On a Sunday morning in October 1934, E. H. Watson sat down for breakfast and turned his radio dial until he heard the close harmony spirituals of the Southernaires quartet. These Sunday morning sessions were one of the only times when Watson could hear Black broadcasters on a network-affiliated station. The voices that filled his home that morning were not like those on the popular program Amos ‘n’ Andy, where white comedians played Black characters. No, these singers were Black.Footnote 1 Watson may not have known about the quartet’s struggle to find a commercial sponsor or that network executives were actively debating what genres of music they should be permitted to sing.Footnote 2 But one thing’s for sure: he knew how it felt to listen. In a letter reprinted in The Pittsburgh Courier, Watson professed, “‘Thank God I’m black. Thank God I’ve got the soul of a black man.’ That’s the way the ‘Southernaires’ make you feel.”Footnote 3
Like Watson, Reed Smoot also felt a keen sense of pride when hearing his community represented on the airwaves. Smoot, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Utah’s first US Senator, had become a fan of listening to the Salt Lake Tabernacle Choir’s weekly network program while living in Washington, DC. “A splendid advertisement for Utah,” wrote the Senator in his diary.Footnote 4 A few weeks before Watson’s letter appeared in The Pittsburgh Courier, Smoot praised the Tabernacle Choir program before the General Conference of Latter-day Saints. He celebrated its ability to “allay the prejudices of the people against the Church.” Smoot knew such prejudices all too well: when he first arrived in Washington, he endured bitter hearings over whether he should be seated as a senator. As proof of the choir’s good work, he read aloud a letter from a Methodist listener who loved the “wonderful” program. Yet, while it fostered goodwill among non-Mormons, the program’s deepest impact was on Smoot and his fellow Latter-day Saints, affirming their worth and signaling their rightful place in the soundscape of American religious life.Footnote 5
Watson and Smoot publicly championed their respective Sunday programs because hearing such programs was exceedingly rare in the 1930s, when radio was at the height of its national influence. While early radio provided some limited opportunities for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, their prospects all but disappeared in the late 1920s as the industry became dominated by two national networks: the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). By the early 1930s, NBC and CBS accounted for more than two-thirds of all broadcasting in the United States, and their programs were often described as representative of the nation.Footnote 6 Wary of federal regulation, network executives and commercial sponsors insisted that network programs must be uncontroversial and appeal to the entire country. This created a dilemma for racial and religious minorities because industry leaders reasoned that their offerings would only appeal to a segment of radio’s mass audience. They assumed, for instance, that white Southerners would not want to hear programs featuring Black broadcasters.Footnote 7
While Black performers faced acute obstacles in radio’s network era, NBC and CBS remained out of reach for racial, ethnic, and religious outsiders of many stripes. By 1931, both networks refused to sell airtime for religious programming. Network executives cited fears that commercial religious programs could become a racket and would invite the scrutiny of the Federal Radio Commission, which was charged with ensuring stations broadcast in “the public interest.” Instead, the major networks offered free “sustaining” airtime to a select group of national religious organizations, such as the Federal Council of Churches. Unlikely to receive free airtime from these organizations and unable to purchase it outright, most racial and religious minorities were thus locked out of the major networks and forced to purchase airtime from generally less powerful, independent stations. Yet, despite the odds, a small handful of outsiders successfully crossed over into the national networks.Footnote 8
Outsiders such as white Latter-day Saints and Black Christians used sacred music to carve out space for themselves on network radio. Most of their programs aired on Sunday mornings, a time considered less desirable by advertisers. Performers took full advantage of the opportunity. Through sacred songs, underrepresented groups asserted their distinctive cultural contributions and worthiness for full citizenship, and they often reserved portions of their broadcast for spoken addresses to underscore these points.Footnote 9 To get on the air and to stay there, outsiders skillfully navigated the demands of both white industry executives and multiracial audiences. These sometimes-conflicting demands meant that, while their programs occasionally underscored stereotypes, they also included dissonant tones of imagining the world otherwise.Footnote 10 Ultimately, Latter-day Saints and Black Christians broadcast a complex mixture of sounds that simultaneously challenged and reinforced the assumed whiteness of national network radio and the “American religion” that its Sunday morning programs purportedly reflected.Footnote 11
The historian Barbara Savage has aptly described the radio as a “battlefield in a domestic mind war about race.”Footnote 12 While race is generally considered a visual phenomenon, sound has played a surprisingly crucial role in racial and religious formations.Footnote 13 Radio, especially powerful chain networks like NBC and CBS, spread and standardized social identities. Despite network executives’ claims that the radio was “colorblind,” radio programs led listeners to “hear” race even when they could not see the performer.Footnote 14 The popularity of the “aural blackface” program Amos ‘n’ Andy demonstrates how the radio trafficked in and spread racial tropes and stereotypes.Footnote 15 Meanwhile, performances by actual people of color were also generally “contained” by the dominant ideologies of station operators, regulators, and network executives.Footnote 16
But the medium was not just a tool of white supremacist propaganda, as is sometimes assumed. Nor was it a “sonic wallpaper of (white) sameness” that required marginalized Americans always to listen askance.Footnote 17 By the late 1940s, the industry began to recognize listeners of color as distinct markets and to cater to them through specific stations.Footnote 18 Even before that, public affairs programming occasionally gave voice to integrationist sentiments during discussions of segregation.Footnote 19 Perhaps radio’s most profound contribution was how it lowered the barrier for Americans to encounter other cultures. Radio and recording technologies detached sound from the body, enabling the voices of marginalized people to enter spaces where their physical bodies would not have been welcome. And, because radio listening did not require purchasing a physical record that left material evidence of what someone had tuned in to, it was both free and potentially private. As a result, the medium served as a “trapdoor” to other cultures, sometimes leading listeners to appreciate the music and culture of subordinated groups.Footnote 20 Still, while the medium enabled communing across racial and religious lines, programs like The Southernaires and Music and the Spoken Word mattered most to listeners who identified with the underrepresented broadcaster. Overlooked by the industry and much of the scholarship, racial and religious minorities listened closely to these flawed yet beloved programs.Footnote 21
