqueror in 1938, offered feverish congregational singing and hand clapping on a string of singles for Apollo Records between 1947 and 1950. The Reverend Samuel Kelsey (1897–1993), pastor of a Church of God in Christ congregation in Washington, DC, patterned his 1940s-era releases after 1920s-era recording pastors like Gates, Rice, and McGee by inviting congregational singing, and even a trombonist, to accompany his spoken word messages. Interesting to note is that he bases the sermonette on his 1947 MGM recording of “The Storm Is Passing Over” on the verses of the fourth chapter of Mark that form the basis of “Peace Be Still.” But with rare exceptions, such as some of Gates’s twelve-inch 78-rpm releases, these studio simulations of church services were limited to three and four minutes.

On the other hand, folklorist and song collectors Alan Lomax, John Work, and Lewis Jones captured live recordings of African American congregational singing in authentic church settings for Fisk University and the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song. One example, taped in August 1941, features a lively service held at the Church of God in Christ on the Moorehead Plantation in Lula, Mississippi.⁸ To an accompaniment of guitar, tambourine, and hand clapping, the congregation sings zesty renditions of “I Got a Hiding Place” and “I’m Gonna Lift Up a Standard for My King.” Each selection features unison antiphonal singing between an impassioned lead vocalist and the congregation. Less than a year later, the song collectors captured a Sunday evening Holiness Service in Clarksdale, Mississippi, held at a Church of God in Christ church led by a Reverend McGhee, with guitar and trombone accompanying the lively singing and shouting.⁹

Professor Braxton Shelley posits that the live gospel music recording phenomenon derives from “early radio programs that featured actual worship services of churches like Chicago’s First Church of Deliverance during the 1930s.” Citing Dr. Tyron Cooper’s 2013 dissertation, Holding to My Faith: Performing Belief in Contemporary Black Gospel Music ‘Live’ Recording Productions, Shelley asserts that weekly church radio broadcasts “allowed listeners to experience the character and spirit of Sunday morning worship services” and that they “led to these church choirs and subsequent artists recording live [so as to] capitalize off of their ability to appeal to an audience base with an affinity for the spontaneous, transcendent moments characteristic of African American worship.”¹⁰ Lerone Martin argues just the opposite: that, among other things, recordings of phonograph preachers “drafted the blueprint for trendy black religious broadcasting.”¹¹ These arguments are not necessarily contradictory. Although 1920s phonograph preachers may have stimulated the rise of religious broadcasting among African American churches (though nonblack ministers and evangelists had been broadcasting on radio since the birth of the wireless), the electrically charged atmosphere of live radio broadcasts of church services no doubt played a role in the industry’s adoption of live gospel recordings. For example, whether or not the Capitol Records singles by the Echoes of Eden Choir were recorded, as alleged, in St. Paul Baptist Church, their release was based on the Los Angeles church’s popular radio broadcasts and attempted to immortalize those authentic “transcendent moments” on record. On several of the choir’s recordings, individual members inject spontaneity by responding reflexively during particularly moving moments, just as they would have done in church, such as when contralto Sallie Martin digs deep into her solar plexus to excavate a series of seismic low notes on “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”¹²

Around the same time, in 1947, the Reverend G. W. Killens, the Louisiana-born pastor of Mount Calvary Missionary Baptist Church in Oakland, California, was immortalized on disk while preaching to an audience in the Oakland City Auditorium. Singles of Killens’s thunderous oratory and the audience’s enthusiastic response, issued initially on Ollie Hunt’s independent Bay Area imprint Olliet Records, were sufficiently popular to be rereleased in 1951 by the Bihari Brothers on their Los Angeles RPM label.¹³ The year 1949 witnessed live sermon recordings by the Reverend William M. Rimson, pastor of Detroit’s Greater Love Tabernacle Church of God in Christ, issued initially on the Religious Recordings imprint, and by the Reverend Louis H. Narcisse. Like Killens a Bay Area pastor, Narcisse made a test pressing of “Get Back Jordan” for Jaxyson Records. Not released until the 2000s, on a Jaxyson Records compilation by Acrobat Records, the side captures the fervency of worship, complete with congregant hand clapping and spontaneous exhortations.¹⁴

The decade of the 1950s opened with sixteen sides by gospel singer Edna Gallmon Cooke leading the Young Peoples Choir from Springfield Baptist Church of Washington, DC. The record labels state that the sides were “recorded during church services” but with the exception of “God Be with You,” a spoken benediction by Springfield Baptist’s pastor, the Reverend J. J. Abney, none of the sides offers any aural impression of being made during a service—no congregants can be heard in the background.¹⁵ On the other hand, a congregation is intensely engaged with Deacon Leroy Shinault on his long-meter rendition of “Lord I Come to Thee,” captured on a 1957 release by Ping Records and presumably recorded in a Chicago church. Shinault raises the hymn and the congregation responds by singing a keening melody characteristic of long-meter hymnody.

