8

The Performativity of “Peace Be Still”

As has been mentioned several times thus far, “Peace Be Still” was recorded during the 1963 Birmingham campaign, arguably the most important operation of the classical southern period of the civil-rights movement. Nevertheless, 1960s-era Angelic Choir members interviewed for this book said that neither the song nor the album nor their performance was directly inspired or influenced by the Birmingham church bombing or any other current events from the front lines of the movement. This is not to suggest that no choir members or listeners interpreted “Peace Be Still” or other album selections as a commentary on the troubles or as a therapeutic response to the trying times. Indeed, Professor Robert Darden, who leads Baylor University’s Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, considers “Peace Be Still” the “second gospel song most associated with the healing that eventually followed the terrible events of Sunday, September 16” (the first, in his estimation, was Dorothy Love Coates and the Gospel Harmonettes’ album cut, “The Hymn,” recorded for Vee Jay in 1964).¹

So, if not in explicit response to civil-rights gains or losses, what were James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir trying to communicate through “Peace Be Still” and other album selections? What fueled the indelible impression “Peace Be Still” left, and continues to leave, on its listeners? Since black sacred music is clothed in multiple layers of meaning, let’s first consider a coded messages theory. In his master’s thesis, “Sit In, Stand Up and Sing Out! Black Gospel Music and the Civil Rights Movement,” Michael Castellini contends that gospel songs, like their folk spiritual forebears, contain coded messages that speak to an African American worldview. Song lyrics employing biblical texts embed socially relevant messages in religious metaphor. If folk spirituals, “draped in scriptural imagery and sung by people well versed in their seditious meaning … referred to earthly as well as heavenly release from hellish oppression,” so too, do gospel songs.² Scriptural imagery of this kind, Castellini writes, is what anthropologist and political scientist James Scott refers to as the “hidden transcript,” or the “folk cultural discourse that diverts direct aggression into folktales, humor, fantasy, play, ritual, music, and other forms.”³ Singing a gospel song or a spiritual with a hidden transcript falls within what Scott calls the realm of “infrapolitics,” or daily acts of resistance that appear opaque to the external world but, to the black community, the message is crystal clear.⁴

“Gospel music has always operated primarily in the realm of infrapolitics,” Castellini argues, “by strategically masking its oppositional expressions in biblical allegory and religious symbolism to deflect the repressive reaction of hostile whites.”⁵ In other words, gospel songs and singing are a sacred shorthand decipherable by those in the African American religious community but not easily decipherable by individuals outside it. “Black people’s singing was in a specific context of social circumstance,” explains civil-rights leader, minister, and religious music scholar Wyatt Tee Walker. “Simply put, what Black people are singing religiously will provide a clue as to what is happening to them sociologically.”⁶

The life-preserving necessity of communicating in code was not easy for southern migrants to simply switch off upon settling in the North. During a 2005 interview that was posted in 2018 on the website JerryJazzMusician, Nick Salvatore, author of Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America, posited, “When a group of people is living in an oppressive and dangerous culture, how do they speak out against it? If you are African American, how do you speak out against an oppressive culture like that found in the Mississippi Delta of 1947? It was very dangerous, and plenty of people were killed trying to do so. So, when black people came to a city like Detroit from a state like Mississippi or Arkansas, while they discovered a freedom that didn’t exist for them in the Delta, they weren’t sure how to express themselves after being raised in a culture that threatened them for speaking out. In the process of finding one’s voice, church hymns and sermons became critically important.”⁷ As the children of migrants or as newcomers themselves, the members of the Angelic Choir could certainly bear witness. Having to earn a living outside their church and choir activities and, as we shall see, living in a region with racial tensions simmering beneath the surface, they were careful to not draw the wrong kind of attention.

One cathartic and confidential way to communicate the anger and frustration of living as a black person in America, then, was to sing it out. Whether advancing the collective cause of freedom or expressing private sorrows and joys, singing is a vehicle for African Americans to, in the words of Bernice Johnson Reagon, “evidence their reality.”⁸ Regardless of whether that reality is at the community level, at the personal level, or both, “gospel music, at bottom,” concludes Walker, “is religious folk music that is clearly identifiable with the social circumstance of the Black community in America.”⁹

Professor Johari Jabir of the University of Illinois at Chicago goes one step further. He asserts that coded messages in “Peace Be Still” are not just embedded in the lyrics but also in its dramatic music arrangement. “‘Peace Be Still’ is a song about peace but it is not a peaceful song,” he writes. “It does not use the bourgeois style of peaceful music to obscure the violent truth of Black life in America. Cleveland’s arrangement of vocals, instrumentation, and lyrics is the ‘manner that reflects the matter,’ to borrow a phrase from Richard Wright’s discussion on depicting the violence of Black life in writing…. [Its] language, logic, and sound … expose the violent contradictions of race, rights, protest, and citizenship indicative of the Black experience in America.”¹⁰ In sum, the performativity of “Peace Be Still,” or its ability to effect change in the world, adroitly articulates the African American worldview in words and music, and in plain sight, but without fear of reprisal. James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir did not need to spell out their message for it to be heard and understood.