This article helps remedy the literature’s “minimal coverage” of nonwhite representation and listeners prior to the rise of Black-appeal stations in the late 1940s.Footnote 22 Religious historians have shown how African Americans enthusiastically embraced the phonograph, film, and, later, television, reaching new audiences and creating new religious authorities in the process.Footnote 23 Radio, though, has largely been neglected in that story. The limited scholarship that does exist tends to focus on local and regional broadcasters.Footnote 24 Yet, while the national networks were dominated by white voices, there were important exceptions, and these exceptions profoundly shaped how Americans imagined the nation.Footnote 25 This article further reveals how the major networks’ so-called “religious ghetto,” a category hitherto sidelined by radio scholars, became home to the highest concentration of nonwhite performers on network radio until the 1950s.Footnote 26
With its broad listenership, network-era Sunday programming served as a vital bridge between the era of race records and the age of television. Like other media, the radio created new cultural authorities and often reflected the interests of corporate America. But, because radio, film, and, later, television were more centralized and more heavily regulated, minority performers often faced greater constraints in those media than they did in the recording studio. With their emphasis on the primacy of sound, successful radio programs featuring racial and religious outsiders – such as choir broadcasts – did not provide a perfect model for future films or television shows. Still, their popularity poked holes in dominant ideas about both “American religion” and the suitability of minorities on the air.Footnote 27
In the mid-1920s, the Black Holiness minister Lightfoot Solomon Michaux began broadcasting his Radio Church of God, a program that would eventually be picked up by CBS. While Michaux became wildly popular, his programming attracted the ire of Black elites, making his time as a network star relatively brief. The Southernaires quartet’s success proved to be more enduring. Although they were not the only Black singers on the airwaves in the early 1930s, their ability to appease both network executives and Black middle-class listeners helped make The Southernaires the longest-running Black program of the network era. Wings Over Jordan built on the success of Michaux and the Southernaires quartet, becoming the first Black network program to be classified as “religion” when CBS put the choir over its national network in 1938. A comparison between the radio endeavors of white Latter-day Saints and Black Protestants, however, reveals that similar strategies did not necessarily lead to similar outcomes.
Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux’s “Sermons in Jazz”
Journalist Lew C. Barrison began his 1934 profile of Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux by describing the sounds of the Black Holiness minister’s weekly radio broadcast: “A thousand voices lift over a riot of organ music, supported by a full-tone choir, led by the resounding ecstatic voice of Elder Micheaux [sic] himself! Radio’s Church of God is again on the air!” Barrison chronicled how he became entranced by the program’s songs, jokes, and “sermons in jazz,” as well as the enthusiastic reactions of the mixed-race live audience. The program’s music, especially its syncopated call-and-response theme song, “Happy Am I,” created for Barrison a “weird yet alluring mixture of rich melody and modern jazz.” Michaux thought that music opened the door to evangelism. “Get him singing, and he’s ready to listen to the word of God,” the preacher claimed. Music and the ability to perform white expectations of Black folk religion became the wedge that enabled Michaux to break into national network radio.Footnote 28
Early in his ministry, Michaux, a former seafood salesman, recognized that he could use the wireless to spread the gospel and grow his church. In the mid-1920s, he regularly sought opportunities to broadcast revivals over his local radio station in Newport News, Virginia. A few years later, he moved to Washington, DC, and worked to tap into the district’s radio market. Surprisingly, the station owner that agreed to broadcast Michaux was James S. Vance, the printer of a local Ku Klux Klan newspaper. The Klan leader let Michaux broadcast for free because doing so helped his station, WJSV, fulfill the 1927 Radio Act’s mandate to broadcast “in the public interest.” Vance may have also recognized that the program could appeal to the masses. After all, broadcasts by Michaux emphasized music, humor, congregational participation, and easy-to-understand sermons. The white station owner may have heard these joyful elements as mapping onto his preconceived notions of Black folk religion and therefore may not have perceived it as a threat to the racial order. Michaux’s evening program became so popular that Vance later invited him to deliver morning devotionals on Sundays and throughout the week.Footnote 29
Music and audience participation featured prominently in Michaux’s broadcasts. Radio Church of God was filled with songs by the choir and by soloists such as Mary Michaux, the minister’s wife. Sometimes radio listeners called the church during a broadcast to make song requests.Footnote 30 Multiracial audiences clapped and sang along, layering the rhythmic sermons with shouts of “Yes!,” “Amen!,” or “Praise the Lord!” Michaux’s frequent jokes meant that they could participate through laughter, too. During a film of Radio Church of God, Michaux preached, “The woman that haveth three husbands [yes!], they all have died [yes!], gone to heaven [yes!], in heaven [yes!] whose wife will she be? [all right!] I see some of you sisters getting very anxious! [laughter].” Singing, shouting, and laughing with the program provided an upbeat counterpoint to the blues of the Great Depression. Soon, listeners throughout the mid-Atlantic began humming along.Footnote 31
CBS’s decision to buy WJSV in 1932 transformed Michaux from a regional phenomenon into arguably “the best known colored man in the United States.”Footnote 32 Upon acquiring WJSV, CBS canceled every local program except Radio Church of God. Footnote 33 The network retained Michaux and his choir and broadcast them as an unsponsored program over fifty-two stations, making Michaux the first Black clergyperson to host a network program. After just two years on CBS, the Radio Church of God’s audience had reportedly grown to twenty-five million listeners.Footnote 34 By 1936, it even spanned multiple continents due to a partnership with the British Broadcasting Corporation.Footnote 35
Thousands of listeners wrote Michaux letters each week to share how much they appreciated the program.Footnote 36 Many enjoyed the humor and music, while others felt drawn to the multiracial worship environment and hope-filled messages.Footnote 37 Some even made pilgrimages to participate in the live broadcast. Listening to this poor seafood salesman-turned-global radio star was inspirational for working-class Black Americans. Meanwhile, for white Americans, listening could, as Lew Barrison put it, “tickle every fancy.”Footnote 38
Not everyone was pleased with Michaux’s broadcasts, however. Over the previous decade, middle-class Black Protestants had increasingly come to see themselves as stewards of Black social and cultural life.Footnote 39 These self-appointed stewards listened with scrutiny to their expensive radios. In 1931, they gathered more than seven hundred thousand petitions to ban Amos ‘n’ Andy. Black elites also expressed concerns about how Black clergy broadcasters like Michaux represented the race. They disapproved of how Radio Church of God blurred worship and entertainment, and they often likened Michaux to the white stars of Amos ‘n’ Andy or to the Black vaudeville star Bert Williams. In an editorial in the Afro-American, the Baptist layman George Mark accused Michaux of damaging both Christianity and his race. “If other ministers are not obliged to clown, in order to broadcast, why should you be required to do so?” Mark asked.Footnote 40 Criticisms continued to mount throughout the mid-1930s until 1938, when CBS and the BBC dropped the program due to the clergyman’s alleged misappropriation of funds.Footnote 41