In 1951, only three years after Columbia Records introduced the ten-inch long-playing 33⅓-rpm disk into the marketplace, Decca Records, by then a significant force in African American popular and religious music, and on its way to becoming a major player in original cast recordings of Broadway musicals, released what may well be the first commercial album to feature a live African American worship service with gospel singing. The Wedding Ceremony of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Russell Morrison chronicled the very public July 3, 1951, nuptials of Tharpe, Decca’s biggest spiritual star, and New York Savoy Ballroom executive Russell Morrison. The combined ceremony and gospel music program was recorded in front of fifteen to twenty thousand Tharpe fans at Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC. Decca’s folk and R&B director Paul Cohen and R&B department assistant Joe Thomas culled nearly three hours of taped material to make the collection a souvenir of, according to the album notes, a “100% unrehearsed, live occasion.”¹⁶

The final product was a ten-inch LP with four cuts per side and, for those without a phonograph capable of playing the new 331/3-rpm records, a corresponding album of four double-sided 78-rpm disks. A portion of the album contained highlights from the formal wedding ceremony, presided over by the Church of God in Christ minister and aforementioned recording preacher, the Reverend Samuel Kelsey. The rest were selections from the music program that preceded and followed the formal vows, including selections by Tharpe and the Rosettes, her female background vocal group, and Decca labelmates the Harmonizing Four of Richmond, Virginia. Decca’s rationale to capture Tharpe live, however, was inspired neither by records of St. Paul’s Echoes of Eden nor by the many recorded sermons of the 1920s, nor even by the company’s use of the long-playing album to release soundtracks of Broadway musicals, but by Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic releases. The jazz impresario’s series of recorded jam sessions captured jazz performances in all their “on-the-spot spontaneity.”¹⁷

But if Tharpe’s wedding album opened the door to album-length live in-service recordings, few African American gospel artists walked through it in the 1950s. Recording sessions continued to occur in the controlled confines of professional music studios and radio stations. A prime example is a ten-inch album recorded on March 31, 1954, for Choir Records of Hollywood. The disk featured the Voices of Victory, the home choir of the Victory Baptist Church of Los Angeles, California, directed by Thurston Gilbert Frazier (1930–74).¹⁸ Frazier, who arranged and sang on the album’s selections and directed the choir, sought with this release to reproduce an authentic Baptist Church service, from invocation to doxology. Engineered by Francis Allan Enig, A Service by the Pastor and the Choir of the Victory Baptist Church opens with a spirited reading of “I’m So Glad Jesus Lifted Me,” a song featured on the weekly radio broadcasts of Chicago’s First Church of Deliverance and recorded by the Voices of Victory for Decca in 1953. After the introductory singing, Victory Baptist’s pastor, the Reverend Doctor Arthur Atlas Peters, recites prayers and delivers a sermonette while the choir presents a program of spirituals, gospel songs, and hymns, such as “Great Change in Me” and “Blessed Assurance.” Robbie Preston, the mother of organist and singer Billy Preston, handles piano responsibilities. As on the St. Paul Echoes of Eden singles, members of the Voices of Victory can be heard punctuating the recording atmosphere with spontaneous vocal interjections, exclamations, and hand clapping as they embrace the spirit of the service. The disk was pressed without track breaks, suggesting the presentation was to be enjoyed as one continuous listening experience.

The Voices of Victory release came closer to capturing an authentic church service than Tharpe’s public nuptials, which sounded like a gospel musical at which a wedding ceremony broke out. But for all its attempts at authenticity, what’s missing from the Voices of Victory disk, as from most of its predecessors, was the audible pleasure of a live recording audience or congregation. That’s because it was not recorded in Victory Baptist Church at all but in the Capitol Records studio in Hollywood. The Voices gathered in the same studio, and around the same microphones, as Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. Nevertheless, a Billboard reviewer gushed, “Every so often a small or new LP diskery turns out an album of such merit that it deserves the widest exposure. Here is one.”¹⁹

