Dorsey, Thomas Andrew

(b. 1 July 1899 in Villa Rica, Georgia; d. 23 January 1993 in Chicago, Illinois), called “The Father of Gospel Music” for the contributions he made as songwriter, arranger, choir director, and publisher in the development of gospel hymnody. Dorsey helped usher in the Golden Age of Gospel (1930-1960).

Dorsey was the first of three children born to the Reverend Thomas Madison Dorsey and Etta Plant. His father was a farmer and a Baptist preacher who ministered to two rural churches and ran a school during the winter months and his mother was a property owner as a result of an insurance settlement following her first husband’s death. Thomas often accompanied his father and thus came to know the characteristic forms of worship and singing in a rural southern black congregation. He learned to play the piano from his mother and shape-note hymnody from his uncle, Corrie M. Hindsman, who was also a pastor. His mother also taught him the significance of “moaning,” a deeply felt emotional reading of a hymn, which was the source of the style of embellishment in the gospel blues that Dorsey came to write. In addition, he got some formal instruction from Mrs. Graves in Atlanta, who taught Morehouse College students (although Dorsey himself did not attend More-house), and from the Chicago College of Composition. His principal teachers were the people he sought to emulate, Ed Butler and Eddie Heywood, the respective pianists at “81” and “92” (film and vaudeville houses serving Atlanta’s African American community), and the African American entertainers—singers, bands, and vaudevillians—who performed in Atlanta theaters.

Dorsey worked at the “81” after his family moved to Atlanta in 1908. He found the move a distasteful experience for a number of reasons, such as encountering color status within the African American community for the first time (Dorsey was very dark-skinned and “African” in his features), and having to begin school over again at a lower grade than he had finished at Villa Rica. Those factors forced him to think about ways of making a living, a step that would begin to define his lifetime work. At this point in his life religious music was not his first order of business, although he did learn the popular hymns featured in the evangelist Billy Sunday’s revivals as arranged by his musician, Homer Rodeheaver. He also studied C. A. Tindley’s work, which embedded hymn and revival tunes in the idioms and tonalities of the southern black Baptist and Methodist churches. What mattered during his Atlanta years was developing his piano skills— playing at house parties and in bordellos—and gaining a reputation as someone with talent. He would continue in this same path when he relocated to Chicago by way of Gary, Indiana, in 1916. Although he returned to Atlanta between 1917 and 1918, he was back in Chicago to stay by 1919. He did not attend high school.

Dorsey had a significant career as a blues musician during the 1920s before devoting himself completely to religious music in 1932. This change was the result of a conversion experience that marked the end of a two-year period of depression. The death of his wife, Nettie Harper (whom he had married in 1925), in August 1932 after having given birth to a baby boy who died one day later made the change final. He eventually remarried in 1941 and had two children, a son and a daughter, by his second wife, Kathryn Mosely.

Although one of his gospel songs, “If You See My Savior,” was a hit at the 1930 National Baptist Convention and, moreover, he worked very briefly as the director of music at the New Hope Baptist Church on Chicago’s South Side, his principal work during this period was in blues. The money was better. He played with Will Walker’s Whispering Syncopators for four months and began composing and arranging as southern-style blues began to catch on in Chicago. Dorsey was the pianist and the head of the Wild Cats Jazz Band, a group that toured with Ma Rainey. It was during this period that he took the nickname “Georgia Tom” and teamed up with Horace (“Tampa Red“) Whittaker. They called themselves “The Hokum Boys” and introduced “hokum music” with the song “It’s Tight like That.” Hokum music, with its sexual innuendoes and overtones, was one of the reasons why blues became synonymous with vulgarity and worldliness. Between 1928 and 1932 Dorsey made over sixty hokum recordings, either solo or with Tampa Red.

Dorsey’s bout with depression and the death of his first wife brought all of this activity to an end. It resulted in his writing one of his greatest songs, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” a work which has become one of the United States’ most beloved hymns. It has been translated into over fifty languages and become, because of the poignancy of Dorsey’s lyrics, an Everyman’s prayer. The turn from blues to religious music did not signal a change in the kind of writing and arranging that Dorsey did and would do. Instead, he carried what he had learned into writing gospel music. The blues style suited Dorsey’s feel for improvisation and embellishment, and the immediacy and power of his lyrics encouraged powerful performances by individuals (Mahalia Jackson would be a Dorsey presenter from 1935 to 1946) and choirs. Dorsey became the director of the Pilgrim Baptist Church Choir in 1931.

Dorsey’s music did not catch on immediately. He and others who joined him (such as Sallie Martin, the first singer to work with Dorsey in demonstrating and popularizing his music) had to work very hard to spread the word of gospel music and have it accepted and used in the larger black Baptist churches of Chicago and to be featured at the National Baptist Convention meetings. In addition to trying to sell his music, he formed a publishing house and he and Sallie Martin formed the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses in 1932, thus effectively giving gospel music an institutional base. There, Dorsey remained active until the 1970s, when failing health forced him into semi-retirement. In 1983 he was featured in the documentary “Say Amen, Somebody.” He died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1993 after spending the last year of his life in a coma.

Gospel music did not start with Dorsey. He drew on traditions and forms that were part of his training and experience, but he gave them shape and power and thereby contributed enormously to the development of a singular musical form, a fact others acknowledged by making the name “Dorsey” synonymous with gospel music.

The major work on Dorsey is Michael Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (1992). This is likely to remain the definitive reading of Dorsey’s life and work for some time. Other texts that discuss Dorsey in the development of gospel and gospel performers are Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1997); Alan Young, Woke Me Up This Morning: Black Gospel Singers and the Gospel Life (1997); and Horace Clarence Boyer, The Golden Age of Gospel (2000). An obituary is in the New York Times (25 Jan. 1993).

Robert B. Carey