On the other hand, historian Will Boone believes the lyric content of “Peace Be Still” may be more transparent than opaque. At the 2014 conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Boone offered a second potential translation of “Peace Be Still” by citing African American studies professor Ashton Crawley’s concept of the “aesthetics of possibility,” or a preference for expressing joy over pain as itself a “radical act of resistance.” Boone explained that the album’s periodic outbreaks of palpable joy, despite life’s trials, outweigh the need to garner strength from one specific tragic incident, such as the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. In assembling the Peace Be Still album, Boone argued, “Cleveland and the Angelics told a story of salvation, deliverance, joy, and celebration. It was not a new story, but a very old one; applicable to current events but ultimately concerned with things that are timeless…. It is through this so-called otherworldly practice that people and communities are empowered, that they come to see the world otherwise; that they come to believe in the possibility of political freedom because they have glimpsed existential freedom.”¹¹

In other words, existential freedom, or the transformative power of joy expressed by “Peace Be Still” and other tracks on the album, inspires believers to not just stand the storm of racial prejudice but to overcome it and emerge victorious. It’s a philosophy not inconsistent with the passive resistance strategy employed by the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the exact moment in time the album was recorded. Indeed, Freedom Rider and King associate Reverend C. T. Vivian could just as easily have been talking about “Peace Be Still” when he said that “Anytime you can get something that lifts your spirits and also speaks to the reality of your life, even the reality of oppression, and at the same time is talking about how you can really overcome; that’s terribly important stuff.”¹² This aligns with Emily J. Lordi’s definition of soul logic, or “the special resilience black people had earned by surviving the historical and daily trials of white supremacy.” Linking soul logic to its gospel roots, Lordi asserts that “soul musicians, through a series of practices drawn from the black church, modeled virtuosic black resilience on a national stage.”¹³ Lordi’s definition of soul logic, which includes both vocalists and musicians, gives further credence to Jabir’s suggestion that “Peace Be Still” makes its point both lyrically and musically.

The act of overcoming or, in gospel song parlance, “shouting troubles over,” through the allegorical use of biblical stories in song is, like coded messaging, a mainstay of gospel music. It’s what the Angelic Choir members meant when they expressed their commitment to “praising the Lord” during the Peace Be Still session. To them, thanking the Lord for helping them overcome life’s trials was just as important as beseeching the Lord for continual assistance. Theirs is the gratitude of survivors, not the pleas of victims. They are not “poor pilgrims of sorrow” but victorious warriors and standard bearers for Christ. Endurance is itself a form of protest; survival informs the antagonist that the protester cannot be kept down or, in the words of Isaiah 54:17, “No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper.” Incorporating into this argument the Angelic Choir’s status, as summarized by Gertrude Hicks, as “everyday people, no stars,” one is reminded of a comment made by country-girl-turned-stage-actor Nina in Anton Chekhov’s The Sea Gull: “What’s important is not fame, not glory, not the things I used to dream of, but the ability to endure. To be able to bear one’s cross and have faith.”¹⁴ Again, Lordi’s soul logic proves instructive: “People who had soul believed in—had to believe in—the value of pain, and they showed how it could be alchemized into artistic expressions of deep feeling. Both the belief and its creative expression secured one’s place in a community of other black people who understood that suffering had meaning and who lived that understanding through a life-affirming style.”¹⁵ “All classes of a people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be,” Alain Locke wrote. “With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage.”¹⁶

So whether as a coded message, an expression of joy to supersede pain, or a declaration of endurance, “Peace Be Still” struggles to make sense of the madness of man’s inhumanity to man. “All great music teeters on the edge of madness,” writes British commentator Norman Lebrecht in a May 2019 review of Stephen Johnson’s book, How Shostakovich Changed My Mind. “In life’s crises,” Johnson suggests that “each of us comes up against an internal siege … and music comes to our relief.”¹⁷ Jabir concurs: “Gospel songs like ‘Peace Be Still’ are a distinctly religious example of how Black people ‘make sense’ of a social order that does not—even on its own terms—make sense.”¹⁸ For Locke, African American art converts “the brands and wounds of social persecution” into “the proud stigmata of spiritual immunity and moral victory.”¹⁹