Condemnations of Michaux represented Black elites’ anxieties about the Black working class and the “new sacred order” they were creating.Footnote 42 Steeped in an ideology of respectability politics, Black elites were concerned that Michaux and his congregants did not abide by their understanding of what “religion” should sound like.Footnote 43 Their criticisms failed to appreciate Michaux’s ingenuity or the challenge of navigating a racist industry. In the film of Radio Church of God, Michaux hinted at pressures he faced shortly after his joke about “sisters getting very anxious.” Pointing to a group of people near the front of the church, he said with a smile, “you know these folks are trying to make me an actor.” He acknowledged that people found him entertaining, but his use of “trying” rejects the assertion that the service was purely performative. He was a preacher—not an actor.Footnote 44
But the program’s critics were not entirely wrong. The sound and style of Michaux’s broadcasts were markedly different from the staid, urbane tones of the other clergy-led broadcasts on network radio. And as the Unitarian minister Etheldred Brown pointed out, network radio’s white gatekeepers did not offer time to educated middle-class Black preachers who matched the tone and tenor of network radio’s white clergy.Footnote 45 The preponderance of Black Holiness and Pentecostal preachers on local radio stations, such as Elder Lucy Smith in Chicago, stemmed in part from their proselytizing fervor and the aurality of their worship. Yet, it also reflected how white listeners and station owners perceived their worship as harmonizing with white racial fantasies of Black religion.Footnote 46
CBS agreed with Black elites that the Radio Church of God was not “real” religion. In an article about religion and network radio, Newsweek reported in March 1934 that Michaux “does not count as a religious program, according to Columbia. He is an example of American folklore.”Footnote 47 In other words, CBS considered Michaux’s broadcast to be a modern expression of a supposedly “premodern” religion. Whereas other cultures and religions had evolved, folk religions such as Michaux’s represented an imagined fragment of a bygone age.Footnote 48
Columbia’s classification cast Michaux’s brand of Christianity as a premodern object of fascination, but it also opened the door to network broadcasting. After all, CBS put Michaux on its nationwide network the same autumn that it ceased selling airtime to Charles Coughlin and white Protestant fundamentalists.Footnote 49 Classified as folklore, the musical Radio Church of God skirted the scrutiny of religious gatekeepers and aggrieved network exiles. Black Americans would also carve out space on the air using programs classified as “music.”
Ministry, Minstrelsy, and the Southernaires Quartet
“It’s church time, friends,” began the NBC announcer, speaking softly over the polished close harmony humming of the Southernaires quartet. “The Little Weatherbeaten Whitewashed Church is just over the way, and there is room for all who come with knee bowed and body bent.” As the humming faded, listeners heard the distant, steady sound of tolling church bells. The announcer reverently declared, “The bell calls, whosoever will, let him come!”Footnote 50 Many listeners heeded the call. Some churches even installed loudspeakers so congregants could listen during Sunday School.Footnote 51 Coming on right before NBC’s first clergy star, the white Protestant minister S. Parkes Cadman and his National Radio Pulpit, The Southernaires made a powerful claim that Black Protestants constituted a vital part of American religious life.Footnote 52
Fascinatingly, however, “church time” was not “religion,” according to NBC. Though listeners such as Stuart McKeown described the quartet’s Sunday morning broadcast as “a religious program,” NBC classified it as “music.”Footnote 53 As with Elder Michaux on CBS, this designation enabled the Southernaires quartet to circumvent NBC’s religious gatekeepers. Once there, the singers worked hard to remain on the air. Balancing the demands of white gatekeepers and the Black Protestant establishment, the Southernaires quartet endured as a fixture on NBC for two decades, making their eponymously titled program the longest-running Black network program of radio’s so-called golden age.Footnote 54
In 1929, Homer Smith, William Edmonson, Lowell Peters, and Jay Toney formed a quartet to sing at a Methodist congregation in Harlem, but they soon made their way into local broadcasting booths. Not long after, NBC hired the group to sing over its nationwide network of fifty-one stations every Sunday morning.Footnote 55 The quartet became known as “The Southernaires” because they sang “songs of the deep South,” especially African American spirituals.Footnote 56 Arranged in four-part close harmony by their accompanist, Clarence Jones, the quartet’s songs typically highlighted the high falsetto of Homer Smith and the resonant bass of William Edmonson. The middle singers, Lowell Peters and Jay Toney, filled out the chord and frequently soloed. “For entertainment with an underlying note of reverence,” assessed Variety magazine in 1931, “the Southernaires present just about the best program heard over WEAF on the Sabbath morning.”Footnote 57
The Southernaires appealed to a large multiracial audience. In 1931, The Pittsburgh Courier reported that it was “one of the most popular” programs on the air and printed excerpts of letters from listeners. Census records reveal that the writers included listeners of a variety of races and occupations.Footnote 58 The program’s broad appeal led Cleveland Allen of The Chicago Defender to write that the singers were “missionaries of the air” for “bringing about goodwill between the races.”Footnote 59 Even though Black listeners had lower rates of radio ownership, they still found ways to listen.Footnote 60 Black newspapers urged their readers to write to NBC to convince the network to keep its Black radio stars on the air, as networks measured the size of the listening audience based on the number of letters a program received.Footnote 61 By the mid-1930s, NBC estimated that eighteen million listeners regularly tuned in to the Sunday morning program.Footnote 62
Aspects of The Southernaires came straight from the vaudeville stage. Drawing on forms established by minstrel and variety shows, the quartet included sketches and comedy bits alongside their spirituals, and at least one of their singers had previously worked as a “minstrel performer.”Footnote 63 A recording of “Roll Jordan Roll” illustrates their vaudevillian tendencies. In contrast to the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ slow and dramatic renditions of the spiritual, the Southernaires quartet’s recording began as an upbeat, toe-tapping number. However, after the first two verses, they dramatically slowed down the tempo, matching that of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and shifted to a more ominous-sounding minor key. The quartet continued alternating between these two tempos and keys—sounding fast and happy in one moment and then slow and foreboding in the next—making the traditional version of “Roll Jordon Roll” come across as overly melodramatic. The next verse underscored the quartet’s humorous intentions. After the lead singer sang, “Oh sister, you oughta’ been there,” the other three singers responded with “Yes, my Lord!” with Smith, the high tenor, using his falsetto and an exaggerated accent to impersonate a Black woman.Footnote 64 The performance echoed long-standing tropes in popular culture where men donned drag for laughs, often at the expense of Black women.Footnote 65 The singers’ ability to shift between modes highlighted their skill as musicians and entertainers in the minstrel tradition.
