Peace Be Still
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Peace Be Still

How James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir Created a Gospel Classic

Robert Marovich

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eBook - ePub

Peace Be Still

How James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir Created a Gospel Classic

Robert Marovich

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About This Book

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022

In September of 1963, Reverend Lawrence Roberts and the Angelic Choir of the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, teamed with rising gospel star James Cleveland to record Peace Be Still. The LP and its haunting title track became a phenomenon. Robert M. Marovich draws on extensive oral interviews and archival research to chart the history of Peace Be Still and the people who created it. Emerging from an established gospel music milieu, Peace Be Still spent several years as the bestselling gospel album of all time. As such, it forged a template for live recordings of services that transformed the gospel music business and Black worship. Marovich also delves into the music's connection to fans and churchgoers, its enormous popularity then and now, and the influence of the Civil Rights Movement on the music's message and reception.

The first in-depth history of a foundational recording, Peace Be Still shines a spotlight on the people and times that created a gospel music touchstone.

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1

The Reverend Lawrence C. Roberts and the First Baptist Church of Nutley

The township of Nutley sits serenely near the Passaic River in Essex County, New Jersey, about eight miles north of Newark and sixteen miles west of New York City. Incorporated in 1902, Nutley has a slightly rolling topography, a picturesque business district with a decidedly Italian American flavor, and a civic pride in being happily anonymous. “George Washington never slept in any beds here,” joked the March 3, 1939, edition of the Nutley Sun.
Perhaps the first president of the United States never slumbered in Nutley, but the township is not as anonymous as it claims. It has, in fact, been home to a number of notables, among them Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show performer and inspiration for the MGM musical Annie Get Your Gun. Illustrator Frederick Dana Marsh, homemaking queen Martha Stewart, and members of first lady Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis’s extended family have lived in Nutley. And from 1961 to 2005, Nutley was home to one of the nation’s most celebrated gospel choruses, the Angelic Choir. It was the main ensemble in the music ministry of the First Baptist Church, the township’s first African American church and one of only two that served the area’s black population during the first few decades of the twentieth century.
Not that Nutley ever had a particularly sizable black population. Before 1902, when Nutley was still called Franklin Township, only a handful of African Americans resided there. The demographics changed around 1916 as blacks began migrating from the American South to the Northeast as part of the first wave of the Great Migration. One of the most significant demographic shifts in twentieth-century America, the Great Migration lasted from 1915 to 1970. According to Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, whose epic The Warmth of Other Suns is a remarkable history of the movement, millions of African Americans departed the South for northern urban areas so they could make a better life for themselves and their families. Jobs were available in cities such as Newark, where manufacturing fed the insatiable appetite of World War I for supplies but lacked the manpower to keep up with demand. Eastern seaboard railways made New York City and Newark (and Nutley, by extension) popular ports of entry for African American migrants traveling from Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas.
It didn’t take long for southern migrants to discover that the “Promised Land” of the North was not prepared to accommodate them. According to a February 17, 1917, Nutley Sun article,
The problem of caring for the Southern negroes [sic] who have been emigrating to the North for the last year in expectation of making their fortunes has presented itself in Nutley, as in most other towns and cities hereabouts. Three negro families, numbering in all eleven persons are now being cared for by the Social Service Bureau. They came north after hearing stories of the high wages to be made but on arrival were unable to secure work and soon were destitute. The Bureau has given them clothing and financial aid.1
Although as late as the 1950 US Census, only 2 percent of Nutley’s population, or 453 people, was non-white, even a tiny community needed a convenient house of worship.2