And for African Americans, making sense of the madness through the medium of music in 1963 meant cloaking it, like the folk spirituals, in biblical metaphor, letting the music be their voice and tell their story. This is consistent with Nick Salvatore’s comments. Prior to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, gospel artists on major record labels were, with rare exception, hesitant to express—and, in some cases, prohibited from expressing—explicit social statements on phonograph records. Radio stations, fearing backlash from sponsors, were reticent to program records deemed controversial. For example, when researching material for his book, Roosevelt’s Blues, historian Guido van Rijn discovered that of the approximately 25,000 blues and gospel records released between 1902 and 1945, only 349, or about 1.4 percent, contained direct political references.²⁰

In the same book, van Rijn raises another excellent point about the hidden transcript. He tells the story of Lawrence Gellert, a white Hungarian immigrant who lived with a black woman in 1920s North Carolina. Inspired by the music produced by his friend’s church, Gellert set about recording African American protest music in Georgia and the Carolinas. Of the five hundred recordings Gellert captured between 1924 and 1937, van Rijn reports that “half the songs he collected contained outspoken political protest, a surprising number compared to the mere 5 percent of protest songs in the Library of Congress recordings collected by John and Alan Lomax and the even smaller percentage on commercial recordings.”²¹ The musicians Gellert recorded evidently trusted him, likely because the music collector was of the community. But one wonders whether the musicians would have felt as comfortable expressing their opinions had Gellert been recording for commercial purposes. In this case, Matthew 10:27 is better rendered as “What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye not in light.” At least not explicitly.

This wasn’t just an African American music phenomenon. Consider the radio ban of “The Pill,” Loretta Lynn’s 1975 single about birth control. The line “Makin’ love in the green grass” in Van Morrison’s 1967 hit “Brown Eyed Girl” was edited out for radio play. Even the Beach Boys’ now-iconic “God Only Knows” from 1966 was deemed blasphemous by some radio stations because the rock song used the word God. But songs by black artists explicitly protesting discrimination would likely have had difficulty being released in the first place. Bosses of major imprints with gospel catalogs like Savoy, Vee Jay, Peacock, and Nashboro would not have authorized the release of a single that did not stand a chance of garnering radio play and potentially prejudice programmers against their less radical offerings. That “Peace Be Still” received wide radio play suggests that no radio station found its message so explicitly subversive as to endanger its relationship with its advertisers or more conservative listeners. Indeed, Dorothy Love Coates and the Gospel Harmonettes’ 1964 version of “The Hymn,” which explicitly refers to “the little children” who “lost their lives in the church bombing,” was not released as a single by the black-owned record company Vee Jay.

Instances of explicit social messaging on African American religious records prior to 1964 were almost unilaterally released by small, independent labels with regional distribution and aimed specifically at the African American market.²² As Darden highlights in the second volume of Nothing but Love in God’s Water, his sweeping survey of black sacred music and the freedom movement, recordings such as “Where Is Freedom” by the Friendly Four, which encouraged “freedom fighters everywhere,” was released around July 1963, on a South Carolina label called Movement Records, an imprint likely established for that one release.²³ Brother Will Hairston of Detroit (1919–88), who made a career out of writing and recording movement songs like “Alabama Bus” (1956) and “Shout School Children” (1957), released his material on indie Detroit labels J-V-B, Knowles, and Natural. But whereas Hairston felt comfortable recording a tribute to Emmett Till, the teenager from Chicago whose horrific 1955 murder catalyzed the modern civil-rights movement, Dootone Records, a black-owned independent label that experienced national success with the Penguins’ “Earth Angel” in 1954, released actor and musician Benjamin Sherman “Scatman” Crothers’s “The Story of Emmett Till” in 1956 under the nom de plume of the Ramparts.²⁴

In the early years of King’s civil-rights efforts, northern black churches, with notable exceptions, supported their southern brethren prayerfully but passively, holding fund-raising events for the local chapter of the NAACP but steering clear of explicit protest activities. More direct involvement happened around 1960, when reports of bloody sit-ins and the harassment and brutality directed at the Freedom Riders began troubling the waters of the nation’s social conscience. Moreover, as Andrew Billingsley affirms in Mighty like a River, blanket criticisms of the response of African American churches to racism and discrimination do not take into account the various ways churches and their flocks are equipped to respond to social and political crises. It depends on whether they are conservative, semiactivist, or activist congregations.²⁵

The conservative church, Billingsley writes, is concerned primarily with the spiritual and religious needs of its members. Semiactivist churches not only care for their members’ spiritual and religious needs, they also tackle relevant social issues by hosting guest speakers, community meetings, and discussions. These two types align with C. Eric Lincoln’s description of spiritual, or privatistic, churches, which focus energy and resources on their members.²⁶ On the other hand, activist churches (communal in Lincoln’s terminology) confront social crises head on.²⁷ They are involved in every aspect of their members’ lives, including the political. Activist or communal churches were numerous in the South during the early 1960s. Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and Brown Chapel AME church in Selma, Alabama, are two examples of activist churches that provided succor to marchers, protesters, and civil-rights organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Using Billingsley’s nomenclature, First Baptist Church of Nutley would fall into the semiactivist category. Although the Reverend Lawrence Roberts and his staff did not march on the front line with Doctor King or protest in the streets of Nutley or Newark, the church did host ecumenical gatherings to promote fellowship, understanding, and collaborative worship among various religions well into the 1970s. On more than one occasion, Anthony Heilbut told this author during informal telephone conversations how Roberts shared with him his concerns about the larger issue of human rights.