In the same way that the Black minstrel performers Bert Williams and George Walker marketed themselves as “Two Real Coons,” the singers emphasized that their racial identities made their performances more authentic. They claimed that their songs were sourced from “white-haired old colored people in the South who remember the days of slavery.”Footnote 66 NBC also linked the singers’ racial identities to their authenticity. “There is a depth of passion in the spiritual, a quality of gaiety in dance tunes and minstrel songs that can best be expressed by colored singers,” the white announcer told the listening audience during the quartet’s first anniversary program.Footnote 67
As they did with Michaux, some Black elites expressed concerns about the program, especially the spirituals.Footnote 68 Black intellectuals had long praised spirituals as Black Americans’ distinct contribution to American culture.Footnote 69 During the 1920s and 1930s, they sparred over when and how spirituals should be sung, with many decrying performances they perceived as making light of these sacred melodies.Footnote 70 Black Protestant leaders criticized the Southernaires quartet for singing spirituals at faster tempos and for singing profane popular tunes alongside these sacred songs. The singers pushed back. “The Negro, while a religious being, also had his lighter side,” claimed Homer Smith. Their popular tunes did not “make fun of the race” but were “modern spirituals” with lyrics that were “far from jazzy.” As for the faster tempos, Smith insisted that they were not a form of mockery but were simply due to radio’s strict time constraints.Footnote 71 The quartet’s popular upbeat spirituals were forerunners to the rhythmic renditions of gospel quartets such as the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Golden Gate Quartet.Footnote 72
The Southernaires worked to transform Black elites from critics to allies. In 1932, the singers lobbied to create a guest speaker program to help with the broadcast’s “tone,” and NBC management eventually agreed. The singers consistently invited “high class speakers” such as the African Methodist Episcopal bishop John Gregg, the musician W. C. Handy, and the YMCA leader Channing Tobias to speak on their program.Footnote 73 Most guests celebrated the cultural contributions of Black Americans. For instance, Charles W. Filmore, a Black colonel who organized the World War I regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters, spoke about the history of Black soldiers’ contributions to American war efforts.Footnote 74 Guest speakers often became public and private advocates for the quartet.Footnote 75 Finally, the singers’ well-publicized efforts to combat the racial discrimination they faced in radio stations, hotels, trains, and airports also endeared the Black Protestant establishment to them.Footnote 76
Despite support from Black elites, the quartet struggled to find a commercial sponsor. Without a sponsor, the singers received only meager fees from NBC. After two sponsor-less years, the singers and former guest speakers appealed to NBC executives for assistance with securing a commercial contract. Assessing the situation, NBC Vice President George Engles wrote, “we have unfortunately found that colored quartets are difficult to sell on commercial programs.”Footnote 77 White advertising executives feared that Black performers would tarnish their brand, especially in the South.Footnote 78 While NBC executives asked around, they failed to find a sponsor and did not offer the group more unsponsored airtime until years later. Radio’s Black stars thus survived on what NBC President Merlin Aylesworth characterized as “starvation wages.”Footnote 79
Radio officials also placed constraints on the quartet’s repertoire. At one point, NBC’s all-white Program Board voted unanimously to restrict the Southernaires to singing only spirituals.Footnote 80 In the margins of a memo to NBC Vice President John Royal, Music Supervisor Walter Koons defended the restrictions, saying, “Their popular work is terrible and we’ve been trying to get them to stick to negro stuff.”Footnote 81 Aware of NBC President Aylesworth’s fondness for the group, Royal overruled the Program Board’s restrictions. Yet, Royal conceded that some restrictions were understandable. “There is no reason why they should do popular ballads,” concluded Royal, “but they should not be prevented from doing ballads of a Southern nature.”Footnote 82 Though the network president’s fondness for the singers gave them a degree of musical freedom, they still had to perform within the confines of white expectations.
NBC also expected guest speakers to conform to their rules. Speakers had to submit their scripts to NBC producers, who would edit out controversial material. In February 1934, the Southernaires quartet invited Joel Spingarn, the Jewish president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to speak in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his organization. Upon reviewing his script, NBC’s continuity department asked Spingarn to eliminate “all references to segregation, lynchings, and riots.” This included referring to the mass white supremacist violence that led to the creation of the NAACP as the “trouble at Springfield, Ill., in which colored people were involved.” Spingarn chose not to abide by such edits and went ahead with his original speech. NBC responded by canceling the guest speaker series.Footnote 83
A recorded segment of a Southernaires broadcast illustrates how the group navigated the demands of white executives and Black middle-class Protestants. The recording opened with the tenor Homer Smith singing a dramatic and vibrato-filled rendition of the Black Methodist composer Charles Tindley’s hymn, “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?” Smith showcased impressive vibrato, breath support, and seamless transitions between his lower register and high falsetto, demonstrating his prowess as a formally trained singer. Immediately following Smith’s stirring solo, however, bass William Edmonson assumed the role of the illiterate “preacher” of the fictitious Little Weatherbeaten Whitewashed Church. Speaking with a minstrel dialect, the preacher commanded his “son” to read out letters from listeners. Edmonson insisted that his answers “ain’t gonna come from no books but from my heart and my way of seeing things.” In contrast, the preacher’s literate son spoke without a minstrel dialect, highlighting that the preacher did not represent younger generations of Black Americans. The “son” and the timing of the sketch, directly following Smith’s skillful solo, underscored that “the preacher” was a performance.Footnote 84 Similarly, a collage of photographs from the Southernaires’ 1939 Decca album visually demonstrated these sonic contrasts by picturing the singers in tuxedos in some images and in overalls and straw hats in others.Footnote 85 These moments of contrast functioned like a wink, undermining some of the racist implications of their performances.