The Rising Mount Zion Baptist Church

Whether its edifice be austere or modest, stone cathedral or repurposed storefront, the most important institution in the African American community is the church. Historically denied access to, and membership in, mainstream political, economic, and civic associations, African Americans turn to the church for more than worship. The church also functions as a community center, a social service agency, an employment center, a youth fellowship hall, and a vehicle for building leadership skills and community status by holding positions of authority, such as on the Trustee Board, the Deacon Board, the Mothers Board, the Nurse Ministry, the Department of Christian Education, the Music Ministry, and the Usher Board. “For the Negro,” writes Kenneth Clark, “his church is his instrument of escape, his weapon of protest, his protective fortress behind which he seeks to withstand the assaults of a hostile world and within which he plans his strategies of defiance, harassment, and, at times, his frontal attacks against racial barriers.”3 For the few hundred African Americans who settled in or around Nutley during the era of the Great Migration, their “protective fortress” was Rising Mount Zion Baptist Church.
Rising Mount Zion was established in Nutley in 1889 as a prayer group by early migrants William Robinson, born in North Carolina around 1867, and his wife Nannie, born in Virginia around 1870.4 The young Robinson couple held the prayer group’s initial services in their Chestnut Street residence, but by 1890, the Rising Mount Zion membership outgrew the Robinson home and secured more spacious quarters at Nutley Town Hall. Around this same time, Nannie remarried and her new husband, the Reverend George Moon, assumed the church’s spiritual leadership. Moon moved the congregation from Nutley Town Hall to a spot on Passaic Avenue. Rising Mount Zion remained on Passaic until 1907, when the congregation purchased two hilly plots at 13 and 15 Harrison Street in Nutley. There they erected a humble white wooden frame edifice, the quintessential little wooden church on a hill.5
Of an array of pastors leading Rising Mount Zion prior to 1959, the Reverend George B. Riley appears to have made the most significant contribution to the church’s growth. Elected pastor in 1936, Riley modernized the wooden church by purchasing an organ, expanding and enlarging the building, and overseeing a name change. On April 11, 1939, Rising Mount Zion Baptist Church was officially rechristened First Baptist Church of Nutley. When Riley died in 1949, he was succeeded by the Reverend Joseph J. Napier, born around 1911 in Dooley County, Georgia. Napier led the church from 1950 to 1959 while also holding a job with the Union Building Construction Company in nearby Passaic. But by the end of the 1950s, the First Baptist congregation had dwindled to just a handful of members.6 Its future uncertain, the church sought a pastor with vision and youthful vigor to lead it into the next decade. They would select the Reverend Lawrence Roberts.