That “Peace Be Still” was sung by a church choir adds yet another interpretive layer. In their seminal book The Black Church in the African American Experience, C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya introduce a concept called “convoking the culture”—to bring about “genuine corporate worship” by “assembling the faithful to a common place and a common experience of worship” so as to “transcend or to reduce to insignificance those social, cultural, or economic barriers which separate individuals in their secular interest.”²⁸ Within the church, choral singing, an act of communal expression, offers a “sense of community” and a “temporary reduction of social alienation” through the “reaffirmation of a common bond.”²⁹

Because “Peace Be Still” was sung by a choir that, as a subset of a believing community, represents it (in this instance, First Baptist Church of Nutley), the song’s infrapolitical message was affirmed by the community at large. A choir speaks for its congregation and with its congregation in the collective interpretation of a song. Allison Schnable of Princeton University might concur with this point. In her ethnographic study of a youth gospel choir, she writes that the “collective emotional experience of making music, the shared understandings of religious narratives in songs’ lyrics, the ritual of performance in church services, and repeated co-presence in the sacred space of the church building create strong bonds among church members.”³⁰ In this regard, the two most musically climactic moments of “Peace Be Still”—the twice calming of the waves represented by dramatic crescendos and decrescendos of the voices and musicians—characterize what Castellini calls the communal “elevated spiritual moment” that “is the message of gospel music.”³¹

Looking at it from this perspective, “Peace Be Still” convoked cultural unity within the church walls of Trinity Temple and, via radio and phonograph record, within African American households throughout the United States. Like a radio broadcast of a church service, Peace Be Still as a long- playing album available for mass consumption was a way to gather the African American Christian body together for collective reaffirmation of a common bond and experience through music. The album, and its title track in particular, were intended to heal wounds inflicted by a myriad of daily indignities while also offering hope and encouragement for more than just the flock gathered at Trinity Temple on a mid-September evening in 1963. It was a reminder that no matter how tough life might be, no one anywhere had to battle the wind and the waves alone.

Although the Angelic Choir was not explicitly responding to the violence in Birmingham or the civil-rights movement generally, it did not mean that its members weren’t personally angered and saddened over what was happening in the South. Many had family and friends living there but, as one member noted, the situation “didn’t govern life.” And, as the preceding arguments suggest, it would be naive to conclude that the sobering but ultimately uplifting message of “Peace Be Still” was bereft of any reaction or response to race prejudice or socioeconomic injustice, especially when racial injustice was alive and well in Newark long before the city’s cataclysmic 1967 riot.

When in 1945 sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton wrote, “Understand Chicago’s Black Belt and you will understand the Black Belts of a dozen large American cities,” Newark could easily have been among the dozen.³² Southern migrants who arrived in Newark between the 1920s and the 1950s, including members of the Angelic Choir and their families and neighbors, confronted many of the same injustices their brethren experienced in northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York.

Between 1940 and 1950, Newark’s black population increased by nearly two-thirds, from 45,760 to 75,637, or a little less than one-fifth of the city population. In response, whites fled to the surrounding suburbs, dividing the area into what historian Kevin Mumford calls the “white suburb and the black city.”³³ But while African Americans were swiftly becoming a majority in Newark, the city’s power structure was still dominated by white males. Discrimination in public accommodations was forbidden by New Jersey state law, but that didn’t necessarily prevent it from happening.³⁴ In 1949 singer and actor Lena Horne brought a racially mixed party to Caruso’s Restaurant in Newark and was refused service. Citing the state laws forbidding segregation, Horne sued the restaurant and won.³⁵

Horne’s suit reflected a shift, begun prior to World War II, from passive acceptance by African American Newarkers of the status quo to active dissent. Emboldened by international outrage over the rise of fascism in Europe, blacks evoked anti-Hitler sentiments to call for antiracism in America.³⁶ Among the many reasons for their protest was the “invisible but assiduously observed color line” that dictated where in Newark African Americans could and could not live. Real-estate agents intentionally steered African Americans away from the suburbs, where the housing stock was better, to areas such as the Central Ward, where many dwellings were outdated and had outlived their usefulness. Of the more than forty thousand blacks living in Newark at the start of World War II, 90 percent were crammed into the Central Ward.³⁷ It was an enormous disappointment to the migrants; adding insult to injury, it seemed as if the worst domiciles were reserved for African American soldiers returning from the war.³⁸

