Nothing But Love in God's Water: Volume 2: Black Sacred Music from Sit-Ins to Resurrection City
Volume 1 of Nothing but Love in God's Water traced the music of protest spirituals from the Civil War to the American labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and on through the Montgomery bus boycott. This second volume continues the journey, chronicling the role this music played in energizing and sustaining those most heavily involved in the civil rights movement.
Robert Darden, former gospel music editor for Billboard magazine and the founder of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at Baylor University, brings this vivid, vital story to life. He explains why black sacred music helped foster community within the civil rights movement and attract new adherents; shows how Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders used music to underscore and support their message; and reveals how the songs themselves traveled and changed as the fight for freedom for African Americans continued. Darden makes an unassailable case for the importance of black sacred music not only to the civil rights era but also to present-day struggles in and beyond the United States.
Taking us from the Deep South to Chicago and on to the nation's capital, Darden's grittily detailed, lively telling is peppered throughout with the words of those who were there, famous and forgotten alike: activists such as Rep. John Lewis, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and Willie Bolden, as well as musical virtuosos such as Harry Belafonte, Duke Ellington, and The Mighty Wonders. Expertly assembled from published and unpublished writing, oral histories, and rare recordings, this is the history of the soundtrack that fueled the long march toward freedom and equality for the black community in the United States and that continues to inspire and uplift people all over the world.
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Robert Darden is Professor of Journalism, Public Relations, and New Media at Baylor University. He is the author of two dozen books, including the first volume of Nothing but Love in God's Water and People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music.
--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