As the longest-running Black program of the network era, The Southernaires framed how many listeners conceived of African American religious experiences. Despite the program’s flaws, listening to The Southernaires became part of many African Americans’ Sunday morning routine. When asked about the sights and sounds of her childhood, Barbara Harris, the first female bishop in the Episcopal Church, recalled, “Well, one of the sounds of growing up was Sunday morning on the radio. As you walked along the street, everybody’s home radio was tuned to the same station. And you could hear all of the program of Wings Over Jordan and The Southernaires singing as you walked to church. You didn’t miss a beat.”Footnote 86 Likely modeled after The Southernaires, Harris’s other Sunday morning staple, Wings Over Jordan, proved to be the most popular Black program of the network era.
Wings Over Jordan Choir and Respectable Resistance
As a young boy living in Philadelphia, Leroy Murphy remembered not just the sound but the feel of Wings Over Jordan. “I remember sitting with my back up against the speaker of the four feet tall Zenith Radio,” he recalled. “I love the Wings Over Jordan Choir. Every Sunday I could feel the big baritone and bass voices vibrating against my back through the speakers. To me that was the sound of a ‘man.’” Listening to Wings Over Jordan was, for Murphy, an assertion of self-worth and Black masculinity: “It was like we had two heroes, Joe Louis and the Wings Over Jordan Choir.”Footnote 87 Murphy was far from the only fan of the choir. By the early 1940s, Wings Over Jordan was the most popular program on CBS.Footnote 88
In the mid-1930s, as Black workers in Cleveland and across the country were escalating their demands for economic justice, Glenn T. Settle, the new minister of Cleveland’s Gethsemane Baptist Church, began considering how he could harness the power of radio broadcasting.Footnote 89 According to the recollections of his secretary, Settle despised Amos ‘n’ Andy for how it depicted Black people.Footnote 90 He believed that broadcasting his church choir would attract new worshippers to Gethsemane and counter demeaning representations of Black Americans on the radio. Settle approached Worth Kramer, the white program director of Cleveland’s CBS-affiliated radio station WGAR, to request an audition for the choir. The audition went well, and the choir broadcast locally over WGAR for the first time on July 11, 1937. Cleveland’s Call and Post reported that the new program, “replace[d] the regular Southernairs [sic] broadcast that has been recently discontinued on a local station.”Footnote 91 Entitled The Negro Hour, the program quickly became a local hit.
Six months later, CBS picked up the program, renamed Wings Over Jordan, and began broadcasting it over its nationwide network.Footnote 92 After the success of Michaux’s Radio Church of God and The Southernaires, network executives knew that Black Christian music could achieve a large audience, but Wings proved even more popular than they imagined. Conservative estimates placed Wings’ audience around twenty-five million, but promotional materials claimed as many as forty million weekly listeners.Footnote 93 CBS diverged from precedent and classified Wings Over Jordan as “religion.” Thus, it joined CBS’s rotational program, Church of the Air, as the network’s only weekly “religious” broadcasts.Footnote 94
There are several reasons why CBS classified Wings as religion. First, the network was six years removed from its decision to boot Charles Coughlin off the air and clamp down on religious broadcasting.Footnote 95 Broader societal shifts were equally important. Throughout the 1930s, liberal elites attempted to combat fascism and communism by promoting the idea that tolerance and diversity were defining features of the “American way.”Footnote 96 CBS’s 1938–39 series Americans All, Immigrants All exemplified these efforts.Footnote 97 Settle’s commitment to creating a respectable program that could “convince the universe that my race was made up of hard-working, God-fearing citizens worthy of this free land” fit neatly into CBS’s newfound emphasis on tolerance.Footnote 98
The music on Wings testified to the worthiness of Black Americans for full inclusion. The choir exclusively sang spirituals. Sung without accompaniment in four-part harmony for women and men, Wings spirituals were marked by a moving bass line, intentional vocal sliding, and a call and response between the soloist and the choir. Each broadcast began with the choir singing the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” loudly and in unison, creating a wall of sound that underscored the lyrics: “Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land. Tell old Pharaoh to let my people go!”Footnote 99 The message was clear: just as the Israelites had been delivered from slavery in Egypt, so too would Black Americans be delivered from oppression.Footnote 100 Gladys Goodloe Hauser, one of the choir members, recalled how singing the song “did something to us, it lifted us up.”Footnote 101 The choir’s spirituals sounded like “the cries of 13,000,000 souls for equal justice,” wrote one listener.Footnote 102
Settle’s narrations also echoed the program’s respectable resistance. In contrast to most network-era broadcasting featuring Black characters or performers, listeners did not hear “minstrel dialect” on Wings Over Jordan. Instead, they heard Settle’s smooth, calm narrations as he introduced each song and explained its spiritual significance. At one point during the broadcast, Settle asked listeners, “Do you have your Bible ready?” The minister would then read a passage of scripture, pausing to allow the choir and those listening over the radio to repeat each phrase.Footnote 103 In doing so, Settle and the choir resisted cultural expectations about hearing minstrel dialect and invited listeners to join them in that resistance.