Notwithstanding the kind treatment Roberts reported receiving from Sebastian S. Kresge, Mumford notes that in postwar Newark, the flagship Kresge department store was one of the downtown establishments where segregation existed. Mumford also cites the restaurant in the S. S. Kresge 5 and 10 Cent Store on Broad Street for “randomly observed Jim Crow segregation.” African Americans were usually seated in its main dining area, but when white-collar white workers crowded the café, the African Americans were relegated to counter service.³⁹ In response, African Americans pursued self-sufficiency by establishing their own businesses and service organizations.⁴⁰ The Coleman brothers’ hotel and recording studio, discussed in chapter 2, are examples of entrepreneurship in response to exclusionism. Nevertheless, the “energetic center of civil rights” that Newark had become during World War II gradually faded as postwar communist hysteria turned what could have been a progressive mobilizing effort into “liberalism [that] was polite and passive.”⁴¹

The 1950s witnessed the black population of Newark surge to 142,600, and the area’s African American middle class successfully broke color barriers by settling in surrounding suburbs such as Orange and East Orange. Nevertheless, in 1960, when Roberts assumed the pastorate of First Baptist Church of Nutley, most of the African American population of Newark, where many First Baptist Church members and Angelic Choir members resided, were still consigned to the cramped and crumbling confines of the Central Ward.⁴² When the local housing authority proposed to ease overcrowding by constructing the Columbus Homes, an integrated housing project, in the Italian American section of town, white ethnics pitched a fit.⁴³ Meanwhile, southern migrants still arriving in Newark in search of work joined the ranks of the unemployed, which for the city’s African American working population hovered around 12 percent.⁴⁴

If the Freedom Riders’ arrival in Newark in 1961 redirected attention from the city’s housing and employment discrimination to the struggles of southern African Americans, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was intent on eradicating local injustices.⁴⁵ CORE established its first Newark branch office in 1963 and by July was organizing successful protests over unfair treatment of African Americans in employment and housing. Sitins at White Castle hamburger restaurants in Newark and Orange forced management to agree to new hiring practices that ensured jobs for African Americans. A “phone-in” to jam the switchboard at Newark Bell Telephone Company ended with a commitment on the part of company management to hire more black employees. Education was also an issue. By the 1960s, when the First Baptist Sunday Service recordings commenced, more than half of all African American adults in Newark had less than an eighth- grade education. Nearly half of African American youth between the ages of thirteen and sixteen were not in school at all, pushing the local high school dropout rate to an all-time high.⁴⁶ Thanks to CORE’s organizing efforts, African Americans in Newark were once again speaking out about poor housing, high rents, absentee landlordism, income and education inequality, and police brutality.⁴⁷

Sometimes the violence was just as blatantly racial in New Jersey as it was in the Deep South. For example, in August 1963, a month prior to the Peace Be Still recording session, the New Jersey Afro American reported on a row in Jersey City, just east of Newark, involving twenty-one-year-old Essie Marie Harvey. After Harvey, an African American, had been insulted and chased by a group of white boys, a group of her friends that included fourteen-year-old Serina Taylor came to her rescue. Members of the white group, held temporarily at bay, threatened to return. On Saturday morning, August 17, Taylor was sitting on the porch of her home at 118 Woodward Street in Jersey City when she was shot, “sniper style,” by two young white men in a passing automobile. Vincent Lanza and James A’Polito were arrested for the shooting.⁴⁸

If Nutley’s white community was generally friendly to, or at least tolerant of, its African American neighbors and to those arriving from out of town to attend First Baptist Church, the town was not bereft of its own racially motivated incidents. Bootsy Roberts remembered instances of racial profiling by local police that required her husband’s intervention:

At nighttime, the young [men] would come in on the bus to go to a party in town, or they had a girlfriend in town, they would visit the girlfriend and walk to the bus stop. The police would pick them up. Little black boys, they would pick them up and then they would call my husband and say, “Do you know this boy or this guy?” My husband told them, “Every black boy you see, you call me. I don’t know them all. You don’t stop the little white boys when they’re walking to the bus, so stop stopping these black boys walking to the bus stop after visiting their girlfriends!” He said, “What’s good for the white boys is good for the black boys. Now you just stop it!”⁴⁹

Notwithstanding racial tensions on the outside, the self-contained African American communities in and around Newark are remembered fondly by those who grew up there in the 1950s and 1960s as peaceful, orderly, and self-reliant. Still, Lorraine Stancil admitted that “there were some places we couldn’t go. There were some tense moments, and as I began to question my mother about certain things, depending on where we were, if we were in the street, she would try to quell my questions and say ‘not now.’ When we were at home, it was a better time to openly discuss whatever was going on.”⁵⁰ By 1967, a flammable mixture of economic and housing inequality, political disenfranchisement, and a frustration that things would never get better in Newark exploded into one of the worst urban riots in American history.

