Wings Over Jordan Choir
The Wings Over Jordan Choir was an African-American a cappella spiritual choir founded and based in Cleveland, Ohio. The choir was part of the weekly religious radio series, Wings Over Jordan, created to showcase the group.
Debuting over Cleveland radio station WGAR in 1937 as The Negro Hour, the radio program was broadcast on the Columbia Broadcasting System from 1938 to 1947 and the Mutual Broadcasting System through 1949. Wings Over Jordan broke the color barrier as the first radio program produced and hosted by African-Americans to be nationally broadcast over a network. The program was the first of its kind which was easily accessible to audiences in the Deep South, featuring distinguished black church and civic leaders, scholars and artists as guest speakers. One of the highest-rated religious radio programs in the United States, it also had an international shortwave audience on the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Voice of America, and Armed Forces Radio. The program has been credited with WGAR and CBS receiving inaugural Peabody Awards in 1941.
Founded in Cleveland by Baptist minister Glynn Thomas Settle, the choir performed concerts throughout the country during its height and toured with the USO in support of the American war effort during World War II and the Korean War. Billed as one of the world's greatest Negro choirs, the Wings Over Jordan Choir is regarded as a forerunner of the civil rights movement and a driving force in the development of choral music helping to both preserve by introducing traditional spirituals to a mainstream audience. Other versions of the group began to emerge during the 1950s, and a Cleveland-based tribute choir of the same name has performed since 1988.
History
1935–1938: Formation
Cleveland origins
Wings Over Jordan originated as a choir at Gethsemane Baptist Church in Cleveland's Central neighborhood under the direction of Rev. Glenn Thomas Settle. Born in Reidsville, North Carolina, in 1894 to sharecroppers Ruben and Mary B. Settle as one of nine children, Settle's paternal grandfather Tom Settle was an African prince who was captured and sold into slavery during the 1850s; his maternal grandfather was a member of the Cherokee Nation. The Settle family moved to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1902, where Glenn became involved in local churches and worked up to three jobs after his father's death. Moving to Cleveland in 1917 with his first wife, Mary Elizabeth Carter, Settle studied at the Moody Bible Institute after being inspired to improve his education; he took classes in the evening and worked as a metallurgist in a foundry during the day. Before his ordination, Settle led a church in Painesville and was assigned to a Baptist church in Elyria which split into two congregations in 1933. In Elyria, Settle became known for sermons advocating social justice and the easing of racial tensions. He became Gethsemane's pastor in November 1935 as the church was in the middle of a fiscal crisis, leading its return to a "very healthy" financial state. In addition to leading Gethsemane, Settle was a clerk in Cleveland's street department.Like Settle, most of Gethsemane's congregation were migrant families from the South. Although it was not one of the city's more prominent churches, it had a choir of rich, natural, untrained voices. The singers included laborers, maids, beauticians and elevator operators. Gethsemane had no music ministry, and Settle established an a cappella choir with his singers and singers from other choirs and Cleveland's Central High School. James E. Tate, who had become involved with Gethsemane when Settle was appointed pastor, was appointed director. The choir's repertoire of spirituals documented the African-American psyche during their enslavement and, after falling out of favor among Blacks following emancipation, experienced a resurgence in popularity during the Great Depression. Settle saw spirituals as a dignified art form and sought to preserve their authenticity with the choir; performances often had a deeply-emotional atmosphere, reflecting his work as a minister. Although they were regarded as "sorrow songs", spirituals also held hope for a better Black future; choir members were comforted by singing their ancestors' songs, which helped them overcome feelings of hopelessness. Settle's granddaughter Teretha Settle Overton later compared spirituals to gospel songs, calling the former songs of woe and saying that the latter proclaim salvation and redemption. The choir quickly became popular in Cleveland, with concert bookings throughout the city and an early-1937 regional tour which included Settle's hometown of Uniontown.
