

Chapter two deals with the Birmingham singers, and the movement from choral style to quartet arrangement. Chapter one details the origins of the genre, from 1850s references to the Fisk ante-bellum era, showing the development of group harmony through the Jubilee period, focusing on the person of John Work II in Nashville. It is a serious scholarlystudy based on much original research, very strongly footnoted, but remains free of jargon and so is exquisitely readable. This pioneering book sets a new standard of excellence for work in the field of gospel music. A cappella gospel quartets remained prominent well into the 1950s, but by the end of the century the close harmony aesthetic had fallen out of practice, and the community-based trainers who were its champions had virtually disappeared, foreshadowing the end of this remarkable musical tradition. These trainers adapted standard musical precepts, traditional folk practices, and popular music conventions to create something new and vitalīessemer's musical values directly influenced the early development of gospel quartet singing in Chicago and New Orleans through the authority of emigrant trainers whose efforts bear witness to the effectiveness of "trickle down" black music education. In Bessemer, Alabama, the effect of school music instruction was magnified by the emergence of community-based quartet trainers who translated the spirit and substance of the music education movement for the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods. The surge in black religious quartet singing that occurred in the 1920s owed much to this vocal music education movement. Early in the twentieth century there were countless initiatives in support of black vocal music training conducted on both national and local levels. In the 1870s, the Original Fisk University Jubilee Singers successfully combined Negro spirituals with formal choral music disciplines, and established a permanent bond between spiritual singing and music education. To Do This, You Must Know How traces black vocal music instruction and inspiration from the halls of Fisk University to the mining camps of Birmingham and Bessemer, Alabama, and on to Chicago and New Orleans.
