Gospel Music Scholar Robert Darden Explores How Spirituals Powered the Civil Rights Movement

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL to kick off the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, it was before “5,000 hymn-singing blacks.” Those thousands of voices united in song, prayer, and protest show the power of black sacred song, which has payed a […]

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL to kick off the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, it was before “5,000 hymn-singing blacks.” Those thousands of voices united in song, prayer, and protest show the power of black sacred song, which has payed a pivotal role in the African America drama since the days of slavery. In Nothing but Love in God’s Water: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement (The Pennsylvania State University Press), the first of two volumes, gospel music scholar Robert Darden explores how songs and singers helped African Americans challenge slavery, subjugation, and oppression.

Darden is the director of the Gospel Music Restoration Project, currently at Baylor University, which will become a permanent feature of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture when it opens on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 2015. He draws upon hundreds of interviews, one-of-a-kind sources, and rare or lost recordings to illustrate the ways black sacred song “irrepressibly bubbles up and envelops black people at their times of greatest need.”

In Nothing but Love in God’s Water, Darden examines:
• the origins and settings of spirituals;
• spirituals as protest songs;
• the beginnings of the modern civil rights movement;
• the embrace of spirituals as protest songs by the labor union movement.


Darden surveys the work of slave composers whose names are lost to history, along with other composers, performers, music preservationists, and the activists who employed, preserved, or were perhaps the subject of song: abolitionists Harriet Tubman and John Brown, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the father of gospel music Thomas A. Dorsey, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mahalia Jackson, Paul Robeson, Billie Holiday, and many more.

The songs are center stage, including early spirituals “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” “Steal Away to Jesus,” “John Brown’s Body,” and possibly the most significant of them all, “Go Down Moses,” closely identified with the heroic Harriet Tubman. Darden examines later gospel and protest songs, such as “We Shall Overcome,” “Move on Up,” and “Strange Fruit.”

The protest spirituals of the slavery era survived beyond the Civil War to aid freedom fighters in the difficult years ahead. Darden traces the music’s survival through a variety of sources, including the African American church, and the labor union movement.

“This music provided something that enabled black people to challenge the most powerful nation on the planet armed only with love, justice and song,” Darden says. “ It’s all there in those old spirituals, and those unstoppable, irresistible gospel songs.”

Robert Darden is director of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, and Associate Professor of Journalism, Public Relations, and New Media at Baylor University. A former gospel music editor for Billboard magazine, he is the author of several books including People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music.

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