Peace be still, p.1
Peace Be Still, page 1
The cover photo depicts Reverend James Cleveland in the foreground and members of a choir in the background.
peace be still
music in american life
A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.
peace be still
how james cleveland and the angelic choir created a gospel classic
Robert M. Marovich
© 2021 by Robert M. Marovich
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Marovich, Robert M., author.
Title: Peace be still : how James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir created a gospel classic / Robert M. Marovich.
Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2021. | Series: Music in American life | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021008762 (print) | LCCN 2021008763 (ebook) | ISBN 9780252044113 (cloth) | ISBN 9780252086168 (paperback) | ISBN 9780252053054 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Cleveland, James. Peace be still. | Gospel music—History and criticism. | Gospel music—New Jersey—History and criticism. | Angelic Choir.
Classification: LCC ML410.C66 M37 2021 (print) | LCC ML410.C66 (ebook) | DDC 782.25/4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008762
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008763
For Laurel Delaney, with all my love;
and
For all Angelic Choir members, living and departed.
I just had Mary, Jane, and John Doe from up the street, down the street, and around the corner. But I knew if you put them in the church atmosphere, we would do well.
—Reverend Lawrence C. Roberts
True history tells of everyday people who do extraordinary things quietly, not even realizing that they have left their mark.
—Margo Lee Williams
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Reverend Lawrence C. Roberts and the First Baptist Church of Nutley
2 Gospel Music in Newark
3 The Birth of the Angelic Choir
4 The Arrival of James Cleveland
5 In Search of the Authentic: The Live In-Service Recording
6 This Sunday—In Person
7 Peace Be Still
8 The Performativity of “Peace Be Still”
9 The Release of Peace Be Still
10 I Stood on the Banks of Jordan
11 Doxology
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Photographs
Acknowledgments
This book was birthed from a dream I had one night in 2013, while preparing to produce a one-hour radio special honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the recording of Peace Be Still.
I dreamt that I traveled back to September 1963, to the church where the Peace Be Still recording was taking place. There I was, a visitor from the future, sitting in on the live session, writing down what was happening. At one point, I introduced myself to the Reverend James Cleveland—he wasn’t Reverend James Cleveland then—and said I was a Chicago boy. He liked that. I said I was from Rogers Park, and he knew where that was. I said I knew the South Side and shouted, “35th and South Parkway!” I went to give him a fist bump and he lurched back. His reaction startled me at first, then I remembered—nobody was giving fist bumps in 1963!
Later in the dream, while Cleveland was at the piano, working on one of the songs, I wished him good luck. Smiling like the Cheshire cat, I told him I believed the record would be one of the best-selling gospel albums in history. He turned around, looked straight into my eyes, and replied, “Boy, don’t put that kind of pressure on me!”
I shared my dream with the Reverend Doctor Stefanie Minatee, a longtime member of the Angelic Choir community, and she suggested I write a book about the album. She even offered to gather some Angelic Choir alumni for me to interview. That group interview took place one Sunday in October 2013. I was awestruck to be sitting in Nutley’s historic First Baptist Church, interviewing those members who were present from the very beginning of the Angelic Choir as well as those who had joined along the way. Their insights anchor this book. But without Reverend Minatee’s encouragement and support, I doubt this book would ever have come to pass. I am eternally thankful to her and grateful she has successfully overcome the health issues that plagued her not long after that interview. She is a warrior in every respect.