WGAR's ''The Negro Hour''
After consulting a colleague at Cleveland's street department who was an ethnic radio broadcaster, Settle entered the choir in an on-air amateur contest hosted by Cleveland station WJAY. The choir was ruled ineligible; the station considered them professional artists, but WGAR program director Worth Kramer was in the audience. After the WJAY audition and learning about Kramer's position, Settle approached him with a request to add a weekly show aimed at the African-American population to WGAR's Sunday ethnic lineup. An affiliate of NBC's Blue Network, WGAR recently removed a Sunday-morning Blue Network program with the Southernaires from their schedule after a local group purchased the time slot and, despite a variety of programs for European ethnic groups, had nothing for Cleveland's Black population. Kramer was so impressed by the choir's subsequent audition that he promptly launched The Negro Hour on July 11, 1937, for which Settle's choir provided the music.In addition to the choir's musical performances, The Negro Hour featured guests who would talk about issues facing Blacks; the first program's guests were Rev. H. C. Bailey and Cleveland mayor Harold Hitz Burton. The first known radio program autonomously produced and directed by African-Americans, it is also considered the first program to feature Black people in ways which were not demeaning burlesque. Kramer became an early supporter of the choir after becoming interested in spirituals; he researched their origins, and considered them "the only true form of early American music". Settle and the choir—now known as The Negro Hour Choir—were featured performers at the Ohio Baptist General Association's 1937 conference, which WGAR broadcast live. James E. Tate received $450 from Gethsemane's congregation for his planned studies at Oberlin College after Settle praised his "natural ability ... to train and direct singing groups".
Going national on CBS
On September 26, 1937, WGAR switched affiliation from NBC's Blue Network to the Columbia Broadcasting System. The success of The Negro Hour caught CBS' attention, particularly that of executive director Sterling Fisher and musical director Davidson Taylor. A special 15-minute prime time slot was given to the choir on November 9, 1937. Entitled Wings Over Jordan, the program featured the Robert Nathaniel Dett song "Keep Me From Sinking Down". The choir received another prime-time slot on December 14, 1937, allowing network executives a chance to hear the choir and perhaps offer a regularly scheduled program. Nashville religious leader Henry Allen Boyd appeared on the December 5, 1937, Negro Hour, the first non-Cleveland guest speaker. CBS picked up the program, renamed Wings Over Jordan, for national distribution on January 9, 1938; it was the first show independently produced and hosted by African Americans to be broadcast nationwide over a radio network.The choir adopted "Wings Over Jordan" as its permanent name. The name was credited to Settle, who never explained its origin. According to a later Newsweek article, it referred to the African-American Christian belief in crossing the River Jordan at death and hearing the "winged chorus of angels" while completing the journey to the afterlife. Settle's administrative assistant, Alice Harper McCrady, speculated that it sprang from his penchant for analogies in sermons. "Wings Over Jordan" was a metaphor; many spirituals used wings to represent "flying away" from slavery, and "The River of Jordan" and "Deep River" were frequently performed by the choir. A newspaper article about a 1949 concert says that Settle adopted the phrase from the lyrics of a song sung by his mother. Another theory suggests that Settle thought the phrase "had a nice ring to it" when CBS used it for the two prime-time programs. Whatever its origin, the name served Settle and the choir for the next 30 years.
1938–1942: Broad popularity
Worth Kramer's direction
When the program went national, Settle replaced James E. Tate as the choir's director with WGAR's Worth Kramer. Settle initially said that Kramer's role would last for four weeks, but Kramer remained in the position for several more weeks and Tate resigned the following month. Although Tate agreed to return to his former position after discontent was expressed by other members, he left the choir permanently a month later. The director's position was given to Kramer; Williette Firmbanks became a secondary director, including road performances which Kramer could not attend. Kramer left his position as WGAR program director in 1939 to head an "artists service" department established by the station, allowing him to devote more attention to the choir. His original four-week stint as Wings choir director lasted for four years, and his knowledge of radio production and musical sensitivities set a standard emulated by subsequent conductors.Despite Settle's insistence that no one would get undue credit for the choir's success, Kramer received disproportionate media coverage and concert promotion; this sparked unrest among the members. A 1940 Time profile on the program said that Kramer "drummed his arrangements into the musically illiterate group by rote ... for weeks before he put them on the air". Kramer, sometimes in collaboration with Firmbanks, composed multiple arrangements for the choir to assist its many members who could not read sheet music proficiently. He defended the choir in a 1941 open letter to swing band leaders demanding that they refrain from appropriating spirituals: "To many of the opposite race, is exceedingly distasteful. Imagine your disgust, in tuning in a late evening dance program, to hear ... the blatant strains of a band "jiving" "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" or "The Old Rugged Cross" ... you would run immediately to the telephone to protest such irreverent expression of musical prowess". Historians and family of surviving choir members have seen Kramer as helping them gain legitimacy and the pickup by Columbia; Teretha Overton said, " opened doors that my grandfather could not get in". Some CBS affiliates in the Deep South, however,, advertised the show as "Wings Over Jordan ... the Worth Kramer Choir."