In the early summer of 2005, the Rev. Douglas Slaughter went searching for a church musician to hire. He had all too much experience in such quests and their futility. During a dozen years as pastor of Second Baptist Church in Aiken, S.C., Mr. Slaughter had already gone through the recruitment routine four times.
There was nothing the matter with his church. Second Baptist has 600 members and a $700,000 annual budget; it operates an elementary school, builds affordable homes and maintains a retreat site. And the musicians whom Mr. Slaughter had attracted in the past were amply talented, down to their bloodlines. One was the sister of the soprano Jessye Norman, another the sister of the jazz trombonist Wycliffe Gordon.
The problem was keeping them full time on a church staff, serving essentially in a ministerial capacity, when they had so many other professional options like touring with jazz ensembles or directing summer concert series.
Younger musicians, meanwhile, were products of the hip-hop era, far less fluent than their elders with not only the classic gospel of Thomas Dorsey but also the contemporary style introduced by James Cleveland and Edwin Hawkins in the 1960s.
As Mr. Slaughter proceeded with his hunt over the succeeding 15 months — buttonholing other pastors at the National Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, using a church-music consultant to screen applicants, interviewing and auditioning about a dozen candidates without success — he came to realize that what felt like his peculiar problem was actually endemic to the African-American church.
“Everywhere I went, it became part of the conversation,” Mr. Slaughter recalled in a telephone interview. “You can find people who will play. But to really put church first, to have that sense of calling, that sense of ministry — that was the challenge. And when you don’t have that, you can hear it in the worship experience.”
Music has been an essential element of African-American religion from its very beginning, when slaves combined the call-and-response songs of their lost homelands with the Christian hymns they absorbed in bondage. The result was both a body of liberation music for themselves and a profound influence on popular music in the United States and beyond.
With emancipation from slavery and the establishment of the major black Christian denominations, African-American churches relied on a steady stream of musical and religious talent.
In the last generation, however, a variety of economic and artistic factors have interrupted this supply line. The emergence of rap music, which does not require a practitioner to sing or play any instrument, has reduced the number of African-American children skilled with keyboards and conversant with the gospel canon. Instrumental-music programs in public schools, which not only trained young people but also provided weekday employment to many church musicians, have been eviscerated by budget cuts and other classroom pursuits.
Meanwhile, the commercial market for gospel musicians has made the five-figure salaries and 24/7 hours of midsize churches seem unappealing, though many megachurches pay upward of $100,000.
“Musicians are going to the highest bidder because they can,” said L. Stanley Davis, a former instructor in gospel music at DePaul and Northwestern Universities in metropolitan Chicago and a board member for the Stellar Awards, gospel’s equivalent of the Grammys. “The years when we celebrated ministers of music who served for 35 or 40 years are gone. For many, it was a commitment. It was a way of life. But for musicians 40 or younger, it’s employment.”
Anthony Heilbut, author of the definitive book “The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times,” spoke of the oddly parallel evolution of hip-hop, with its materialistic worldview, and evangelical Christianity’s increasingly popular strain of “name it and claim it” theology, which views wealth as a reward for righteousness
Black Churches Hungering for Musical Talent
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“The music, the rituals, the protocols, the decorum of the black church, all of this has changed,” Mr. Heilbut said. “Modern church theology and hip-hop mesh uncomfortably well because both of them place a premium on Jesus and bling.
“And if you want to reach your audience, you have to give them the current sound. What you grew up with is what they’d call Old School. And that term itself is an extension of hip-hop. It’s a patronizing term.”
The effort to reconcile gospel and hip-hop has led, for example, to the veteran singer Shirley Caesar’s recording several songs with Tonéx, who is 30. In the aftermath of his arrest and indictment in 2002 on charges of soliciting a minor for child pornography, R. Kelly put out a putatively “inspirational” CD, “Happy People/U Saved Me.” Many churches have begun employing “praise teams” to lead the congregation in relatively simplistic, repetitive choruses.
For pastors like Mr. Slaughter, the pursuit of traditional church music and musicians means taking their sales pitch to such events as the Hampton University Ministers’ Conference and the Gospel Music Workshop convention. It means competing against the pop industry, megachurches and even Japan’s two academies of gospel music, which hire top American performers for teaching residencies.
In the end, Mr. Slaughter lucked out. Or, as a pastor might prefer to put it, providence interceded. Three months ago, he enticed Eli Wilson Jr., an accomplished musician who had been a consultant to Second Baptist, to sign on as music minister. The two men have known each other for nearly a quarter-century, since both were on the staff of St. Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn.
Mr. Wilson started playing piano at age 6 in the church his father pastored in New Orleans. Now, at 58, he embodies a breed that is rapidly vanishing.
“When I was coming up, the emphasis was on using music to develop and grow people, spiritually,” he said. “Right now, it’s all about the tightness of the band and spotlighting the best voices. So instead of looking for people who have a heart for ministry, you look for the best musicians. And for them, it’s just another gig.”
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