gospel

How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel is the culmination of research on gospel music undertaken by Horace Clarence Boyer, a gospel singer and pioneering scholar on the subject. Boyer skillfully combines the history of gospel music and its social context, tracking the development gospel from its early stages during its golden age (1945-55), into the 1960s, when the music form began to take its place in American popular music. Photographer Lloyd Yearwood’s rare photos of performances and backstage activity further enhance the written history.

Sirarpie Der Nersessian (1896-1989) was an Armenian art historian. Born in Istanbul, she fled in 1915 to escape the persecutions that had erupted against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. She lived for a time in Switzerland, then moved to Paris in 1919, where she obtained a graduate degree at the Sorbonne. By the mid-20th century, she was living in Washington D.C., working as a scholar at Dumbarton Oaks. In 1963, she published a book on the Freer Gallery of Art’s Armenian Gospel manuscript folios.

This book traces the development of gospel music, from its roots in the 1900s through its golden age in 1945-55. How Sweet the Sound takes the reader from African American churches in Los Angeles in 1906; to the Deep South Pentecostal churches; to Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and St. Louis in the 1930s. Author Dr. Horace Boyer (1935-2009) was one of the foremost scholars in African American gospel music, a music historian, and a gospel singer himself.