In A City Called Heaven, Robert M. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through its growth into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. Marovich mines print media, ephemera, and hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and historians--as well as relatives and friends of gospel pioneers--to recover forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and granted social mobility to a number of its practitioners. As Marovich shows, the music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. Yet it also helped give voice to a people--and lift a nation.

A City Called Heaven celebrates a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.

Robert M. Marovich hosts "Gospel Memories" on Chicago's WLUW 88.7 FM and is founder and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Gospel Music, www.journalofgospelmusic.com.

Acknowledgments   vii
Introduction   1

Part One: Roots   9
1. Got On My Traveling Shoes: Black Sacred Music and the Great Migration   11
2. "When the Fire Fell": The Sanctified Church Contribution to Chicago Gospel Music   27
3. Sacred Music in Transition: Charles Henry Pace and the Pace Jubilee Singers   48
4. Turn Your Radio On: Chicago Sacred Radio Broadcast Pioneers   58
5. "Someday, Somewhere": The Formation of the Gospel Nexus   71
6. Sweeping through the City: Thomas A. Dorsey and the Gospel Nexus (1932 - 1933)   87
7. Across This Land and Country: New Songs for a New Era (1933-1939)   112
8. From Birmingham to Chicago: The Great Migration of the Gospel Quartet   132

Part Two: Branches   147
9. Sing a Gospel Song: The 1940s, Part One   149
10. "If It's in Music -- We Have It": The Fertile Crescent of Gospel Music Publishing   167
11. "Move On Up a Little Higher": The 1940s, Part Two   179
12. Postwar Gospel Quartets: "Rock Stars of Religious Music"   204
13. The Gospel Caravan: Midcentury Melodies   229
14. "He Could Just Put a Song on His Fingers": Second-Generation Gospel Choirs   260
15. "God's Got a Television": Gospel Music Comes to the Living Room   281
16. "Tell It Like It Is": Songs of Social Significance   297
17. One of These Mornings: Chicago Gospel at the Crossroads   317

Appendix A. 1920s African American Sacred Music Recordings Made in Chicago   331
Appendix B. African American Sacred Music Recordings Made in Chicago, 1930-1941   335
Notes   337
Bibliography   389
General Index   401
Index of Songs   435

Illustrations follow page 228