Here's a summary of and selected quotes from the essay "The Impact of Gospel Music on The Secular Music Industry {1992} by Portia K. Maulstby as found in "Signifyin{g}, Sanctifyin', & Slam Duncking: A Reader In African American Expressive Culture", editor: Gena Dagel Caponi {1999, the University of Massachusetts Press, pp.172-190"

"...The vocal stylings and timbral variations of gospel singers echo those of gospel preachers and join "infectious rhythms, meliometic melodies, complex harmonies, call-response structures' to define an approach to music-making that permeates both sacred and secular African American music."

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"The seeds for the commercialization of gospel music were planted in the 1930s when its performers were showcased in a variery of nonreligious settings. Gospel quartets were the first to garner a secular following by performing at local community events, on radio broadcasts, and on commercial records. Evolving out of jubilee quartets in the 1930s, they expanded their repertoire of Negro spirituals to include secular songs and a new body of religious music known as gospel. By the 1940s, the song of pioneering gospel composers Thomas A. Dorsey, Theodore Frye, William Herbert Brewster, Kenneth Morris, Lucie E, Campbell, and Roberta Martin had become standard repertoire in jubilee-gospel quartet performances..."

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The gospel sound encompasses many vocal styles and timbres. It ranges from the lyrical, semiclassical, and tempered sounds of Roberta Martin, Alex Bradford, Inez Andrews, and Sara Jordan Powell, to the percussive and shouting approach if Sallie martin, Archie Brownlee, Albertina Walker, Clara Ward, and Norsalus McKissisck, Many singers, including Mahalia Jackson, Marion Williams, and the Barrett Sisters, employ components from both styles in their performances...Regardless if vocal style employed, singers of popular idioms use a wide range of aesthetic devices in interpreting songs: melismas, slides, bends, moans, grunts, hollers, screams, melodic and textual repetition, extreme registers, call-response structures, and so on. Dinah Washington, a protegee of Roberta Martin, was a master in the subtle manipulation of timbre, shading, time, pitch and text. Her trademark sound echoes the vocal control, timing {"lagging behind the beat",} and phrasing of Roberta Martin. Dinah's style was imitated by a host of singers,including Lavern Baker, Etta James, Nancy Wilson, Dionne Warwick, and Dinah Ross".

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"Vocal techniques, timbres, and delivery style were not the only components of gospel appropriated by rhythm and blues. Gospel rhythms and instrumental stylings, which originated in secular contexts, became integral to this sound...In Screanubg Jay Hawkin's I Put A Spell On You" {1956} snd Lavern Baker's "See See Rider" {1962}, for example, he [David "Panama" Francis, studio drummer for many Black artists] employed the 12/8 meter {known as the common meter in the Church of God In Christ} and hte triplet note pattern associated with this meter. These structures as well as the rhtyhms that accompany the "shout" {religious dance} provide the rhtyhmic foundation for many contemporary popular songs."