Wings Over Jordan also included time for a seven-minute address by a prominent Black professional; those featured included Carter G. Woodson, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Hattie McDaniel, Mordecai Johnson, Thomas Dorsey, and Mary McLeod Bethune.Footnote 104 Wings’ speeches celebrated the achievements of Black Americans, and transcriptions were reprinted in Black newspapers. In his 1940 address, Edgar A. Love, a founder of Omega Psi Phi and a Methodist clergyman, argued that Black Americans built US democracy. Love described the influence of prominent Black Americans such as Frederick Douglass and Phillis Wheatley, and he concluded by insisting that the work was unfinished because “none is free until all are free.”Footnote 105 Herman Moore, a federal judge in the Virgin Islands, used his speech to argue against the doctrine of separate but equal.Footnote 106 As Evelyn Roberts, an arranger for Wings recalled, the speeches “created quite a controversy” because white Southerners were happy to listen to the music but despised the lectures.Footnote 107 Unlike NBC with The Southernaires, CBS refused to cut the guest speaker program. Wings Over Jordan speeches were the only time when Black Americans could consistently speak to a national audience, and they often contained network radio’s most explicit critiques of Jim Crow.Footnote 108
The Wings Over Jordan choir’s ability to broadcast from any CBS-affiliated station allowed the group to follow Black collegiate choirs’ tradition of touring and fundraising. In its first two years, the Wings Over Jordan choir traveled more than 200,000 miles for 185 local concerts.Footnote 109 By sharing profits with local sponsors, the choir reportedly saved hundreds of churches from mortgage foreclosures and earned a reputation as “one of the top fund-raising attractions of all time.”Footnote 110 Throughout its travels, the Wings Over Jordan choir resisted Jim Crow. Settle and his singers refused to ride freight elevators, and, on at least one occasion, a singer used their free time to engage in civil disobedience.Footnote 111 Moreover, because the choir refused to sing before segregated audiences, concerts in white Southern churches were often the first time that such churches had integrated seating.Footnote 112
Wings Over Jordan filled Black Americans with pride. Esther Rolle, the star of the 1970s television show Good Times, remembered how listening to Wings Over Jordan gave her “that sense of being a part of a wider society than just my little hometown because I was listening to somebody way over there coming across on the air that I could identify with.”Footnote 113 Representation mattered. Like E. H. Watson listening to The Southernaires, Rolle heard herself in the broadcasts. Listening connected Rolle not just with the performers but with Black Americans across the country. Patriotic Black Americans were undoubtedly moved by a famous photograph of the choir, dressed in military-style uniforms and arranged in a “double V” formation, that was taken in advance of their USO tour to Europe in 1945.Footnote 114
Wings Over Jordan’s pursuit of respectability came at a cost, however. Wings did not open the floodgates for Black programs. In fact, it may have unintentionally deflected calls for more programs featuring Black Americans. It may not be a coincidence that CBS dropped Michaux shortly after it picked up the Wings Over Jordan choir. The pursuit of respectability also negatively affected some Black members of the chorus. James Tate had served as the choir’s original Black director and conducted the choir during its initial local broadcasts. However, Settle asked Worth Kramer—WGAR’s white program director, who doubled as a choral conductor—to spend four weeks preparing the choir for the network broadcasts. Settle later asked Kramer to replace Tate as the permanent conductor. As a radio expert, trained conductor, and skilled arranger, Kramer may have increased the musical quality of the choir. His arrangements soon became the backbone of the choir’s repertoire. However, the appointment was also a pragmatic calculation by Settle because Kramer held the keys to the broadcast kingdom.Footnote 115
Kramer’s appointment reinforced stereotypes. While Settle thought that a white conductor testified to interracial harmony, the decision implied that Black singers needed a white liberal to arrange and order sonic Blackness to “save” the spirituals. A 1939 print collection of Wings arrangements wrote that Kramer would listen to choir members “sing spirituals that their grandparents had sung to them” before “arranging the music for choral singing.”Footnote 116 White periodicals’ praise of Kramer often reeked of racist paternalism. Time magazine wrote that Kramer “drummed his arrangements into the musically illiterate group by rote, drilled them for weeks before he put them on the air.”Footnote 117 According to Time, the Black singers produced excellent music but only after a white savior “drummed” and “drilled” them into submission. The article failed to mention that Kramer—though he did have an excellent ear for arranging and conducting—also could not read or notate music. For such tasks, he relied on Williet Firmbanks, the often-unacknowledged Black woman who served as the choir’s assistant director and accompanist.Footnote 118
Settle’s decision for the choir to sing only spirituals made Wings Over Jordan a broadcasting success, but it had negative consequences. Wings singers were capable of singing a variety of styles but never did so over the radio. “Oh no, we dare not do that,” recalled one singer. “We only did that when we were on our own.”Footnote 119 Exclusively singing spirituals suggested that Black religion was Christian, sorrowful, and a product of the “Old South.” In doing so, it reified nostalgia for the antebellum South and narrowed the imagined range of what Black Americans could sing and who they could be.Footnote 120
Singing Saints and the Making of “America’s Choir”
Black Protestants were not the only racial and religious outsiders to use sacred music to make space for themselves on network radio. Catholics and Jews also employed similar methods.Footnote 121 And the radio endeavors of Latter-day Saints makes for a particularly revealing comparison. While Saints adopted similar strategies to those used by Black Protestants, their radio efforts were generally more successful. Their consolidated organizational structure and geographic location were instrumental to that success. Their emerging white identity also reduced the barriers they faced. In turn, the choir’s appearances on national network radio solidified the Saints’ whiteness.
