Pulpit Politics and Popular Music

Nick Salvatore. Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 2005. 419 pp. Notes and index. $27.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper).

Ray Charles was born in the rural South, raised in the bosom of the black church, and driven from the South by ambition and undeniable talent. As many Americans learned in the 2004 film Ray, Charles's genius lay in his ability to embrace the spiritual harmonies of gospel and the secular (some thought sinful) counterpoint of black popular music, especially R&B and soul.¹ His life, like his music, reflected the tension between saint and sinner. Charles was a family man and a ladies' man, a savvy businessman and an addled addict arrested for drug possession. The angels and devils that counseled him also served as his muses. Though Charles's career spanned the civil rights movement, and he rubbed shoulders with many of the era's powerful activists, he himself was a reluctant revolutionary—at least in the political sense of that word. This story, in its broad outlines, is also the story of the Reverend C. L. Franklin. Ray Charles played the piano, Franklin the pulpit. Both found themselves "singing in a strange land."

Nick Salvatore's Singing in a Strange Land is a deeply researched and powerfully written biography of C. L. Franklin. Like Salvatore's earlier biographies—Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (1982) and We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber (1996)—this book is as much about "the times" of its subject as it is about his life. The times themselves offer all of the drama of a historical novel, from Jim Crow to the Great Migration, civil rights to Black Power. But the life alone is worth the price of the book.

Clarence LaVaughn Franklin was born in 1915 in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Sunflower County is in the heart of the Mississippi Delta—a place that residents have proudly dubbed the "most southern place on earth"—and in 1915 it was one of the most brutal places for poor black sharecroppers like C. L.'s parents.² Like many writers who have focused on the Delta, Salvatore waxes poetic about this strange and exotic place and the blues music that black life there inspired. Music would play a central role in C. L. Franklin's life, and he undoubtedly heard (and had) the blues growing up. But Salvatore compensates for a lack of hard evidence on Franklin's early life with anecdotes about the Delta Blues that—while brilliantly told—are only tangentially relevant to Franklin's young adulthood.

Abandoned by his natural father at an early age, C. L. worked long grueling hours for his stepfather (whose surname he ultimately took as his own) to help the family make ends meet as sharecroppers. From an early age, as C. L. ploughed the land, he preached as well, and this became his ticket out of the Delta. In the course of seven years, from 1939 to 1946, his ministry took him to progressively more prestigious pulpits in Memphis, Tennessee; Buffalo, New York; and Detroit, Michigan. This was a mercurial rise for a young minister who had relatively little formal education, and it was a testament to Franklin's passion as a preacher and singer.

As Salvatore analyzes Franklin's sermons, the reader can hear the minister's "whoops" and can feel the pulse of responsiveness from his congregations. In the spectrum of black Baptist preachers, Franklin was more emotional and lyrical than intellectual, but he never lost sight of contemporary social issues, according to Salvatore, "even as he brought the congregation to its peak" when "the moment of spiritual elevation was close by" (p. 86). The sermon "Without a Song" exhibited Franklin's powerful voice and his ability to draw parallels between the stories of the Bible and his parishioners' daily lives. Riffing on...