I grew up in a home where gospel music was always playing. My grandparents raised me in a small town outside Birmingham to the sound of The Caravans and Mighty Clouds of Joy. The music was like the smell of food in the kitchen or the sound of a television in another room. It was sometimes turned up, sometimes down, but the rich harmonies and fusion of the blues, jazz, and soul were never far away.
I didn’t appreciate gospel music enough as a kid. But as my relationship with God grew, I valued it more. It gave me words for experiences I was still learning to name. And I came to treasure that generations of songwriters had left behind words and sounds that captured not only the Christian life but also the experience of African American Christians as they wandered through the proverbial wilderness, where survival required the steady guidance of God.
When we think about theology, we often think about preachers, scholars, or pastors. In the Black church tradition, however, theology has equally been carried through song. Gospel songwriters translate the truths of our faith into words we can remember long after sermons fade from memory. Preaching is good for explaining belief. But it is songs that have often declared the truth of God’s companionship in the face of harsh realities with no end in sight.
Few songwriters have put together words that communicate such truths as well as the late gospel giant Lucie Campbell did. I consider her one of the genre’s greats, and the feeling seems to have been shared by other gospel singers, like Mahalia Jackson, who took Campbell’s songs and transformed them into new arrangements. Horace Clarence Boyer, one of gospel’s foremost scholars, once said Miss Lucie, as Campbell was often known, was “perhaps the most significant Black church musician we’ve ever produced.”
related
Personally, I don’t remember the first time I heard Campbell’s words. Nor do I remember the first time I heard her famous song “Touch Me, Lord Jesus.” But the first version that stuck with me was recorded by the Angelic Gospel Singers, whose lead singer reminded me of my grandmother.
Over the years, I heard the song performed by choirs, soloists, and small gospel groups. Initially, I simply appreciated the piano music that accompanied it. But one Sunday morning, I paid more attention to the lyrics:
O bear me thro’ the current;
O’er the chilly Jordan,
O Lord, please lead me, my dear Savior
To my home above.
I often found that Campbell’s words were not abstract theology but a prayer shaped by real human need. Her songs did not avoid hardship. Instead, they spoke directly to the realities many African Americans faced—poverty, loneliness, exhaustion, and uncertainty—while insisting that God remained present in the middle of those realities.
Campbell herself was born in Duck Hill, Mississippi, in 1885. She was the youngest of nine children. Her father worked for the railroad, and her mother worked as a cook. When Campbell was a child, her father died in a railroad accident, leaving her mother to raise their children alone.
The circumstances of Campbell’s early life were not unusual for African Americans growing up in the rural South during the late 19th century. Life was often hard, but her story showed remarkable determination.
As a child, Campbell had an early talent for music. She wanted to play the piano. But because her mother could afford lessons only for Campbell’s older sister, Campbell simply listened and practiced on her own. She graduated high school as valedictorian at the age of 14 and later began a career in education.
Throughout her life, faith, education, and music were closely intertwined. As a teenager, she organized a choir that would eventually grow to a thousand members and sing at the National Baptist Convention. In her early thirties, she was elected music director for the convention and eventually became the first African American woman to publish a gospel hymn, called “Something Within.” She composed more than 100 other songs before she died in 1963.
related
In Campbell’s imagination, human need was often the place where Christ met his people. Life contains strong currents. There are moments when we feel as if we are being swept forward by circumstances we cannot control. There are seasons when the waters feel cold and uncertain.
Yet I found that her music does not end with those realities. It moves toward provision. In “Touch Me, Lord Jesus,” Campbell pleads with God to be fed “from Thy holy table, / Rain, rain bread from heaven, / Let my cup o’erflow.” In “I Am Not Blessed with Riches,” she writes we may be helpless, but Jesus can turn our night to day. He, after all, is her hope, joy, and comfort. She asks us, “Is he yours?”
When I listen to Campbell’s words now, I hear more than a beautiful gospel song. I hear a teacher of the church helping me remember what God has already done even when the present world feels uncertain. That may be why her music continues to resonate generations later. It beckons us to put our hope in God and still helps us find our way home.
Daylan Woodall is a pastor and religious studies professor whose work focuses on African American Christian history and the Black church. He writes the Substack newsletter Too Hip for the Room.
">Christianity Today.
Comentarios