The History of Gospel Music: From Spirituals to Kirk Franklin

Gospel music did not just “happen.” It grew out of people trying to make sense of scripture while life was anything but calm, first in hush-and-holler spirituals and later in revival hymns that you could actually sing on the way home.

Here’s the twist: two different streams ran side by side for a long time. Enslaved Americans shaped spirituals with call-and-response, claps, and foot-stomps, then the post-Civil War South carried those rhythms into church. Meanwhile, 18th-century Anglican hymnody brought songs like “Amazing Grace” and “Rock of Ages” into the same spaces, and the blend got even more complicated once 19th-century religious revivals turned it into a recognizable genre.

And once the phrase “gospel music” hit print in 1874, everything started to lock into place.

What Is Gospel Music

Gospel music is a tradition of Christian sacred music. It's defined by strong vocals, call-and-response structure, and lyrics rooted in scripture. The word "gospel" comes from the Old English godspell, meaning "good news."

That word was itself a translation of the Greek term used for the first four books of the New Testament. According to Britannica, gospel as a distinct musical genre developed out of the 19th-century religious revivals in the United States, and it split early into two parallel traditions: white Southern gospel and Black gospel. Black gospel eventually became the dominant form.

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That’s when those plantation spirituals and the church version of “Amazing Grace” started sharing the same room, and the sound began to change.

The 19th-Century Roots: Spirituals and Anglican Hymns

Two streams fed into what became gospel music. The first was the African American spiritual. These were songs sung by enslaved Americans on plantations, combining West African call-and-response patterns with Biblical themes. They were typically performed a cappella, with hand-claps and foot-stomps for rhythm.

The second stream was 18th-century Anglican hymnody. Songs like "Amazing Grace," written by former slave-ship captain John Newton around 1772, and "Rock of Ages" (1763) became foundational.

Both traditions ran through African American churches in the post-Civil War South. Photographs from that period, including some featured in 50 unbelievable history photos, capture the small wooden churches where the styles first started to merge.

1874 and the First Use of the Term "Gospel Music"

The actual phrase "gospel music" first appeared in print in 1874. Composer and Baptist evangelist Philip Bliss published Gospel Songs: A Choice Collection of Hymns and Tunes that year. Bliss and contemporaries like George F. Root and Charles H. Gabriel wrote singable, accessible hymns that revival audiences could pick up immediately.

This early gospel was predominantly white, predominantly rural, and closely tied to country music. Black gospel as a distinct form wouldn't fully crystallize for another fifty years.

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Then 19th-century revivals kicked in, and the “good news” idea stopped being just a message and became a format people could pick up fast.

It’s like how the 1990s modem screech became everyday life’s soundtrack, as this 1990s technology breakdown explains.

Thomas A. Dorsey: The Father of Gospel Music

Thomas Andrew Dorsey (1899 to 1993) was born in Villa Rica, Georgia. His father was a Baptist preacher and his mother was a church organist. By age 12, Dorsey was already playing piano in Atlanta theaters and brothels.

He moved to Chicago in 1915, and he spent the 1920s recording bawdy blues records under the name Georgia Tom, often alongside slide guitarist Tampa Red. Then he got sick.

A severe illness and religious conversion in 1928 turned him toward sacred music. Per the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, Dorsey coined the phrase "gospel music" for Black sacred music as early as 1920, and his merging of blues and jazz with church hymns was extremely controversial at first. In 1932, the same year his wife and son died, he founded the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses. Over his career he wrote more than 1,000 songs. "Peace in the Valley" is the other big one.

The Golden Age: Mahalia Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe

By the 1940s, gospel had moved out of churches and onto records, radio, and concert stages. Two voices defined the era. They could not have been more different.

• Mahalia Jackson (1911 to 1972): The New Orleans contralto recorded "Move On Up a Little Higher" in 1947. It sold more than 8 million copies, which was unprecedented for a gospel record at the time.
• Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915 to 1973): A guitarist and singer who literally electrified gospel. Her distorted electric-guitar playing on songs like "Strange Things Happening Every Day" (1944) is now widely credited as a foundational influence on rock and roll. Tharpe performed in nightclubs and arenas. That scandalized parts of the church world but expanded gospel's reach enormously.

By 1874, Philip Bliss was publishing Gospel Songs, and suddenly the term “gospel music” had a name you could print, sell, and sing.

Meanwhile, Black gospel was still waiting to fully crystallize, even as white Southern gospel and revival hymns kept building momentum.

"Oh Happy Day" and the Mainstream Crossover

Gospel's first major pop crossover came in 1969, when the Edwin Hawkins Singers released "Oh Happy Day," an arrangement of an 18th-century hymn.

The record hit No. 4 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and No. 2 in the UK Singles Chart, selling over a million copies. Aretha Franklin, daughter of the Detroit minister C.L. Franklin, brought gospel to the largest pop audience of the 1960s and 1970s. Her 1972 live album Amazing Grace, recorded at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, remains the highest-selling gospel album ever made.

The pattern of gospel singers moving into mainstream pop has continued ever since, and the broader phenomenon of musicians moving between genres has produced some strange career arcs along the way.

Contemporary Gospel: Kirk Franklin and Today

Kirk Franklin's 1993 debut album Kirk Franklin & the Family was the first gospel album certified platinum. His follow-ups in the late 1990s pushed gospel into hip-hop production, drum machines, and synthesizer arrangements that purists rejected and audiences embraced. Contemporary gospel today crosses freely with R&B, hip-hop, and pop. The same producers often work on both sides of the line.

The history of gospel music is, in many ways, the history of American popular music. Soul, R&B, rock and roll, and modern pop all carry gospel DNA in vocal style, song structure, and emotional intensity. The line between sacred and secular has been porous ever since Sister Rosetta Tharpe plugged in her guitar.

The genre got its official label in 1874, but the real story was still unfolding in the churches where those rhythms first met.

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