In this same year, his wife and son would die during childbirth, a tragedy that provided the context behind his most famous work “Take My Hand Precious Lord”, a personal favorite of Dr. Although some people and churches would look down on his work in the beginning, Dorsey’s gospel music was soon accepted into the Christian world, and in 1932 he became the choir leader at the Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago’s South Side. As Dorsey would say later, “I’ve been thrown out of some of the best churches in America.” To some, uncomfortable with the idea of such a mixture, his songs were bastardizations of the word of God.ĭorsey had expected this upon writing his first gospel songs, he was unsure of how the faithful would respond. Dorsey’s mix of secular music styles with religious lyrics was new at the time, and it was not received with open arms by many in the Christian community. He published “If You See my Savior Tell Him You Saw Me” in 1932, his first piece of explicitly religious music. It was after this encounter that Dorsey turned his life towards the creation of “gospel music”, a term he coined. In his second breakdown, Dorsey sought out the advice of Bishop HH Haley, a faith healer that ignited Dorsey’s passion for religious music. Dorsey would not listen, returning to Chicago to play music. During the first of the two such stretches, Dorsey returned home to Atlanta where his mother begged him to stop his blues music and to turn to service to God. He went through his two different nervous breakdowns that left him unable to play or write music for long periods of time. His 1928 hit “It’s Tight Like That” recorded alongside fellow Chicagoan Tampa Red would go on to sell 7 million copies.Įven with all of his musical successes, Dorsey was not without his own struggles. He was an incredibly successful blues musician who played alongside some of the most famous singers in the city. During his early days in Chicago, Dorsey played under the moniker “Georgia Tom”. His father was a minister and his mother the church organist.Īlthough his parents’ occupations seem to make Dorsey’s eventual path in life seem obvious, his early work was entirely secular. Like Kanye West who would come after him, Dorsey was born in Georgia. Dorsey arrived in Chicago, the city that he would call home for the rest of his life and the place where he would eventually change the trajectory of African-American music. What makes Chance, and this album, so great, is that he builds off of the struggles and risks taken by artists before him, creating art that is as confident in its religiosity as it is in its musical prowess.ġ00 years ago, a young Thomas A. It is the next step in a progression of Chicago artists as old as gospel music itself. Coloring Book was not created in a vacuum. Chicago lays claim as the start of popular gospel music, and the significance of this fact has not been lost on Kanye and Chance, the city’s most creative sons. That the two artists both hail from Chicago is no coincidence the city’s proud tradition of music is one that rivals any other in the world. However, when the scope of time is broadened, Coloring Book seems more and more like a natural progression from West, a sort of College Dropout 2.0 that builds on the themes that West has spent most of his life working on. Due to the proximity of their releases, comparing West’s Pablo to Coloring Book seems like the natural step, with Chance living up to his promise of a gospel album and Kanye failing. This is what Kanye promised on The Life of Pablo, and while Kanye provided an album grand in its scope, any piety available was lost by his promise to “f**k the church up by drinking at the Communion”. Coloring Book doesn’t just have gospel influences, it is in fact a gospel album. In his third solo project, Chance has created a piece of art that moves past the traditional realms of hip- hop. In their review of the album, Pitchfork called it “one of the strongest rap albums released this year…”, but while there is no doubting the fact that it is undoubtedly this: a rap album, what makes Coloring Book so special is that it is more. The project has been almost universally hailed as a masterpiece. This verse, perhaps the standout on the album, would be a sort of prelude to Coloring Book, in which Chance takes his “God dream” to a whole new level. The young rapper already had an expansive catalogue of two solo mixtapes, a collaborative free- jazz and hip hop album, and a number of impressive featured verses, most notably on “Ultralight Beam” from Kanye West’s 2016 release, The Life of Pablo. When Chance the Rapper’s third solo mixtape, Coloring Book, dropped, the internet was abuzz.
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