By featuring the stunningly beautiful rendition of the song, “Stand By Me,” at their wedding, Megan Markle and Prince Harry displayed an aspect of Megan’s African American heritage—R&B/Soul music. That was obvious, but I wonder if they knew that this song evoked a deeper root of African American culture and heritage—gospel music.
The gospel-based R&B/Soul song, “Stand By Me,” was originally recorded by singer-songwriter Ben E. King in 1961. A big hit, his signature song had a major influence on popular music, being recorded over 400 times by many artists.
Estimated royalties for the song placed it as the sixth highest-earning song of all time. As a crowning achievement King’s original recording of the song was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress, as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” just a few weeks before King’s death in 2015.
I found it striking that a black gospel choir from England sang this secular song, which has deep roots in the 20th-century gospel music tradition. Ben E. King based his song on a gospel song of the same name. That song was written and copyrighted in 1905 by Reverend Charles Albert Tindley (1851-1933), founding father of the gospel hymn.
Tindley’s “Stand By Me” is the second most well-known hymn in African American Christendom, after “Precious Lord,” composed by Thomas A. Dorsey in 1932. Born in Maryland in 1851 to a free black woman and her husband, a slave, Tindley was mostly free but worked alongside slaves.
Having learned to read and write in his teens, he married and 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 church in Philadelphia where he had been a member and janitor, the East Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church. Under his leadership, the church grew rapidly from the 130 members it had when he arrived to one of the largest Methodist congregations serving an African American community on the East Coast of the United States.
Membership of the church over time grew to a multiracial congregation of over 12,000. Renamed Tindley Temple after Reverend Tindley’s death, the National Register of Historic Places added the church in 2011.
Reverend Tindley was one of the eminent preachers of Methodism at the turn of the 20th Century. Emory University hymnologist James Abbington called Tindley a “pastor, orator, poet, writer, theologian, social activist, ‘father of African American Hymnody,’ ‘progenitor of African American gospel music’ and ‘prince of preachers.’”
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.
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 mostly out of the African American experience, they have universal appeal.
Tindley composed nearly 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.”
Thomas A. Dorsey, acclaimed as the father of gospel music, always indicated that he had built upon the gospel hymn foundation established by Tindley. Dorsey, a former blues pianist who had been Ma Rainey’s band leader, added secular blues music to the sacred text and gave us gospel music as we know it today.
There is much more to the story that Reverend Tindley started. For example, I have given a talk 3 or 4 times over the past ten years that I have called, “Soul Music: From Reverend C. A. Tindley to Sister Aretha Franklin.”