The Gospel Truth

The Shiloh Baptist Choir

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, November 30, 2011

The November morning scene at Shiloh Baptist Church in Hudson is pretty much a picture-book example of the term “Sunday best.” The ladies sport fancy hats and bright outfits, the men and boys have on ties and their sharpest suits, and the little girls, their hair done up in braids with candy-colored beads, wear satiny skirts and dangle their shiny shoes beneath the pews. As the organ begins to fill the air with the stately hymn “Standing on the Promises,” a drummer adds some rhythm. And then a small group to the side of the pulpit, its female members draped in shimmering red robes to match the room’s regal decor, rises and begins to sing. The congregation joins in, and over the next two hours, amid the day’s prayers, announcements, and heartfelt sermonizing, there’s clapping and much more singing all around—along with many an “Amen!” The services here are always uplifting and jubilant, but on this occasion there’s added reason to celebrate. While there are some time-tested musical groups in the Hudson Valley, not many have been performing for as long as the Shiloh Baptist Choir: Today, the choir and the church for which it’s named are celebrating their 96th anniversary.

“We don’t have a lot of written records from the early years of the church, but we do know that music has always been part of it,” says the Reverend Ronald Grant, the institution’s pastor, who shares the choir’s directorial and accompanist duties with his son Dwayne “D. J.” Grant. “At that time the congregation itself would have been the choir; back then everyone would just sing together with the minister. For generations Shiloh Baptist Church has been the hub of African American religious activity in Columbia County, and at one point or another every local family has been through here. We have about 150 active members in the congregation now, which is down from what it once was. But we do get visitors or new or returning members who say, ‘My grandparents, or my great-grandparents, used to belong to this church.’ And many of those ancestors also sang in the choir.”

Thanks to its patronage of Italian Renaissance painters, the Catholic Church has been credited with keeping visual art alive from the 13th to the 15th century. And, similarly, thanks to their proliferation of gospel music, African American churches deserve the world’s undying gratitude for what they’ve done for modern Western music. For without gospel and the blues it sprang from, none of the popular music we’ve loved during the last 100-plus years—jazz, rock ’n’ roll, soul, funk, hip-hop—would exist. How so? Simple. All of these genres are rooted in the blues, and while the blues themselves have fallen in and out of favor with a public focused on their ever-morphing derivations, their steadfast, sanctified cousin has never lost its audience. Thus, it’s been America’s black churches—most of them small community organizations like Shiloh—that have preserved the blues form over the decades and provided the touchstone for the above descendant styles. It doesn’t take the most learned of ears to spot the similarities between the blues and gospel: the African-rooted call and response between the lead voice and accompanying instruments or singers; the use of moody “blue” notes and chords; the emotional delivery and intensely honest feeling. With its beginnings in the burden-lifting spirituals passed down from slavery days, gospel got a modern makeover in the pre-World War II years by the Reverend Thomas A. Dorsey, a former blues pianist who’d toured with the racy Ma Rainey and composed such double-entendre hits as “It’s Tight Like That.” Dorsey injected gospel music with rhythmic energy and penned the beloved standards “Peace in the Valley” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Little Richard, and countless other influential artists who followed have backgrounds in gospel and the church, many of them enjoying successful careers in both sacred and secular music. Today, gospel continues to inspire generations of worshippers and through its transcendental appeal is constantly being discovered by new listeners in search of something higher and deeper. (Witness the recent popularity of boxed sets like the Dust-to-Digital label’s Goodbye Babylon and Tompkins Square’s Fire in My Bones among the indie crowd.)