King Records of Cincinnati, another “small or new diskery,” as Billboard terms it, added the missing audience component when it recorded the Spirit of Memphis quartet singing “Lord Jesus” in front of an audience at Memphis’s Mason Temple on October 7, 1952. The unknown producer captured the quartet’s unaccompanied singing but, more important, he preserved its interaction with an aurally enthusiastic audience. The sung performance, which consumes both sides of the single, focuses so heavily on the interplay between audience and quartet that the singing is almost secondary.²⁰ A year later, King would record Brother Claude Ely, the “Gospel Ranger,” singing and playing guitar at a white Pentecostal service in a Letcher County, Kentucky, courthouse. Among the products of that live session was a King single of “There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down,” a song that would thenceforth become associated with Ely. Country music historian Kevin Fontenot suggests that this 1953 disk was the first time people unfamiliar with the Pentecostal church had a chance to experience the music.²¹

The Mason Temple in Memphis served as the venue for another live recording, Bessie Griffin’s November 1953 presentation of “Too Close to Heaven.” Supported by pianist Charlotte Nelson, the Caravans accompanist whom James Cleveland replaced in 1954, Griffin sang Alex Bradford’s smash hit, and Memphis radio station WDIA was there to record it for its short-lived Starmaker imprint.²² Like the Spirit of Memphis release, Griffin’s performance filled both sides of the 78-rpm disk. Although these two Memphis recordings were made at gospel music programs and not in church, similarities exist between church worship and a gospel program. Both feature interactions by the audience or congregation and attempts to conjure spirit possession, or individuals “getting happy,” during the performance.

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, Specialty Records owner Art Rupe heard about Killens’s live record from Brother Joe May. May wrote Rupe in 1952 that Randy Wood, owner of one of the nation’s most successful mail-order music companies, told him that the Killens disk was “the best seller of today.”²³ Forever looking for the next best thing, Rupe began taping live performances of his gospel artists whenever he could, including a 1952 appearance in Los Angeles by the Sallie Martin Singers, then Specialty Records artists. The results were hit-and-miss, largely because of the limitations of mobile recording equipment.²⁴ A particularly forceful voice, for example, could cause significant distortion that, at that time, might ruin an otherwise pristine performance. Another risk was when a singer, caught in the spirit, “ran off mike” while singing, leaving a gaping hole in the audio. Too much authenticity was anathema to producers whose skills were honed in the controlled conditions of recording studios.

Serendipity was on Specialty’s side, however, when Rupe’s producer, Robert “Bumps” Blackwell, captured a July 22, 1955, program at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium, which included the aforementioned appearance by James Cleveland and the Caravans. Other artists recorded that night included the Pilgrim Travelers, the Swan Silvertones, Brother Joe May, Annette May Thomas, and Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers. It is one of the most significant aural illustrations of live gospel music during its golden age. The taped program was not released to the public until the 1970s, when portions appeared on a Specialty LP with wrongheadedly overdubbed instrumentation. In 1993, however, half the program, without overdubbing, was released on CD by Fantasy Records in association with Specialty. The CD version of the 1955 Shrine Concert better illustrates the emotional energy that an audience or congregation provides gospel artists—a mutually supportive exchange that simply cannot be replicated in the sterile studio environment. A similar example is a SAR Records limited release of an amateur tape recording of a July 1955 program on which the Soul Stirrers and Sam Cooke sing an extended and hypnotic version of their Specialty hit “Nearer to Thee” to screams from female fans.²⁵

Also in 1955, record man Mike Adrian and album jacket designer Curt Witt inadvertently altered the paradigm of recording African American sacred music on the long-playing album format while wandering around 125th Street and Eighth Avenue in Harlem. In search of objects to photograph for an album cover assignment, the two happened on a worship service in progress. Intrigued by the music and hand clapping, the men ascended the steps to the church. There they encountered the congregation of the local United House of Prayer for All People, a denomination founded in 1919 by Marcelino Manuel da Graça, better known as Bishop Daddy Grace (1881–1960). Not only were the men welcomed warmly, but they came away captivated by the church’s music and spirit. They returned again and again, finally visiting with a tape recorder in hand. The two sides of A Night with Daddy Grace, released in 1955 on the Harlequin label, is the product of that live in-service taping. It features prayers, testimonies, singing by a vocal troupe called the Grace Emanuel Singers, and selections by the Grace Heavenly Band. Directed by Willie Williams, the Grace Heavenly Band was a “shout band” of brass players performing in the lively harmony that remains the distinct domain of the United House of Prayer for All People and is rarely heard outside its denominational walls. The album notes heralded its “on-the-spot excitement” and reckoned that the music therein “makes much of today’s rock and roll sound thin and commercial in comparison.”²⁶ This 1955 release may well be the first instance of a live in-service worship experience preserved on a long-playing album.

