Rev. James M. Gates

AN AMERICAN MUSICIAN
Sermon transcription has a long history. From Jesus' discourse on the Mount of Beatitudes through the speeches of Francis of Assisi and John Chrysostom, sermons have been written down. Calvin and Luther both published collections of their own sermons, Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is still read, though published 183 years ago. Today, we can listen to preachers on the radio, see them on TV, even watch online using current technology. A century ago that technology was the gramophone record.
The evolution of recorded black sermons marches alongside the evolution of recorded black music. A strong African-American impulse in the 1910s-20s was to avoid earthy and vulgar material and put forward a high-minded and refined product that would not reflect negatively on a people seeking acceptance as respectable citizens of white America. The record companies agreed - sermons would strike the proper note.
The first black minister to be recorded while preaching - Rev. Calvin Dixon - touted himself as "the Black Billy Sunday”, a tribute to the white temperance evangelist. Major-league baseball star Sunday famously turned down an 1891 trade to Philadelphia (and a salary close to $1 million in today's dollars) to become an assistant secretary for the Chicago YMCA before starting his massive revivals a decade later. Dixon's sermons recorded for Columbia in 1925, followed Sunday's style; impassioned but verbose, bellowed into a studio microphone with no audience. They didn’t much sell, and he was dropped from the label.
Reverend James. M. Gates of Atlanta came along a year later with a wholly different approach. Gates was a superstar in a city full of black clergymen, and the first to record sermons in the emotional style of black Baptist preaching by his congregants, many of whom - like Gates - had migrated from rural Georgia. His sermons were a hit from his 1926 debut; his records captured the vivid imagery, topicality, cadences, and call-and-response found throughout the rural South, and brought them to black audiences across the country.   
Gates was born in logging-and-farming Hogansville GA - 500 souls halfway between Atlanta and Columbus - in 1884.    After growing up in the Baptist faith, James and his wife moved to Atlanta while in their mid-20s, becoming members (with James possibly a deacon) at Mount Calvary Baptist Church in the 'colored' suburb of Rockdale Park. In 1916, when pastor J.H. Johnson was called to a church in Detroit, Gates became the congregation's fifth pastor (a position he held through 1942). Ten years later, he was well-known throughout the region as "the singing preacher," and had encouraged his fast-growing evangelical congregation to raise the funds for a new, large church building.   
During the church's dedication, visiting promoter Polk C. Brockman heard Rev. Gates preach, and hired one of Western Electric' new recording systems to be set up at the front of the church - recording James preaching to his congregation at Mount Calvary. Brockman (a native Georgian employed by a furniture store that sold Okeh Records) had earlier "discovered" Lucile Bogan, Eddie Heywood, and Fiddlin' John Carson, he talked Columbia Records into pressing and distributing the results. The first release was "Death's Black Train is Coming;" Columbia sold 35,000 records in three months. While it's likely that Brockman took the lion's-share of payment for the sessions, Gates certainly made much more money than he had expected.
During his heyday in the 1920s and ’30s, Gates wrote and produced a river of sermons. He recorded in Atlanta (as well as Chicago, New York, New Orleans, Memphis, and South Carolina) for popular national record labels, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies across the country to black audiences thirsting to hear “straining" preaching from strong, melodic, fire and brimstone black pastors. From 1926–1941, Gates put out more than 200 sides on 78 rpm discs - including 80 more recorded in 1926 alone!
At his peak, he was as big a money-maker as any of the biggest stars of the era. He wasn’t first into the field, but his innovative style came to dominate the market. He became a shrewd businessman, maximizing his exposure, and steadily building his audience. For those African-Americans who had left the South to find jobs in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Oakland, or Los Angeles, his records brought back to them the preaching they had grown up with.    If he had any real competition, it's not remembered much at all.   
His second-most popular sermon was 1927s "Death Might Be Your Santa Claus" in which (Paul Oliver tells us) "the good reverend castigates those who buy their children Christmas gifts of guns and decks of cards, then warns those who prepare to drive to all-night dances that Death himself could be waiting around the next bend." Other sermons included the relatively-tame titles "Judgement Day is Coming," "The Dying Gambler," and "He'll Feed You When You're Hungry," He addresses all the ladies with "Women Spend Too Much Money," and "Smoking Women In The Street" (my own favorite).   On the eve of WW2, he recorded "Hitler and Hell."
Several of the sermons were recorded at different times for different labels including Paramount and Victor . Rev. Gates' voice dominates all his recordings, but he rarely performed solo. Most of his sides include a choir (even if just a trio) or instrumental accompaniment, and on all of them we hear congregational noise (even somehow in the studio-takes). Other pastors mined his material for their own sermons. Thirty-five years later, the Rolling Stones covered part of a Gates sermon (which they had heard from the Staples Singers) on their record "The Last Time."
Gates died in 1945, his funeral services saw Atlanta's largest gathering until those held for Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968,
#anamericanmusician
Death's Black Train is Coming (1926)
https://youtu.be/iPT-CYAtzDU