Lawrence Curtis Roberts

In many ways, the life story of Lawrence Roberts is a history, in microcosm, of African American gospel music in Essex County, New Jersey, for which the county seat is Newark. For nearly thirty years, the pianist, singer, songwriter, choir director, record company executive, talent scout, and church leader was an integral member of the county’s professional, semiprofessional, and amateur gospel artists. This community benefited first from his musical talent and, later, his ability to secure for them record deals and public appearances.
Lawrence Curtis Roberts was born in Newark on August 12, 1936, to James and Estelle Holmes Roberts.7 Growing up, Lawrence never knew his father. He told gospel historian Eric Majette Jr. in 2004 that
My father, I never really knew. Further down the line, when I was working for Savoy Record Company the phone rang one day, and the gentleman asked my coworker, Mr. Fred Mendelsohn, could he speak to me? He told Mr. Mendelsohn he was my father. I was grown at the time and had three children of my own. I was actually floored. I went to the phone. He asked me about my grandparents, et cetera, so I knew it was legit. He told me he was going to be in town for the weekend and he wanted to see me. And I graciously consented to see him. He came over to our home. At that time I was living in Newark, and unfortunately prior to leaving, he asked me, could I let him have seventy-five dollars? A man that I had never seen, a man that I grew up totally without any efforts on his part to help me. He left, and that following Friday, I received a phone call that he was dead.8
Absent his father, Roberts was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents, George and Annabelle Holmes, at 42 Boyd Street in Newark’s Central Ward.9 George Holmes, born in Smithfield, Georgia, on October 10, 1894, was a farmer (probably a sharecropper) for a Mrs. W. E. Bryant.10 By 1917, George had married Annabelle (born in Georgia, circa 1901) and they had an infant son, William. Daughter Estelle, Roberts’s mother, was born about a year later. Sometime prior to 1930, the Holmes family gathered their belongings and migrated north. They settled in Newark, first at 81 Tichenor Street and then moved about two miles northwest, to 42 Boyd Street.11
By the time the Holmes family arrived in Newark, the city’s black population was 5 percent of the total census, or approximately 26,000, having swelled from 4,477 a half-century earlier.12 The majority of blacks lived in the city’s Central Ward because in Newark, as in other major northern cities, African Americans, regardless of their financial and class status, were barred from living in better-appointed white-majority communities. Gospel singer and noted background vocalist Emily “Cissy” Houston said her father, Nitcholas “Nitch” Drinkard, aptly summarized the difference between racism as practiced in the North and the South: “Don’t tell me how bad the South was
. It’s the same up here; you don’t have to be a Ku Klux Klanner in a white robe; you could just as well be wearing a business suit and work at City Hall.”13
Indeed, although Newark offered more freedoms than were available in the South, African American migrants still found themselves relegated to lower-paying jobs. For men, that meant unskilled factory work or employment as janitors, servants, and porters. Female migrants took in laundry and served as domestics for white families.14 George Holmes made his living at the Swift slaughterhouse in nearby Kearny, New Jersey.15 Around the time of his birth, Lawrence’s mother Estelle was a seamstress for the WPA Sewing Project, darning clothes and creating new garments to be given away to financially struggling families like her own.16
But if decent-paying jobs were limited and housing was suboptimal, newcomers to the Central Ward could at least function within what African American novelist Richard Wright dubbed the “fluid folk life of the South.” Newark’s housing restrictions inadvertently offered transplanted southerners the freedom to replicate their familiar southern folkways within their new community. And since this community contained dry-goods stores, grocers, taverns, restaurants, beauty salons, barber shops, schools, pharmacies, and churches, Newarker African Americans could avoid interacting with the unfriendly world around them as much as possible. Growing up in nearby Paterson, New Jersey, future Angelic Choir member and gospel soloist Lorraine Stancil recalled that
It was a different time. Families were very, very close-knit. My mom [a migrant from Greensboro, North Carolina] had four children and all we knew was walking up Governor Street, which was the street we lived on. Walking—we didn’t have a car. [Mom] would put her flat shoes in a paper bag and walk us to church during the week and of course all day on Sunday. We didn’t even have a telephone. We had to use the neighbor’s phone, they had one. The neighborhoods protected the children. A neighborhood child would do something wrong and [neighbors] were able to chastise that child and then speak to the parents, and the parents would take it even further once you got home.17
Young Lawrence Roberts attended Eighteenth Avenue Elementary School and Cleveland Junior High. Around age nine, he accepted Christ as his personal savior, was baptized, and joined Little Mount Calvary Baptist Church at 123 Prince Street, the former location of Newark’s landmark Metropolitan Baptist Church. Taking a few formal piano lessons but spending more time at gospel musicales studying the techniques of gospel pianists, Roberts began accompanying some of the services at Little Mount Calvary.18
Roberts became sufficiently proficient on piano to audition successfully for entrance to Newark’s School of Fine and Industrial Arts. The multicultural high school known as Arts High was founded in September 1931, with a mission to place art and drama on the same plane as mathematics, science, and language. Jazz stars Sarah Vaughan and Wayne Shorter, R&B singer Melba Moore, and pop starlet Connie Francis are among the school’s alumni.19 At Arts High, Roberts learned to read music. He learned vocal techniques, such as breathing from the diaphragm when singing, which he himself employed and taught others throughout his music career. He also took full advantage of the school’s many extracurricular offerings, such as joining a music trio with Connie Francis and jazz vocalist Andy Bey, singing the part of Rodolfo in the school’s production of Puccini’s La Bohùme, and captaining the school’s track team.20 Beneath Roberts’s photo in the 1954 Arts High yearbook, which noted his football and basketball proclivities, was the note “Although he is undecided ...

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