Around the same time, an African American church congregation in Detroit could be heard audibly appreciating traditional or folk preaching and gospel singing on album-length sermons by its pastor, the Reverend Clarence LaVaughn Franklin. Born near Indianola, Mississippi, on January 22, 1915, C. L. Franklin grew up listening to the Reverend Gates’s recorded sermons. He was drawn to the religious life and in June 1946, after ministering to congregations in Mississippi and Tennessee, he was installed as pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit. By harnessing the power of radio, records, and national preaching and singing tours, Franklin built New Bethel into an influential ministry not only in Detroit but throughout the nation. As early as 1949, Detroit record-store owner Joe Von Battle was recording Franklin’s Sunday morning sermons. By 1953, Battle was pressing them, complete with singing and the spontaneous reactions from the church congregation, on his J-V-B label and selling them at his Hastings Avenue record store in Detroit. He also leased the recordings to Chess Records, which issued Franklin’s sermons on its own imprint. Chess continued its relationship with Franklin after the J-V-B issues ceased, establishing a special Sermon Series devoted almost exclusively to Franklin’s messages. One of the most stunning examples of congregants or audience members being swept into the music was a 1956 solo by Franklin’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Aretha, of “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Halfway through her church performance of Thomas Dorsey’s beloved hymn, captured on tape by Battle, a female congregant shrieked uncontrollably and repeatedly, evidently slain in the spirit.

In 1954 the choir of the Reverend James Lofton’s Church of Our Prayer, also from Detroit, released a two-part single, “Great Day,” for the local Prosperity label. Recorded in the church, this cover of the Ward Singers’ “Who Shall Be Able to Stand” features spontaneous exclamations of joy by the choristers.²⁷ But if there was any audience participation, it was tamped down so as not to interfere with the recording process.

In Brooklyn around 1958, the Washington Temple Church of God in Christ produced an album called Gospel Singing in Washington Temple. Led by Bishop Frederick D. Washington (1913–88) and his wife, the powerful vocalist Ernestine Washington (1914–83)—both having recorded as far back as the early to mid-1940s—the church boasted a music ministry led by music director Alfred Miller. Anthony Heilbut cites Miller as being the first pianist on records to play in the modern gospel style introduced in the mid-1930s by Roberta Martin. Not only did the church’s music ministry (which included its own “Angelic Choir”) record many projects in Washington Temple, but it also hosted HOB Records’ star-studded fifth anniversary celebration musical, which was recorded live in the mid-1960s and released as an album.²⁸

Toward the end of the 1950s, Dot Records released a gem of a live album by Clara Ward and the Ward Singers. Bestowed the unimaginative title of Gospel Concert, the album captured the group not in a church but at a June 18, 1958, live appearance at New York’s celebrated Town Hall. Accompanied by Sam Windham, the same steel guitarist who worked with the Angelic Choir, gospel organist Herman Stevens, and a lineup of top jazz musicians, including Milt Hinton on bass and Osie Johnson on drums, the Wards present a variety of gospels, spirituals, and hymns. “Didn’t It Rain” features Windham’s stimulating steel-guitar work. It documents the Wardses’ unfettered exuberance in front of a live audience or congregation.²⁹

Folklorist Alan Lomax was busy again in October 1959 when he captured the Reverend Robert Crenshaw, one-time member of the Skylarks and Swan Silvertones quartets, during a worship service at New Brown’s Chapel in Memphis. The highlight of the album was Crenshaw’s lifting of the long- meter hymn, “I Love the Lord, He Heard My Cry,” with sung congregational response. Meanwhile, that same year, but in the world of southern gospel, Starday Records of Nashville, Tennessee, recorded the eleventh anniversary of Wally Fowler’s “Gospel and Spiritual All Nite Singing Concerts” at the city’s Ryman Auditorium, then home of the Grand Ole Opry. In November 1948 Fowler, founder of the Oak Ridge Quartet, initiated the practice of bringing southern gospel’s most popular quartets and soloists together at the Ryman for an all-night congregational sing-along.³⁰

The first known live commercial recording of a Newark, New Jersey, gospel choir is by the Back Home Choir from Greater Harvest Baptist Church. Its appearance, alongside hometown heroes the Drinkard Singers, at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, was preserved on LP by Norman Granz, of the aforementioned Jazz at the Philharmonic series, for his one-year-old Verve label.³¹ But the first known live in-church commercial recording of gospel music in Newark occurred at the Abyssinian Baptist Church on Kinney Street and under the pastoral leadership of the Reverend Raphus P. Means. Alex Bradford, Abyssinian’s minister of music at the time, was a nationally known gospel music personality and recording artist with as much drive and ambition as James Cleveland. Known as the “Singing Rage of the Gospel Age,”³² Bradford was born in Bessemer, Alabama, on January 23, 1927. As a youngster, he was fascinated by the musical and theatrical flamboyance of Prophet Jones, founder of the Triumph the King of Christ Universal Dominion Kingdom of God and Temple of Christ.³³ Bradford was also drawn to the sanctified church in general and attempted to join, but his staunch Baptist mother kept him seated firmly in the pews of the Baptist Church.³⁴