Still, to my mind, there was one important hurdle to overcome for the book to become a reality. I needed the blessing and participation of Dolores “Bootsy” Roberts, the Reverend Lawrence Roberts’s widow. She graciously offered both. I thank her for her willingness to be interviewed and to read through a draft of the full manuscript and make important suggestions. Thanks also to Phyllis Morris and Yvonne Walls Wislow for gathering Angelic Choir alumni for follow-up telephone interviews, and to the Reverend Brian Z. Evans, Kimberly Johnson, and the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, for welcoming me to the church every time I visited to conduct research. Sister Kim’s assistance and encouragement have been a particular source of inspiration. Thanks to Robert Logan for sharing memories and photos and answering last-minute questions. He is a wealth of knowledge. Many thanks to Dennis Bines for his memories and insights and for providing me with a copy of the Angelic Choir Reunion DVD he produced. Thanks to Joe Peay for his reminiscences and for introducing me to Melodi Ewell Lovely, who shared the largely untold story of her father’s role in the reintroduction of “Peace Be Still.” To Carol Hobbs, once again a lifesaver with her accurate and efficient transcription work. And thanks to my wife, Laurel Delaney, for her steadfast support of my writing career and for being an inspiration to me every day.
I also want to single out several individuals and institutions who took the time to make critical contributions to this book: The American Guild of Organists, especially James Kennerley and Eric Birk; Tom Ankner and the Newark Public Library; Will Boone; Rebecca “Betty” Brooks; Isaac Brown; Jay Bruder; Reverend Doctor Malcolm Byrd; Vivian Carroll; Dan Cherry; Robert Darden; Glenn G. Geisheimer (oldnewark.com); Gloria Givens; Grey Roots Museum and Archives Collection, Owen Sound, Ontario; Jennifer Griffith; Bernadine Hankerson; Janet Harper, formerly librarian at the Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College Chicago; Linwood Heath; Anthony Heilbut; the late Gertrude Deadwyler Hicks; the late JaVan Hicks; Sylvia Hicks; Eli Husock; A. Jeffrey LaValley; Melodi Ewell Lovely; Eric Majette Jr. and the Living Testimony Foundation; the Malaco Music Group, especially Rosetta Anderson, Louise Black, Melissa Brown, Tommy Couch Sr., Tommy Couch Jr., Darrell Luster, Stewart Madison, James Robinson, and Wolf Stevenson; Derek Mikel May; Pastor Norman K. Miles Sr. and Trinity Temple Seventh-day Adventist Church, Newark; the late Raymond Murphy; Brenda Nelson-Strauss and the Archives of African American Music and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington; Doug Oxenhorn and the New Jersey Historical Society; Etta Jean Nunnally; Brenda O’Neal; Kevan Peabody; Monica Pege; Bob Porter; Inez Reid; the late Reverend Doctor Lawrence C. Roberts; Robert Rogers; Percy Spencer; Lorraine Stancil; Nellie Suggs; Elizabeth Surles and the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University; Annette May Thomas; Nick Van Dorn and the Nutley Public Library; Geraldine Griffin Watlington; Jacqui Watts-Greadington; Marcel West; Harry L. Williams; Keith Van Williams; and Margo Lee Williams.
I express my appreciation to the anonymous peer reviewers whose excellent recommendations improved the manuscript greatly. And to anyone I have forgotten to mention here, I apologize. Please charge it to my head and not my heart. I will thank you personally.
Finally, I am grateful to the team of dedicated professionals at the University of Illinois Press, and especially to Director Laurie Matheson. Laurie’s faith in me and my work for the past eight years affirmed my decision to leave a long career in nonprofit fund development to pursue writing for a living. I’ve been a fan of the University of Illinois Press’s Music in American Life Series since the early 1980s. To make a second appearance in the catalog, alongside the award-winning authors and acknowledged experts I admire, is humbling.
peace be still
Introduction
Producing the third volume of the James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir series of live in-service albums was turning out to be more complicated than anticipated.
For one thing, the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, where James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir recorded the first two volumes of their live Sunday Service collaboration, was no longer standing. Where the little wooden church once stood was the foundation for a larger and more modern worship facility. In a gesture of ecumenical goodwill, Trinity Temple Seventh-day Adventist Church in Newark, a quick drive south of Nutley, invited the First Baptist congregation to use its sanctuary until the new building was completed. The location change meant that the Savoy Records engineer had to recalibrate what he learned from wiring First Baptist Church to meet the acoustic challenges of Trinity Temple.