All this is to say that the Cleveland–Angelic Choir recording of “Peace Be Still” reflected the time in which it was produced, its response to those times embedded in biblical allegory and musical drama. But as societal norms changed, so too did the performativity of “Peace Be Still.” According to Hayes and Laughton’s Gospel Discography, nearly fifty versions of “Peace Be Still” were recorded between 1951 and the early 1990s. Only three predate the 1963 Cleveland–Angelic Choir recording. Of the three, only one—a 1951 version for Specialty Records by Dorothy Love Coates and the Gospel Harmonettes not released until the 1990s—used the Palmer-Baker hymn as its reference point. The other two, by the Mary Johnson Davis Singers (Atlantic, 1953) and Clara Ward (Dot, 1960), were written by Memphis preacher-songwriter Reverend W. Herbert Brewster. He set the same Bible verses to a wholly original melody. This suggests that the 1963 Cleveland–Angelic Choir “Peace Be Still” was the first time that African American artists released a recording of the Palmer-Baker version, thereby setting the standard for others to emulate.

Most gospel artists who covered “Peace Be Still” after September 1963 did so with fidelity to the Cleveland–Angelic Choir variant, but some employed the hundred-year-old hymn to express more explicit aspirations for personal healing and racial concord. That’s because, by the mid-1960s, major record labels were not only becoming more tolerant of lyrics of social significance, they welcomed them. Veteran record man Ralph Bass (1911–97) was among those proactively promoting gospel songs with social messages. He had joined Chicago’s Chess Records in 1959 after a successful seven-year run heading up Federal Records, a subsidiary of King Records.⁵¹ Bass, as artists and repertoire man for the Chess subsidiary Checker, was eager to inject a youthful groove into gospel. Perhaps he took his cue from the Staple Singers, who supported Doctor King’s commitment to justice, desegregation, and national amity that spoke explicitly to the African American worldview. Gospel songs that replaced the theme of man’s relationship to God with man’s relationship to his brethren came to be called “gos-pop.” No doubt Bass’s intentions were not wholly philanthropic; he recognized the potential of gos-pop to stimulate retail sales for the company. He explained in late 1968 that “The message of gos-pop is that there is more to gospel than just finding solace in the church. This follows the same message of Martin King, who was fighting for a new way of life. Kids are tired of hearing ‘Jesus Give Us Help.’ They want a positive message. Gos-pop teaches a way of life.”⁵²

An example of gos-pop as endorsed by Bass in the mid- to late 1960s is the Salem Travelers’ Checker single “Give Me Liberty or Death.” The song was written by group member Arthur Davis and recorded in February 1968, two months before the assassination of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. To a fulsome musical foundation, the song contains statements such as “They learned that the word freedom / They’ve learned it is not just a word / They’ve been run over by horses and bit by dogs.”⁵³ Other socially relevant Salem Travelers songs included their first hit, “The Children Goin’ Astray,” released in 1965 for One-Derful Records’ Halo subsidiary, as well as Checker releases “These Are Trying Times” (1968), “Tell It Like It Is” (1968), “Keep On Holding On” (1969), “What You Gonna Do” (1970), and “Troubles of This World” (1970). On “Tell It Like It Is,” Salem Travelers lead singer Robert Dixon laments that people who are criticized and scorned are “sick and tired of waiting for something to be done.” To stinging psychedelic guitar riffs, Dixon declares, “The black and white should take a stand and rid this hate that’s within man.”⁵⁴

Similarly, the Meditation Singers’ Checker single, “Stand Up and Be Counted,” a multiracial call to direct action released in February 1968 with writer credits to producer Gene Barge, declares, “Don’t turn your back on bias and hate / You’ve got to look ol’ Jim Crow in the eye / We can win if we cooperate.”⁵⁵ The Violinaires of Detroit, also Checker artists during the 1960s, contributed “I Don’t Know,” a Gene Barge composition produced by Bass. After verses containing litanies of social dysfunction, the group sings the chorus, “I don’t know what this world is coming to.”⁵⁶ After King’s death in April 1968, the record stores and airwaves were flooded with tributes to the fallen leader and pleas for unity to continue King’s dream for social justice and racial unity.

