September 2017

   September is usually associated with the end of summer but God has blessed us with another full month of summer weather.  Praise the Lord. Starting this month I'm going to try to do a history of  old hymns. .                             Many hymns are conceived in the throes of tragedy. "Precious Lord" was one written in Chicago in 1932 following the death of Thomas Dorsey's wife Nettie and infant son durning childbirth.     
    Dorsey was born in Villa Rica, GA. and was reared in Atlanta from the age of five where he came in contact with the music of The Blues. His father was a Baptist Preacher and mother a piano teacher.          
     He moved to Chicago in 1915 and began playing in a variety of nightclubs under various names including "Georgia Tom", "Texas Tommy" and "Barrel House Tom".   He put together the "Wild Cats Jazz Band " in 1925 to Play for Ma Rainey.  His wife Nettie was Rainey's wardrobe mistress.                                                                                      In 1926 Dorsey suffered a severe illness and was converted in 1928 and became active in Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago. In 1932 he started serving as chior director and served for forty years. Of his 1000 musical works 200 where gospel songs promoting them through the fomation of The National Association of Gospel Choirs and Choruses. He later began the Thomas A. Dorsey Gospel Song Music Publishing Company.                                                
    "Precious Lord" came out of the tragedy of the death of his wife Nettie and their infant son. This is his account of the event .                          "Back in 1932 I was 32 years old and a fairly new husband. My wife Nettie and I were living in a little apartment on Chicago's Southside.One hot August afternoon I had to go to St. Louis, where I was to be the featured soloist at a large revival meeting. I didn't want to go.  Nettie was in the last month of pregancy with our first child.  But a lot of people where expecting me  in St.Louis......                                                                         ".....In the steaming St. Louis heat the crowd called on me to sing again and again.  When I finally sat down, a messenger boy ran up with a Western Union telegram. I ripped open the envelope. Pasted on the yellow sheet were the words: YOUR WIFE JUST DIED.........                                                When I got back, I learned that Nettie had given birth to a boy.  I swung between grief and joy.  Yet that night, the baby died.  I buried Nettie and our little boy together, in the same casket. Then I fell apart.  For days I closeted myself.  I felt that God had done me an injustice, I didn't want to serve him anymore or write any more gospel songs. I just wanted to go back to that jazz world I once knew so well.......                       But still I was lost in grief.  Everyone was kind to me, especially a friend, Professor Frye, who seemed to know what I needed. On the following Saturday evening he took me up to Malone's Poro College, a neighorhood music school.  It was quiet: the late evening sun crept throuh the curtained windows.  I sat down at the piano, and my hands began to browse over the keys."                                  Dorsey remembered a five not melody from his Sunday School days, by George Allen, paired with the text "Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone"  Arranging this tune and adding his own words, "Precious Lord" became the most famous of his many gospel songs. The folowing Sunday Frye took the song  and introduced it to the choir at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King was pastor at the time.  An event that Dorsy later said "tore up the Church"  Dorsey was the first African American elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Gospel Music Association's Living Hall of Fame.