In A City Called Heaven, Robert M. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through its growth into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. Marovich mines print media, ephemera, and hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and historians--as well as relatives and friends of gospel pioneers--to recover forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and granted social mobility to a number of its practitioners. As Marovich shows, the music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. Yet it also helped give voice to a people--and lift a nation. A City Called Heaven celebrates a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.Table of Contents: Acknowledgments   vii Introduction   1 Part One: Roots   9 1. Got On My Traveling Shoes: Black Sacred Music and the Great Migration   11 2. "When the Fire Fell": The Sanctified Church Contribution to Chicago Gospel Music   27 3. Sacred Music in Transition: Charles Henry Pace and the Pace Jubilee Singers   48 4. Turn Your Radio On: Chicago Sacred Radio Broadcast Pioneers   58 5. "Someday, Somewhere": The Formation of the Gospel Nexus   71 6. Sweeping through the City: Thomas A. Dorsey and the Gospel Nexus (1932 - 1933)   87 7. Across This Land and Country: New Songs for a New Era (1933-1939)   112 8. From Birmingham to Chicago: The Great Migration of the Gospel Quartet   132 Part Two: Branches   147 9. Sing a Gospel Song: The 1940s, Part One   149 10. "If It's in Music -- We Have It": The Fertile Crescent of Gospel Music Publishing   167 11. "Move On Up a Little Higher": The 1940s, Part Two   179 12. Postwar Gospel Quartets: "Rock Stars of Religious Music"   204 13. The Gospel Caravan: Midcentury Melodies   229 14. "He Could Just Put a Song on His Fingers": Second-Generation Gospel Choirs   260 15. "God's Got a Television": Gospel Music Comes to the Living Room   281 16. "Tell It Like It Is": Songs of Social Significance   297 17. One of These Mornings: Chicago Gospel at the Crossroads   317 Appendix A. 1920s African American Sacred Music Recordings Made in Chicago   331 Appendix B. African American Sacred Music Recordings Made in Chicago, 1930-1941   335 Notes   337 Bibliography   389 General Index   401 Index of Songs   435 Illustrations follow page 228