One of the first uses of “Peace Be Still” for explicit social commentary came from poet and activist Nikki Giovanni. Born in 1943, Giovanni became associated with the Black Arts Movement, which conveyed messages of black pride through such vehicles as literary works and theatrical performances. “The Great Pax Whitie / Peace Be Still” opens Giovanni’s 1971 Right On Records release, Truth Is on Its Way. It features a faithful interpretation of the Gwendolyn Cooper Lightner arrangement by Isaac Douglas and the New York Community Choir, under the direction of Benny Diggs, with Douglas handling the lead vocal. After the choir sings “Peace Be Still” all the way through, Giovanni recites her poem, “The Great Pax Whitie” with an evangelist’s conviction and a proto-rapper’s incisive and rapid-fire rhyming. It is significant that Giovanni replaces the exclamation point of “Peace! Be Still” with a colon, transforming peace from a command to an entity. Speaking directly to Peace, she describes the insidious indignities her people have suffered at the hands of a shameless white majority. As the New York Community Choir hand-claps to the 9/8 rhythm and vamps on the “Peace Be Still” motif, Giovanni implores African Americans everywhere to speak out against racism and intolerance.⁵⁷

Giovanni’s invocation of Cleveland and the Angelic Choir on Truth Is on Its Way doesn’t end with “Peace Be Still.” Side two of the album opens with a cover of Sunday Service volume 4’s title track, “I Stood on the Banks of Jordan.” Once again, Douglas and the New York Community Choir accompany Giovanni as she recites her poem, “All I Gotta Do.” Drawing on the song’s focus on watching and waiting, Giovanni expresses the frustration of a black woman waiting patiently for the coming of justice and human rights, knowing full well that the power structure will never fulfill its promises.

The following year, in a documentary film on the historic Wattstax benefit concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum, the Emotions, a sister group from Chicago (and former gospel singers the Hutchinson Sunbeams) are captured performing a nine-minute live version of “Peace Be Still” in a small church not unlike Trinity Temple or the razed First Baptist Church.⁵⁸ Exclamations of “Yes, Lord!” from congregants punctuate the air as the Emotions transition from a spoken introduction invoking the Crucifixion scene to a passionately sung version of the hymn, during which the sisters shift between close harmony and contrapuntal singing and shouting. “I believe I hear this voice crying out now,” sings Sheila Hutchinson, transforming “Peace Be Still” and the biblical story on which it is based into a contemporary protest against racial oppression. Eventually, the trio invites the congregation to sing along. While the Emotions’ fervent performance produces solemn nods from some congregants, it causes one young woman to seize up and faint.⁵⁹

“All I Want Is Peace,” recorded by the Heaven Dee-Etts of Trenton, New Jersey, and included in the group’s 1976 album The Good Times of the Heaven Dee-Etts, turns “Peace Be Still” into an intensely personal plea for emotional healing. Accompanied by electric and bass guitar and drums, the group, led by Mary Glanton, opens the song in tempo rubato until the line “the wind and the waves,” when it shifts into a plodding rhythm. “All that I want from my God is just a little peace of mind,” Glanton shouts. “Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, Lord, my pillow gets wet with tears, Lord, yes it does.” Several times during the session, the urgency in the voices of the Heaven Dee-Etts overwhelms the recording apparatus.⁶⁰ But the transition of performativity from external to internal healing is made manifest in the song.

With an arrangement dramatically different from its forebears but consistent with the message of emotional healing, Vanessa Bell Armstrong’s 1983 version of “Peace Be Still” is the best-known and arguably best-loved recorded version of the song next to the Cleveland–Angelic Choir version of twenty years prior. The genius behind Armstrong’s version, from her second solo album for Onyx International Records, is fellow Detroiter Minister Thomas Whitfield. Born April 30, 1954, Whitfield was among a new generation of gospel choir directors influenced by James Cleveland, who helped commercialize the contemporary gospel sound even as he remained a steadfast proponent of the traditional style. Before his untimely passing on June 20, 1992, Whitfield had, in turn, influenced an even younger generation of choir directors, musicians, and gospel songwriters with his complex jazz- and classical-infused melodies and harmonies.⁶¹ His influence is evident today in the music of gospel choir directors worldwide.

Accompanied by background vocalists that included Gwen Morton and musicians that included Whitfield on synthesizer and future gospel star Fred Hammond on bass guitar, Armstrong renders Whitfield’s arrangement of “Peace Be Still” with intricately woven melisma, well-timed shouts, and over-the-stave soprano flights. By the end, she has translated the biblical story of Jesus calming the waters into a daily devotional, calling for peace “in your home, on your job, late in the midnight hour” and “when you don’t know which way to turn.” As with Giovanni, peace is not an entreaty but a proper noun. It’s not a declaration to halt but a desired state of emotional solace. Not only did Whitfield earn his first Grammy nomination in 1984 for the arrangement, he also received a supreme compliment from the King of Gospel himself, James Cleveland. Detroit radio announcer and professor Deborah Smith-Pollard told Billboard gospel editor Lisa Collins that when Cleveland heard Armstrong’s version of the song, he adopted the Whitfield arrangement for his own use. Cleveland said that “Thomas and Vanessa Bell Armstrong had understood what he had been trying to say 20 years earlier.”⁶²

