Catching the spirit

How a once-timid singer found her way to a gospel choir.

By: Ellen Webster
   The simple truth is, gospel music feels good. Hearing it can be a rich experience, but nothing compares to taking a deep breath and singing your heart out.
   This is what happens when you do.
   Like a pep-rally bonfire, gospel music ignites. It blazes a trail through your body that starts in your toes and zigzags in and out of your heart. It lifts your hands high and then brings them together like fine rhythm instruments. Meanwhile, the rest of your body settles into a cadence that’s somewhere between a gentle sway and the soothing swing of a rocking chair on the front porch.
   As harmonies build, sound bursts up from your abdomen and out through your mouth, and your eyes become as clear as stars on a bright night. Your lips turn up as your head tilts back, making you feel tall and straight and part of a bigger-than-life picture that hasn’t come fully into view. You sense that both joy and heartache are at the core of this music, and in that realization you glimpse the reverent celebration that marks what has preceded and may follow this moment.
   This has been my experience as a member of the Black Gospel Awareness Project Choir, which will be performing on Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Princeton University Chapel.
   The BGA choir is the heart child of Pamela Pruitt, a radiant, blonde-haired black woman who woke one day and decided to bring gospel to the uninitiated. Even before she had more than the basic idea, this gutsy woman reserved concert space at the Princeton University Chapel and set out to create a choir filled with chutzpah. It would be multicultural, which she describes as welcoming to all races and all religions, and it would be largely filled with people like her who had never sung gospel before.
   "After surviving the events of 9/11, and after a year and a half of deep soul-searching and healing, I wanted to make a difference in my life and the lives of others," Ms. Pruitt said. "The spirit projected by gospel music is unexplainable. It is a music that permeates the inner soul into an obvious outer joyousness."
   In the fall, announcements about this choir and an audition call splashed across local papers, and I took notice.
   Raised in central Maine, I grew up in a casual, white, Protestant church where obligatory singing was done with more apology than vigor. No one sang too loudly or energetically for fear of sounding vain and "full of yourself." People who sat near the front of the church and sang audibly were believed to have egos as big as barns — attributes we youngsters were strongly discouraged from adopting. Acceptable sounds from the pews were, instead, tired old tunes squeezed out from a confined space about an inch below lip level. It was better, our elders believed, to mouth the words and leave the noise to the choir.
   Still, I liked the idea of loud and lively music, so when I read the ads for the BGA choir, the gap between me and gospel music all but dissolved.
   The choir kickoff began on a brisk Saturday in October when dozens of individuals of all ages and spiritual and ethnic backgrounds drove to the College of New Jersey for auditions. We were ushered in small packs into a practice room and warmly greeted by a trio of judges, an accompanist and the musical director for the BGA, whom I recognized as Betty Young, the celebrity-status liturgy and praise director from Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton.
   A couple of years ago I had gone to Shiloh specifically to see Ms. Young direct a 60-voice choir. I watched with fascination as she used her entire body as a conductor would a baton. Her eyes shot out steady streams of messages while her mouth was used to enunciate lyrics that sped past in rapid-fire succession. Her long-nailed fingers flew heavenward when the music was about to rise and pointed toward earth as notes tumbled one after another like the cascading dips of a roller coaster descending its highest peak. Her arms could sweep up the entire choir in one unifying gesture or divide it into harmonies that were five, six or seven notes thick. And while all of this was happening, she stylishly sustained the beat of the music with fast-flowing movements.
   I considered all this before I opened my mouth to sing my audition.
   With hesitation bordering on panic, I stammered through a narrow range of scales only to be asked what I’d like to sing. Solo. I saw no way out of this unexpected situation, so I meekly agreed to take on "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as my less-than-triumphant finale.
   But by some stroke of gospel luck, I made the cut.
   Since then the choir has been rehearsed and trained by Gary Taylor, our piano-playing, five-part-singing, patient-as-Job teacher. Mr. Taylor has been directing church music and prize-winning school choirs since he was a young teen, and what he has brought into our fields of vision is not only gospel music but pieces of sociological and emotional understanding about the history of this music.
   One Saturday afternoon we loudly plodded through delicate lyrics of a story-telling song, much as an enthusiastic toddler might trample a bed of his mother’s favorite flowers. "Stony the road we trod. Bitter the chastening rod. Felt in the days when hope unborn had died … " I found out much later that this music, "Life Every Voice and Sing," is known as the Black National Anthem.
   In one smooth motion Mr. Taylor rose from his piano and placed a finger on his lips to temper our excitement. With eyes cast down he paused and whispered, "You are in the middle of the wilderness — hoping no one will hear you. You are a slave — and you’re not supposed to pray." In that instant, with this gentle man’s guidance, empathy through music was experienced — something else that has become part of the BGA experience.
   Possibly the most difficult part of this music for many of us has been the gospel mandate to feel the spirit of the music rather than stoically learn it note-for-note.
   Elizabeth Jackson is a Roman Catholic member of the choir who happens to be black. She has a classically-trained soprano voice but had never sung gospel. "With gospel," she said, "you can just forget everything you’ve learned about precision singing. Instead, the music passes from the director through the air to you, and you better catch it when it goes by because you might not get a second chance."
   And we’re catching it just fine. Nearly 150 of us comprise the three BGA choirs (adult, teen and youth). We came together to sing gospel music. Quite unexpectedly, however, many of us are discovering in the midst of this music that empathic light is touching our own inner worlds and, perhaps in the process, those of the generations of gospel singers before us.
   I have a hunch that if the BGA choir ever ventures north, the impressionable folks from my youth in Maine won’t be able to resist the pull of this music either and will be grateful, as I am, for the chance to sing along.
BGA choirs will perform on Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Princeton University Chapel. Tickets are $25 and are available at all Sun National Bank branches in Mercer Country, and Westminster Choir College of Rider University, and will be available at the door Saturday. The BGA project is supported by WIMG AM 1300’s Community Advancement Fund.