Description
Book SynopsisThe second of two volumes chronicling the history and role of music in the African-American experience. Explains the historical significance of song and illustrates how music influenced the Civil Rights Movement.
Trade Review“Darden’s finest book on black sacred music to date. . . . Noting how spirituals are still sung to embolden freedom fighters around the world, Darden reminds us that protest music remains a balm as well as a call to action against political oppression.”
—Robert M. Marovitch Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal
“An exhaustive, meticulous history of the role of song in African American liberation movements. . . . Darden’s readable, song-by-song reconstruction of the movement’s history serves as an in-depth history of the movement itself. Summing up: Essential.”
—F. J. Hay Choice
“As Americans take to the streets in protest over the loss of African American lives in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York, and elsewhere, the power of the singing army cannot be overestimated. Although decades have passed since the Civil Rights movement of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. era, protesters are not turning to today’s popular song canon to set their marching cadence. They are still singing the old standards, such as ‘I Shall Not Be Moved,’ and ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Like previous generations, they are harnessing the power of black sacred song to lift the spirit of the oppressed and turn the heart of the oppressor. Darden’s book provides an eminently readable and consistently fascinating history of how this came to be.”
—Robert M. Marovich Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal
“Nothing but Love in God’s Water, volume 1, fills a significant niche in the already-voluminous library of the civil rights movement. While previous Pulitzer Prize–winning books have definitively covered the movement’s leaders, politics, strategies, philosophy, and impact, the literature related to the influence—actually, the importance—of the music to the movement has barely been addressed in meaningful, systematic fashion. Nothing but Love in God's Water does that and more.”
—James Abbington on Volume 1 Journal of American History
“In this first volume of a projected two, [Robert] Darden . . . gets immediately to the heart of his subject: music validates the African rites of passage and while continuing that role in African American history provides the commentary and response to all subsequent aspects of black life and society. Alert to the church as the haven for more than worship, the author illustrates this manifested from the plantations to the Fisk Jubilee Singers to the gospel music of Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson. Seeing the cultural fabric as a unit, Darden looks at the protests and responses within blues and jazz as well as in the sacred. The author is knowledgeable about the literature on the subject and has produced a work that will be useful to a broad audience. Scholarly readers will find the expansive bibliography and 26 pages of endnotes of particular value.”
—D.-R. de Lerma Choice
“Nothing but Love in God’s Water encourages readers to think of music as an invitation to transformation, as an opportunity, through performance, to re-arrange socio-political and economic structures of collective life.”
—Anthony B. Pinn Marginalia Review of Books
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Special Thanks
Introduction: What Came Before
Chapter 1: The Sit-Ins
Chapter 2: The Freedom Rides
Chapter 3: Albany, Georgia
First Interlude: McComb, Georgia
Chapter 4: Birmingham, Alabama
Chapter 5: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
Second Interlude: Death in America
Chapter 6: Mississippi Freedom Summer
Chapter 7: Selma, Alabama
Third Interlude: St. Augustine, Florida; The Meredith March; Popular Music
Chapter 8: Chicago, Illinois
Chapter 9: Memphis, Tennessee
Epilogue: Poor People’s March and Resurrection City
Conclusion: What Comes Now