The song remains an Armstrong staple. For example, at the conclusion of her 1998 Verity Records live album Desire of My Heart, Armstrong explains that “some people would be very upset” with her if she didn’t “go back to some old, old stuff.” She added, “I’ll never forget where the Lord brought me from and where I got my beginning.” She ends her medley of “old stuff” with “Peace Be Still,” interjecting, “Even a cold gets worse at midnight, but whenever the Lord says ‘peace,’ He guarantees peace. I know that it will be.” Toward the song’s conclusion, she takes the coded message of “Peace Be Still” a step further. Flashing the two-finger peace sign popular in the 1960s and 1970s, Armstrong declares, “If you don’t say nothing, the devil don’t know what you are talking about.” She, the choir, and members of the congregation and live audience flash the peace sign instead of singing the word peace. In so doing, Armstrong articulates peace as more than a state of individual calm—it’s a state of collective calm with the power to overcome the most diabolical of forces, even if the believer has to achieve it by encoding it in sign language.

A tribute to the popularity of the Armstrong-Whitfield version came from none other than the Reverend Lawrence Roberts when, in 2005, he sang this arrangement with Paul Porter of the Christianaires, traditional gospel soloist Carolyn Traylor, and an all-star chorus. The context of its presentation was the Malaco Music Group’s Gospel Legends video program. Gospel Legends was the brainchild of musician Darrell Luster, who gathered together legendary African American gospel singers, Gaither Homecoming style, to sing some of the most memorable songs in the Malaco gospel catalog. Adding “Peace Be Still” to the set list made sense because Malaco had purchased the Savoy gospel masters in late 1986 as well as the rights to the Vanessa Bell Armstrong album on Onyx that contained her version of the song.

Roberts opens with a narrative that erroneously places the site of the 1963 recording at First Baptist in Nutley but then transitions to a recap of the Bible verses on which the song is based. He then turns the song over to Porter, who mimics Cleveland’s lead vocal techniques with impressive fidelity. Traylor enters during “the wind and the waves” section and from there she and Porter trade leads, singing, shouting, and squalling. Roberts, beaming like a proud father, leads the makeshift chorus. As with Armstrong, peace in the hands of Roberts, Porter, and Traylor is not an exclamation to stop but pleas to attain a desired state of inner peace.

Another telling modification in the performativity of “Peace Be Still,” and next to Giovanni’s the most explicit, occurs during a 1984 recording of the song by James Cleveland and the New Jersey Mass Choir, captured live at a program at Symphony Hall in Newark. It’s a fitting selection to render in the city where, twenty-one years earlier, he and the Angelic Choir transformed a forgotten hymnbook selection into one of gospel music’s biggest hits. This version employs the Whitfield arrangement, with its contemporary choral harmonies and chord changes. But where the 1963 recording was opaque in its response to the civil-rights movement, the 1984 release unveils Cleveland’s personal hopes for amity. This comes at a point in the song when he addresses the spirit of the late Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.: “Martin, I know you’re not here today in flesh, but don’t worry about us. We’re gonna have peace. The black and the white are coming together. We’re loving one another. We’re living next door to one another. We’re going to school with one another. Don’t worry!”⁶³

“Peace Be Still” has also crossed cultural boundaries, as evidenced by the singing of the Cleveland–Angelic Choir version, albeit with Armstrong’s vamp and coda, by Cleveland protégé Jessy Dixon. Surrounded by white Christian artists during a Gaither Homecoming video, Dixon sings with such emotion that the assembly gives him a standing ovation.

Besides thematic intention, whether for internal or communal peace, or as a spirited statement of survivorship, singing “Peace Be Still” in the twenty-first century triggers nostalgia among its listeners. Whether listening to a recording by a national artist or a live rendition by a local church choir, the song, almost without fail, stimulates instantaneous recognition, proceeded by exclamations of joy and gratitude and, in some cases, even tears. Ultimately, nostalgia for the idyllic old-time ways, even if not so idyllic in reality, is an effective coping mechanism, another means of emotional healing.

In the end, there are just as many interpretations of “Peace Be Still” as there are fans of the song. What is certain is that “Peace Be Still” remains a medium of healing and a proclamation of resistance. “I think [‘Peace Be Still’] has lasted all these years and people still sing it,” the Reverend Doctor Stefanie Minatee said, “because people are living in turbulent times and they are looking for something to hold to. When you say ‘the winds and waves shall obey thy will,’ whether [it’s] the wrath of the storm-tossed sea, demons, or men, the lyrics just grab the listener.”⁶⁴ Like the many musical techniques that make gospel gospel, it has a sensibility that comes from Africa. Because, says South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini, “Historically, Africans always have explored healing that resides within sound.”⁶⁵