A generation before Thomas A. Dorsey wrote “Precious Lord (Take My Hand),” Charles Albert Tinley (1851-1933) laid the groundwork for gospel music and a social gospel.
Tindley, who brought something new to the Christian worship service, was one of the eminent Methodist preachers at the turn of the 20th century. Hymnologist James Abbington described Tindley as “a pastor, orator, poet, writer, theologian, social activist, prince of preachers, and progenitor [originator] of African American gospel music.”
Charles Tindley was born in Berlin, Maryland, in 1851 to a slave father and a free mother. Consequently, he was never enslaved. However, since his mother died when he was two, hard times forced his father to hire him out, which meant he worked alongside enslaved people and never attended school.
Having learned to read and write in his teens, Tindley and his wife, Daisy, moved to Philadelphia in 1875. Over the next ten years, he worked as a laborer during the day and studied and took correspondence courses at night. He passed the examination for the ministry in the Methodist church in 1885 and started pastoring small churches in New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland.
In 1902, he became pastor of the East Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, where he had been a member and the janitor. Under his leadership, the congregation grew rapidly from 130 members when he arrived to become the largest African American congregation in the United States. Membership of the church grew over time to a multiracial congregation of over 12,000. Renamed Tindley Temple after Reverend Tindley’s death, the church was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.
We remember Tindley for having brought something new to the worship service. Through the centuries, church music expressed adoration and praise to God through psalms and chants. In the 18th century, livelier music—hymns—became part of the worship service. These hymns, however, carried on the tradition of praise and devotion to God.
Reverend Tindley introduced a new genre— “gospel” songs. The word “gospel” means “good news.” Life was rough for most African Americans in the early 20th century, and Tindley addressed these issues in his sermons. Tindley pioneered a new hymn style, including texts that centered on the worldly concerns of Black Christians as well as the joys of the afterlife.
Of course, some hymns were called gospel hymns” before Tindley’s time. The first published use of the term “Gospel song” probably appeared in 1874 when Phillip Bliss released a songbook entitled Gospel Songs: A Choice Collection of Hymns and Tunes. He used the term to describe a new style of church music, songs that were easy to grasp and more easily singable than the traditional church hymns.
Bliss’s collection of songs was preceded a century earlier by two of the most famous hymns, “Amazing Grace” and “Rock of Ages.” Through time, they became gospel-based hymns.
Tindley’s gospel hymns, the first published in 1901, became the prototype for a composed body of religious music later called “gospel,” unlike the communal and oral approach associated with the folk spiritual and rural gospel traditions.
His songs were extensions of his sermons, which proclaimed the “good news.” Leaning heavily on the Negro spiritual, his songs contained words of hope, cheer, and love. Though Tindley’s gospel hymns grew primarily from the African American experience, they have universal appeal.
Tindley composed over 50 gospel hymns, including such classics as “I Know the Lord Will Make a Way,” “Beams of Heaven,” “Leave It There,” and “We’ll Understand It Better By and By.” Later in the 20th century, another of Tindley’s gospel songs helped galvanize Americans in their struggle for justice. His “I’ll Overcome Some Day” inspired the most famous song of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.”