Volume 41, Number 8 · April 21, 1994
How Far from Canaan?
By Arthur Kempton
The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church
by Michael W. Harris
Oxford University Press, 324 pp., $11.95 (paper)
Got to Tell it: Mahalia Jackson, Queen of Gospel
by Jules Schwerin
Oxford University Press, 288 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Moments before he was shot in Memphis, Martin Luther King, Jr:, leaned over the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel and spoke to a group of men standing in the courtyard below. He asked one of them, the saxophonist Ben Branch, to have his band play 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' at a rally for the city's black sanitation workers, who were embroiled in a long and bitter strike. King was in town to support their lost cause, and had preached enough funerals in black churches to know he could rely on the song's bracing effects.
Review, 7617 words
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