Then there was the problem of musicians. This time, James Cleveland was going to have to work without organist Billy Preston and choir director Thurston Frazier, both critical contributors to the first two volumes of the Cleveland–Angelic Choir collaboration. Their replacements, albeit skilled players, had not yet worked with the Angelic Choir in a live recording setting. And although the previous two volumes of the Sunday Service series had literally been recorded on Sundays, when the spiritual residue of a morning of soul-stirring worship could bleed i
On top of everything else, the senses of the nation were deadened by an explosion that had occurred earlier that week. On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, segregationists planted dynamite beneath the stairs of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. The blast killed four young women and injured seventeen others. Was even the church, the epicenter of African American religious and community life, no longer safe? And here was the Angelic Choir, just four days later, fellow Baptists gathered in a church that wasn’t theirs with musicians they hadn’t worked with, in a city with its own history of racial tensions, recording a Sunday-morning service on a Thursday night. By all accounts, neither was the Birmingham tragedy on the minds of the choristers that evening, nor did it deter them from the work at hand. Still, if there was a recipe for a soul-stirring, handclapping, foot-patting live recording session, this wasn’t it.
What the Angelic Choir did have, however, was the energetic presence of James Cleveland. The Chicago-born singer, songwriter, arranger, pianist, choir director, and all-around religious music entrepreneur had a God-given gift for directing a recording session. His deft orchestration of the evening’s activities and the resilience of the choristers and their leader, the Reverend Lawrence Roberts, as well as a resilience forged in the crucible of daily struggles that came with being black in America, were revealed in the singing that evening.
Hours later, the final notes having rung off the walls of Trinity Temple and the last amen uttered, a peace fell on the assembly. The Savoy Records engineer left Trinity Temple, boxes of tape reels tucked under his arms. In the days to come, Roberts and Savoy’s gospel music producer Fred Mendelsohn would transform those tapes into volume 3 of the Sunday Service series, best known by its subtitle, Peace Be Still.
The first two Cleveland–Angelic Choir Sunday Service volumes received glowing praise in the trade press, but Savoy didn’t appear, at first, to have much faith in volume 3. Perhaps it was the absence of Frazier and Preston that most concerned Savoy, or perhaps they felt the novelty had worn off. Whatever the reason, while the liner notes to volumes 1 and 2 treated the albums like historic releases, recognizing the key participants with brief biographies, the back cover of volume 3 contained little more than generic platitudes. Savoy placed scant media advertising for volume 3. The company submitted the standard pressing order of three thousand copies and mailed copies of the album to gospel radio announcers. The announcers placed the opening track, a new arrangement of a long-overlooked eighteenth-century hymn called “Peace Be Still,” on their turntables, set the needle a quarter-turn behind the lead-in groove, started the disc spinning, turned up the on-air volume, and watched, in wonder, as their phones lit up.
Both Peace Be Still and its title track entered Billboard’s Top Spirituals charts in early 1964 and remained there for nearly two years. Sales significantly exceeded Savoy’s curiously low expectations. Quickly exhausting the initial run of three thousand copies, the album sold—sources vary—between four hundred fifty and eight hundred thousand copies.1 This at a time when gospel album success meant selling fifty thousand copies at best. Moreover, the title track is cited by some of today’s most prominent gospel singers, songwriters, and musicians as having had a profound influence on their artistic development. Historian Tom Fisher considers Peace Be Still “the major founding effort of the modern black gospel chorus sound.”2 It was generally considered to be the best-selling African American gospel album until 1972, when Aretha Franklin’s two-disc Amazing Grace (also featuring James Cleveland, this time with his Southern California Community Choir), assumed the title. Amazing Grace, however, appealed to secular and sacred music enthusiasts alike, and particularly to Franklin’s sizable multicultural fan base, but Peace Be Still was purchased primarily by African American churchgoers who heard it played over local religious radio broadcasts, at the local religious book and record store, and in the living rooms of family and friends. Recognizing a hit, music ministers began teaching “Peace Be Still” to their church choirs. Professional gospel soloists, choirs, and groups placed the song on their set list. Dozens recorded their own versions. An eighteenth-century hymn gathering dust in the hymnbook was brought back to life.