Bradford was as gifted a songwriter as he was a singer. In addition to writing songs for his own groups, he wrote classics for the Roberta Martin Singers, such as “Come On in the Room” and “Too Close to Heaven.” Appearing as “I’m Too Close,” Bradford’s composition proved successful for Martin, but it was his own recording for Specialty in 1953, with his Bradford Singers, that put him on the national gospel circuit. He signed with Savoy in 1959, recording his debut sides for the company’s Gospel subsidiary in September of that year.

In April 1960, as Dunstan Prial reports, John Hammond, discoverer of major American talents from Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, wanted “to replicate the sound and feel of an actual Sunday morning service.”³⁵ Because the recording, produced for Columbia Records, label home of Mahalia Jackson, was to take place on a weekday morning, Hammond and Bradford invited as many Abyssinian members as were available to gather at the church for the recording session. This, writes Prial, “provided an incalculable dimension to an already supercharged atmosphere…. This was no longer a recording session. This was church.”³⁶

Indeed, it was church. The album’s most riveting selection, Bradford’s rousing “Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody,” demonstrates how a spirit-filled congregation becomes, in Shelley’s words, “affective laborers” in arranging a song through its spontaneous responses. After rousing leads by Calvin White and Margaret Simpson, the song wound to a close, but extemporaneous shouts from the congregation encouraged the choir and soloists to pick it back up and reprise the chorus on the spot.³⁷ It is one of the first recorded examples of the false ending, a technique that would become standard for gospel choirs and especially for Dr. Mattie Moss Clark’s Southwest Michigan State Choir of the Church of God in Christ, which used the false ending often on record. “Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody” wound up in the repertories of church and community choirs for years to come.

The recording was marvelous, but there was one problem: Bradford was signed to Savoy, not Columbia. Herman Lubinsky allegedly snuck into Abyssinian that morning to make certain Bradford did not utter one note on the recording. To Lubinsky’s satisfaction, Bradford can’t be heard on the album.³⁸

In its November 7, 1960, issue, Billboard deemed Abyssinian Baptist Gospel Choir one of its Spotlight Winners of the Week. “This is the McCoy,” the reviewer wrote, “with the recording reproducing the fervent, ecstatic emotions of the group.”³⁹ The Abyssinian Baptist Gospel Choir was invited to appear at the second annual Newport Folk Festival. The choir hit the stage Sunday evening, June 26, 1960, singing alongside Odetta, the New Lost City Ramblers, and Theodore Bikel.⁴⁰ Then, on May 28, 1961, Abyssinian pastor Means and some church members walked out of the West Kinney Street facility. The following day, Bradford hosted a meeting at his home to discuss plans for a brand new church. At that meeting, Means, Bradford, and other participants birthed the Greater Abyssinian Baptist Church.⁴¹

Six days before the November 7 Billboard review, King Records engineers John Roswick and Carl Averbeck set up microphones in the Bible Way Church of God in Cincinnati, Ohio, to record the pastor, choir, and congregation in an authentic worship service. The most all-inclusive of live in-service recordings to that point, Let the Church Roll On featured choral and congregational singing as well as an opening prayer and sermonette by Bible Way’s charismatic pastor, the four-foot-ten Reverend “Little” Abraham Isaac Jacob Swanson XII. King packaged “Little Abraham Introduction,” which opened side two, as a single. Retitled “Reverend Swanson’s Prayer,” the single became a radio favorite that gospel music fans of a certain age remember fondly to this day.⁴²

Although recorded between December 14 and 16, 1962, and therefore after Cleveland and the Angelic Choir began their live in-service collaboration, Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz captured fervent Pentecostal worship services at St. Luke’s Powerhouse Church of God in Christ in Phoenix, Arizona. The pastor, Reverend Louis Overstreet (1921–80), was a transplant from Louisiana who played electric guitar and bass drum simultaneously. One of the tracks Strachwitz captured that December is a remarkable instrumental called “Holiness Dance.” Its rhythmic rawness and persistent ostinato evoke the ancient ring shout associated with praise houses established by enslaved Africans in America.⁴³

Thus, by 1962, the stage had long been set for what James Cleveland, Lawrence Roberts, and the Angelic Choir were about to undertake.