Pop Up, Sweet Chariot

Once a year or so, the popular-music business falls into a faint, and the only thing that can bring it around again is a new sound. The new sound quickly becomes every hipster's new groove and everybody imitates it until even little children no longer care to listen. Last year the twist was replaced by the bossa nova, but as things turned out, it was a case of a starving man rescuing one who was merely hungry. Business faded.

For months now (and in the record business, months are decades), desperate music hustlers have been searching for the new groove. Experienced huntsmen confined their attention to Negro music, which, with the single exception of country music, has supplied them with every new idea since the blues. Last week, with appropriate fanfare, they proclaimed they had found the sound: pop gospel. Waving contracts and recording tape, Columbia Records moved into a new Manhattan nightclub called the Sweet Chariot and began packaging such devotional songs as He's All Right for the popular market. "It's the greatest new groove since rock 'n' roll," said Columbia Pop A. & R. Director David Kapralik. "In a month or two, it'll be all over the charts."

Yeah! Since gospel music is the root of rhythm-and-blues and "soul jazz," the discovery turned out to be embarrassingly obvious--like eating the hen after stealing all the eggs.

Still, everyone behaved well: the trade papers ran cheerful forecasts and chitchat columnists began comparing the Sweet Chariot's society audience to the old Peppermint Lounge gang. Within three weeks of its opening night, the Chariot was so happily crowded that its owner announced plans to open two more Sweet Chariots in Chicago and Los Angeles.

Gospel music may have seemed a surprise a half-block from Broadway, but Pentecostal churchgoers and sinners "out in radioland" have been hearing it for years, sung with devotion by such groups as the Clara Ward Singers, the Stars of Faith and the Mighty Clouds of Joy. Recently, its spirit and style and shouts of "Yeah!" (but rarely the rest of the lyrics) have crept into popular music, but only Mahalia Jackson has been popularly successful with the pure version. A couple of years ago, Brother John Sellers and the Grandison Singers became the first to sing gospel in nightclubs. A thin flock of groups followed, some complaining bitterly that cheating preachers had driven them into it by failing to part with a livable share of the church offering.

Wha? Gospel's move into nightclubs (where Negroes call it "ofay gospel") does not necessarily corrupt either singers or songs. But its adoption by the popular-record industry gives good reason for melancholy. To succeed with the predominantly teen-age audience, it will be hyped up and sanitized to the point of becoming grotesque. At the Sweet Chariot (where the rest rooms are labeled "Brothers" and "Sisters" and the bar girls are called "Angels"), two of the groups have already had their names changed by Columbia, and no doubt they will soon begin to sing arrangements of their music that are "more commercial."

Having spent so long on the back streets, gospel singers greet the establishment's new enthusiasm with a doubting, puzzled Wha? Many of them have been working as rhythm-and-blues singers, and now they can be in the new groove merely by singing the remembered songs of their childhood choir-loft days. But even with all the corporate delight at the new groove's financial prospects, the cheerful, sensate piety of the music had already begun to sound like its own requiem by the end of the first week of official enthusiasm. Gospel music is the last remaining unpackaged expression of Negro culture; now that it is being merchandised, where will the new grooves come from?

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