I think that the old gospel music really came out of group singing, either in church or in the living room. Wherever the individual song originated, I think that they were tempered in the experience of singing them together. Contemporary black gospel (at least) comes out of mass choirs to a great extent, but the musical influences are less the old style of singing than hip hop and contemporary R&B. funny the way things evolve... rhythm and blues and soul music came out of black gospel, and now contemporary gospel is coming out of R&B and hip hop. Not Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino or the Moonglows. Definitely not James Brown or Tina Turner. Somewhere along the way, R&B got smoothed out and lost its individuality... probably about the time that corporate motivations over-rode creative ones.

I was kidding my son Pasha the other day when we were working on refinishing floors and he had a contemporary R&B station on. I said that if you eliminated all songs that had "ooh," or "baby" in them, you'd have trouble coming up with enough songs to make a top 40.

But, the old southern gospel, black or white had straightforward melodies and chord progressions and simple harmonies. There were also a lot of call and response songs, and songs where just one word would be changed in a verse, and it would be sung again. Plenty of time to pick up the harmonies.

Jerry