A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music

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CoverTitle PageCopyrightContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart One: Roots
1. Got On My Traveling Shoes: Black Sacred Music and the Great Migration
2. "When the Fire Fell": The Sanctified Church Contribution to Chicago Gospel Music
3. Sacred Music in Transition: Charles Henry Pace and the Pace Jubilee Singers
4. Turn Your Radio On: Chicago Sacred Radio Broadcast Pioneers
5. "Someday, Somewhere": The Formation of the Gospel Nexus
6. Sweeping through the City: Thomas A. Dorsey and the Gospel Nexus (1932-1933)
7. Across This Land and Country: New Songs for a New Era (1933-1939)
8. From Birmingham to Chicago: The Great Migration of the Gospel QuartetPart Two: Branches
9. Sing a Gospel Song: The 1940s, Part One
10. "If It's in Music-We Have It": The Fertile Crescent of Gospel Music Publishing
11. "Move On Up a Little Higher": The 1940s, Part Two
12. Postwar Gospel Quartets: "Rock Stars of Religious Music"
13. The Gospel Caravan: Midcentury Melodies
14. "He Could Just Put a Song on His Fingers": Second-Generation Gospel Choirs
15. "God's Got a Television": Gospel Music Comes to the Living Room
16. "Tell It Like It Is": Songs of Social Significance
17. One of These Mornings: Chicago Gospel at the CrossroadsAppendix A: 1920s African American Sacred Music Recordings Made in ChicagoAppendix B. African American Sacred Music Recordings Made in Chicago, 1930-1941NotesBibliographyIndex

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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.

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A truly major contribution to the history of African-American music

A City Called Heaven is a valuable resource that points to the many voices that were important to the success of gospel music. With his text, Marovich extends an invitation to readers and gospel music lovers to celebrate the beautiful and spirit-filled contributions of those who paved the gospel highway from Chicago to heaven and back

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