Throughout the nineteenth century, most white American elites considered Latter-day Saints to be racial and religious outsiders. The criteria for being considered “white” have changed over time.Footnote 122 Most Latter-day Saints, tracing their ancestral heritage to western and northern Europe, thought of themselves as white. Their founder, Joseph Smith, taught a theology that nonwhite people were cursed but could become white by converting to Mormonism, and, indeed, some Black and Native Americans did become Latter-day Saints. However, non-Saints generally considered Euro-American Saints to be outside the bounds of American whiteness due to their unique scriptures and communalism. Many white Americans resented Saints for “meddling” with Native and Black Americans. Violence and persecution in the 1830s and 1840s caused Latter-day Saints to flee to the Midwest and later to land that would become Utah. Their geographic isolation and the Church’s endorsement of plural marriage in the 1850s heightened the perception of them as an “in-between” race. Consequently, non-Saints generally viewed them as unworthy of political or cultural citizenship, exemplified by the fact that Utah was denied six applications for statehood between 1849 and 1887.Footnote 123
The Saints’ racial and religious status slowly began to change in the 1890s and early 1900s. In the mid-nineteenth century, Church leaders banned Black people from holding the priesthood or entering the temple. While they continued to work for a mass conversion of Native Americans through the 1880s, these efforts slowed during the late nineteenth century. Then, in 1890, the Church leadership formally abandoned the doctrine of plural marriage. A broader societal shift to think about race as primarily a visual phenomenon—due in part to the invention of photography—also led outsiders to increasingly see Saints as white. In 1896, Utah was finally granted statehood.Footnote 124
But the Saints’ transformation into respectable white Americans was far from complete. White Protestants continued to associate Latter-day Saints with plural marriage and non-whiteness in popular culture, as evidenced by the 1905 novelty song “The Mormon Coon.” Playing on white fears of Black sexuality and miscegenation, the song blended Mormon and Black stereotypes into one. The sheet music’s cover illustrates this blending through its depiction of a stylish Black man with a long white beard similar to that of the then-Church President, Joseph F. Smith.Footnote 125 While explicit racial othering faded in the coming decades, the perception of the Saints’ general “otherness” did not. A 1930 Time magazine cover story, for example, referred to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as both “strange” and “exotic.”Footnote 126
Amid debates over the Saints’ race and citizenship, the Tabernacle Choir established its role as cultural ambassador for the Church. Like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Tabernacle Choir used its tours and recordings to counteract group prejudice. The choir’s highly acclaimed performance at the 1893 World’s Fair was especially influential. Writing just a year before Utah achieved statehood, the Church leadership celebrated how the singers were “removing prejudice, dispelling ignorance and shedding forth the precious light of heaven to tens of thousands who have been, and are still, misled concerning us.” The Tabernacle Choir continued to play the role of cultural diplomat into the twentieth century. For example, the choir’s 1909 Northwest tour, 1910 recordings, and 1911 East Coast tour provided positive representations of Latter-day Saints that starkly contrasted with the so-called “magazine crusade” against the Church by muckraking journalists in 1910 and 1911.Footnote 127
Salt Lake’s budding radio industry dramatically expanded the choir’s public relations possibilities. In early 1925, Earl J. Glade, a Latter-day Saint who managed a commercial radio station in Salt Lake, publicly made the case that the Church hierarchy should financially support his cash-strapped station because of its capacity to spread the gospel. The Church leadership agreed to do so in exchange for control over the station’s Board of Directors and free airtime for church services and organ and choir concerts. A few years later, Church leaders agreed to pay for a new transmitter for the station, now known by the call letters KSL. The transmitter increased the power of the station fivefold and attracted the attention of network executives.Footnote 128
NBC executives came to see the Saints’ 5,000-watt station as a strategic link between the network’s affiliated stations in the east and middle of the country and its stations on the West Coast. With the addition of KSL, listeners in Seattle could tune in to live programs created in New York. In other words, a Salt Lake station put the “National” in National Broadcasting Company. Eager for the network’s professional programming, KSL formally affiliated with NBC on Christmas Eve 1928.Footnote 129
Soon after, perhaps as part of the affiliation agreement, KSL and NBC leadership arranged for the creation of a weekly program featuring the Tabernacle Choir and organ, which debuted in July 1929. To help with acoustics, radio technicians hung a massive curtain in front of the choir and even covered the seats with carpet scraps. The organist’s son, perched on top of a stepladder, held the sole microphone for the inaugural thirty-minute broadcast, which opened and closed with Wagner. A faulty connection produced a mysterious hum for many listeners in the Northeast, and some stations even cut the program off before it was over. But radio engineers resolved the problem before the next broadcast, after which the NBC President Merlin Aylesworth sent a congratulatory telegram: “Your wonderful Tabernacle program is making a great impression in New York. Have heard from leading ministers. All impressed by program. Eagerly awaiting your next.”Footnote 130 The half-hour program, later titled Music and the Spoken Word, would go on to become the longest-running year-round broadcast in American history.Footnote 131
Music and the Spoken Word included a diverse repertoire of music that emphasized the Saints’ skill and respectability. The March 16, 1931, broadcast included well-known selections from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen, and Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Typically racialized as “white” in this era, these numbers showcased the Saints’ respectability as well as their proficiency as musicians. Conductors insisted on proper diction and minimized major shifts in volume due to the radio’s technological constraints. The program intermixed works by European composers with popular American hymns, Stephen Foster songs, and folk tunes such as “I Need Thee Every Hour,” “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” and “Old Black Joe.” The inclusion of the latter two songs, staples of the minstrel stage but performed here without mockery, demonstrate how Latter-day Saints occasionally performed music racialized as “nonwhite.”Footnote 132
The Saints’ radio performances of racialized music harmonized with their emerging identity as white Americans. White Americans designed the color line to be “transgressable by their own desires.”Footnote 133 Black people could not use facilities marked as “whites only,” but white people could use facilities marked “colored” if they wanted. The color line that cut through network radio operated in a similar fashion. While white people were permitted to perform music racialized as “white” and music racialized as “non-white,” the reverse was generally not possible during the early years of network radio.Footnote 134 Thus, when Music and the Spoken Word included operas by Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer, Richard Wagner, alongside the Hawaiian tune “Aloha Oe” and the Black spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” listeners heard the Saints as performing whiteness. The Saints’ repertoire amplified their claims to American whiteness and the political, economic, and cultural citizenship that came with it.Footnote 135
The “spoken word” portions of the broadcasts also led listeners to hear Saints as white Americans. A young Richard L. Evans became the program’s announcer in the summer of 1930. Whereas previous announcers had simply mentioned the composer and title of the work, the silky yet masculine voice of Evans provided listeners with context for what they were about to hear.Footnote 136 Prior to an organ rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Evans quoted “the great Negro educator” Booker T. Washington and claimed that the spiritual “glows with the hope that the children of bondage will ultimately pass out of the wilderness of slavery, into the land of freedom.” Evans primed listeners to mentally picture and even identify with Black people and their yearning for freedom.Footnote 137 At the same time, he echoed a tradition of Saints asserting their whiteness by joining the white Protestant establishment’s endorsement of Washington and his vision of racial uplift.Footnote 138