But why was Peace Be Still more popular than other contemporary gospel albums? Did the title track grab listeners with its dramatic arrangement, its evocative lyrics, or both? Did the album communicate a 1960s African American religious worldview with more spiritual lucidity than other religious releases of the day?
Despite the commercial success of Peace Be Still and its lasting impact on generations of gospel singers, musicians, and enthusiasts, even the most basic production information has been frustratingly difficult to ascertain. Who were the musicians? Who did the writing and arranging? Who were the soloists? Why wasn’t there more publicity in the trade magazines? Was Thursday, September 19, the date of the recording, as the Savoy files indicate, or was it Sunday, September 15, the same day as the Birmingham bombing, as some have suggested? And who was Harvey, the enigmatic artist whose painting adorned the album’s front cover? This book is an attempt to solve the mysteries, and debunk some assumptions, surrounding the album and its participants.
Peace Be Still remains the most recognizable title in the nine-volume Sunday Service collaboration between James Cleveland, Lawrence Roberts, and the Angelic Choir—the first multivolume collection, in fact, in the history of recorded gospel music. Effective in its employment of biblical metaphor, thrilling in its evocation of eternal life, and groundbreaking in its choral arrangements, Peace Be Still was among the earliest inductees into the Library of Congress National Registry of Historic Sound Collections, which preserves “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” sound recordings. In 1999 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. “Peace Be Still” remains a popular selection to sing at funerals and other important religious occasions—a gospel chestnut that soothes the sorrowful and encourages the discouraged. Churchgoers rejoice upon hearing the first few familiar notes of the song’s iconic piano introduction.
“Peace Be Still” and other album cuts have become cultural touchstones, their sound symbolic of a tumultuous era in U.S. history. For example, “Peace Be Still” and another album selection, “I Will Wear a Crown,” can be heard emanating from a kitchen radio in the 2016 film adaptation of August Wilson’s stage play Fences. “Peace Be Still” is sung at the conclusion of Detroit, Kathryn Bigelow’s 2017 film about the 1967 Detroit riots. Malaco Music Group, which purchased the Savoy gospel catalog from Prelude Records in late 1986, reports that Peace Be Still, now available as a compact disc and in downloadable formats, still sells, sixty years on.
Although it was not the first African American gospel recording to be produced in a church and in front of a live audience or congregation, Peace Be Still is frequently credited as having given birth to the live recording era in African American gospel music because it was the first such album to achieve stupendous sales figures. Today, many African American gospel artists prefer to record in a live worship setting with an enthusiastic congregation for their audience. No studio can replicate the symbiosis between a gospel artist and a church audience. Some gospel vocalists depend so deeply on the interactive exchange with an audience that a recording studio, lacking the instantaneous feedback of live worship, constrains their art.
Eking every ounce of utility from the album’s unanticipated success, Savoy Records became, for more than two decades, the undisputed frontrunner in the production and sales of live gospel choir recordings. Savoy became as synonymous with choirs as Peacock Records of Houston, Texas, was with quartets. Sales figures for Peace Be Still and subsequent Cleveland–Angelic Choir releases confirmed that the African American marketplace particularly, though not exclusively, was willing to pay for a recording of a live in-service experience that it could enjoy anytime, anyplace, anywhere. So much so that soon after the Cleveland-Angelic Choir Sunday Service partnership ended, Savoy launched a James Cleveland Presents series of albums, many made by church and community choirs singing in front of packed churches. Like Peace Be Still, these albums also brought the worship experience into the home. They were particularly effective as the soundtrack to the Sunday morning ritual of preparing for church. They also introduced the effervescence of African American church music ministries to those who might never step inside a church.
