No deadlines and cold coffee in heaven, do wop

Also enjoying a gospel CD I picked up in Melbourne, old songs from the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Southern US Gospel, a lot of it by white churchgoers, funny that, I realised I had a little racist reaction to the notion of the songs being sung by whiter rather than black southerners. I find their voices a little more nasal and, some part of me is a little offended that they are singing songs that I think of as arising out of oppressed black culture in the South. I thought ‘great – have slaves, lynch people, and then steal their songs’. Which I realise is actually a pretty crap thing to think: on many levels – surely not all white southerners can be lumped in the same basket regarding their politics, surely no-one owns culture and it inevitably gets celebrated and reinterpreted by people from all backgrounds, and hey, isn’t Gospel already a merging of traditional Christian hymns that were being sung in America (brought from Ireland and England), old African tunes brought across through the slave trade, weird apalachian mountain folk and bluegrass music etc. ? (I’m no expert here, this is half remembered and guessed rather than based on research). And really, in my book, gospel is all about the feeling, not even the lyrics, not even the individual voices, so I was a bit harsh in calling them nasal when in fact some of the tracks are beautiful in their plaintive, gentle, optimism. I personally am not a huge fan of organised religion of any flavour, for myself, so the pentacostal movement which ended up having a strong element of Gospel music is not my cup of tea, but in general I think the notion of singing out hopes and good wishes is a nice one – whether it’s a bit of ohm rami, the percussive heart sutra in Japanese or a bit of Hallelujah action. I’m quite fond of a catchy tune about getting on board trains* and going down to the water. I am much more comfortable in thinking in metaphore these days than I once was, so I swiftly translate any specific words or phrases that don’t resonate into meanings that do.

*Gospel songs are nicely pro-public transport. You never hear of anyone getting on board the Gospel family wagon with only one person in it commuting to work. Will the road to heaven be paved with bus and T2 lanes?