Evans also subtly asserted the Saints’ whiteness through his descriptions of them. He frequently integrated paraphrased scripture from the Book of Mormon into his ever-expanding “sermonettes.” Early on, networks attempted to eliminate most of Evans’s direct references to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members. The times when he did speak about the Saints, however, he often did so in ways that rendered them as white. For instance, during one broadcast, he described modern Latter-day Saints as the “descendants of those western pioneers … who made the desert waste places to become the cultural outposts of civilization.” Evans’s use of “pioneers” and “civilization,” as well as his lack of minstrel dialect, were subtle verbal cues that rendered the Saints white Americans.Footnote 139
In 1932, Saints expanded their presence on network radio. A few years earlier, the KSL leadership had asked the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) for permission to become a 50,000-watt station. After several delays, the FRC approved their request in 1932. Even with the financial backing of the Church, KSL officials were wary of the cost of building and operating the new transmitter. They asked NBC to pay higher rates for the now more powerful station, but the network refused. At the urging of a Saint who worked as an engineer for CBS, the KSL leadership then approached NBC’s rival about the possibility of changing their network affiliation. Enthusiastic about the prospect of luring one of NBC’s key stations to its ranks, CBS executives agreed to pay the higher rates and sweetened the deal by offering to move Music and the Spoken Word to Sunday morning. The new time was more convenient for the choir’s volunteer singers and helped convey the program’s sacred undertones.Footnote 140
Perhaps as part of the deal, CBS offered the Saints a spot on Church of the Air. Church leaders understood broadcasting on Church of the Air to be a reflection of their growing religious citizenship. “There are fourteen other leading churches in America participating in this series and we feel very proud that we were able to convince the radio officials the ‘Mormons’ rated amongst the first fifteen,” wrote the organizer of the broadcast, Dave Paine. Church publications urged Saints to tune in and to write to their local station expressing appreciation for the program in the hope that doing so would encourage future broadcasts. As the radio committee feverishly prepared for its inaugural Church of the Air broadcast, it reminded those involved of the stakes: “the responsibility of giving the entire nation a favorable impression of the ‘Mormon Church’ as a whole, rests on our small group … we will all go down in history as pioneers in this work.” The one-off service went well and, after a few years, Latter-day Saints became a regular feature on Church of the Air. Footnote 141 In 1935, Gordon B. Hinckley, a future Church president, formed a new committee focused on radio programming. Hinckley selected speakers for the Church’s appearances on Church of the Air and, with varying degrees of success, trained them to speak more effectively over the airwaves. Under his guidance, their Church of the Air broadcasts came to resemble the popular Music and the Spoken Word program.Footnote 142
Thanks to Salt Lake’s strategic location, the Church’s ability to underwrite technological advances, and their emerging whiteness, the Saints’ radio endeavors during the 1920s and 1930s increased their religious citizenship and ushered in a “golden age” of positive media.Footnote 143 National network radio put the Tabernacle Choir on the path to becoming what Ronald Reagan would later call “America’s Choir.” Looking back, Hinckley concluded, “No medium has touched the lives of so many for so long as has the weekly broadcast of Music and the Spoken Word.”Footnote 144 Network radio built on and solidified the Saints’ image as respectable white Americans. However, this newfound identity effectively wrote Black and Native Saints out of Church history and has led recent observers to associate the Latter-day Saints with “strait-laced blandness.”Footnote 145 While sounding white provided material advantages, it contributed to a loss of cultural distinctiveness.
Conclusion
In April 1940, Harlem resident Charles A. Hamlin wrote to the editors of New York’s Amsterdam News complaining about Church of the Air. Over the course of the 1930s, CBS had gradually expanded the list of groups represented on its rotational weekly program to include Latter-day Saints, Catholics, Jews, and a few other former outsiders alongside white Protestant denominations. This budding pluralism encouraged Columbia to advertise the program as a “lesson in democracy.”Footnote 146 But, as Hamlin noted, CBS’s “democracy” did not extend to Black Americans. “The Church of the Air is one of the oldest programs broadcast over the network of the Columbia Broadcasting System, but I do not recall ever listening to a church program by a Negro preacher and congregation,” wrote Hamlin. CBS should broadcast Black churches, he argued, “not in a spirit to patronize the Negro, but as a matter of right.” Speaking on Church of the Air was a right of religious citizenship. The program reflected and defined who was a good and faithful citizen. The failure to include Black Americans underscored their exclusion from full citizenship.Footnote 147
This was certainly not due to a lack of effort. Like Latter-day Saints, Black Christians creatively used sacred music to break into radio networks and made compromises to please various stakeholders to stay on the air. Their programs resonated most with those whom industry officials barely acknowledged: Black listeners. Whether standing next to a radio speaker or walking through the neighborhood, Black Americans listened closely. Renowned gospel history scholar Horace Boyer recalled how he felt listening to Wings Over Jordan as a child: “We were in the heat of segregation … But, on Sunday morning, we became citizens of the United States, because we could turn on that radio and we could hear this singing, and there was no mistaking—these were black people.”Footnote 148 Black network stars helped “color” the sound of network radio and American religion more broadly and, in doing so, amplified the demands of Black Americans for full citizenship.
Yet, inclusion failed to upend existing hierarchies. Refracting Blackness through network radio made certain elements of Black identity seem possible, while others seemed impossible. Radio’s gatekeepers approved programs that resonated with their preconceived notions of what they expected to hear. And, while radio’s “religious ghetto” was relatively hospitable to minorities, it contributed to the Christianization of Blackness in the cultural imagination. On the radio, African Americans often appeared Christian, musical, simplistic, and “premodern.” And, as the cancellation of The Southernaires guest speaker program demonstrated, speech could be silenced if it strayed too far from radio executives’ wishes. While the Latter-day Saints also used musical programming to carve out space on network frequencies, gatekeepers did not apply the same restrictions to the Tabernacle Choir broadcasts, effectively making them sound more like white Protestant programs. In essence, network radio functioned as a sonic limiter, compressing the range of Black sacred sounds that listeners could hear on network-affiliated stations. Over time, network radio trained listeners to hear—and perhaps reproduce—racial differences within the soundscape of American religious life.Footnote 149
Throughout the 1930s, the radio industry influenced how people perceived and understood social identities, including racial and religious ones. Just as the recording industry “segregated sound” through its categorization of “race” and “hillbilly” records, powerful radio networks amplified perceived racial differences between religions in the United States.Footnote 150 By the end of the decade, Sunday morning CBS listeners could tune in to Church of the Air’s white religious pluralism at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. or Wings Over Jordan’s Black religion at 10:30 a.m. Promoted by powerful media industries during a pivotal moment in the reformation of racial and religious identities, the sound of American religion’s “color line” endured long after it disappeared from radio timetables.
