This story aired on the August 26, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents
If you pass by a church in Oakland on a Sunday, chances are you'll hear it swell with African American gospel music. It's a powerful genre with deep historical roots. But there's one choir in Oakland that performs this music outside of churches, with many members who aren't Black or Christian or either. And they've been doing it for almost 40 years.
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Most Monday nights, about 50 singers gather for rehearsal of the Oakland interfaith gospel choir. They fill the pews of the Imani church, singing up to the stained glass windows.
They have a performance in a few days so they start with some scales, then warm up their voices. And when the director of the choir arrives, they get down to business.
What you’re hearing is gospel music. Now, there are a couple different kinds of gospel music, but this is gospel rooted in the African American church, the African American experience
Terrance Kelly has been leading the choir since 1986. And he defines gospel as heart music:
"The heart and the spirit of gospel is so infectious that, you know, those people will say to me, I only feel this way when I sing this music and I, it's because it's built on struggle and love. It's built on struggle and love, and hope," he says.
According to Terrance, gospel is a combination of those sometimes contradictory emotions, because it comes out of the history of slavery. "It's built on the back of the slave, of the African American slave, with the conversion of slaves to Christianity by force," he explains.
Gospel music is rooted in an older kind of song called the spiritual, which enslaved African-Americans used to sing during work or gatherings. Terrance likes to have the choir sing spirituals in performances, to educate audiences.
"When we sang Wade in the Water, I wanted people to listen for the wailing and the hurt of the slave that might be escaping and using the water to cover their tracks," Terrance says.
You can hear these emotions during the reherersal at the church as they perform "Lord How Come Me Here?" another spiritual.
" Lord, how come me here?", he explains, "God, how come I'm going through this? And then you hear the anguish of the soloist at the end as the choir–everybody screams and the soloist holds onto that scream to make it personal...People need to know that that was not a pretty time, you know, we can't forget that it's not that far gone, it's not that long ago."
Terrance says that the music has always helped people process the darkest realities:
"It's heart music. I tell people it's the way black people sang out their angst into praise," he explains. "All the problems that you have in life, you bring it to the music, you let it sit there, and then you push, push it through to, into a state of praise, so you're able to handle anything."
And African-American gospel music has influenced all music that’s come after it in the United States.
"Without the spiritual or work song from the African slave, there is no American music unless it's Indigenous people's music," Terrance says. "That just simply means all the pop, gospel, jazz, blues, all of it stands on the shoulders of the slave song. And it shows up still in the runs and curly cues, or whatever you want to call them, of all the way up to Taylor Swift."
Terrance’s own personal history with Gospel music goes way back–back to before he was born.
"My father was the late great Ed Kelly. Jazz pianist, organist, bass player, and gospel blues organist," he says. "My mother was the late, great Faye Kelly. She was a gospel choir directress and gospel writer."
"We sang all the time at home," Terrance recalls. "We sang with my mother. She had groups and we sang background for her at home in their rehearsals…there was never a time that, I thought I would not sing gospel. It’s in my bones. I mean, I'm Ed and Faye Kelly's kid there, you know, there wasn’t a chance for me."
Gospel isn’t just a part of Terrance’s history, but Oakland’s too. "The biggest thing about Oakland would be that the Hawkins family are from Oakland," he explains. "And the biggest gospel hit yet today is still Oh Happy Day. And it was created here in Oakland."
Terrance had the idea of the Oakland interfaith gospel choir in 1986. He was attending Jazz camp, now called Living Jazz, a program where musicians jam and do workshops together in California’s forests.
Terrance had been going to the camp for years. But that year, when he was 23, he shared gospel music with the group.
"And they were like, we want to do this year round. How can we do this and not have to join a Christian Church?" He remembers the group. "We have to sing this music. It really edifies us and centers us in a way that nothing else has previously in our lives."
The group asked if he would be interested in starting a choir that would welcome people of any faith.
"And I thought about it. I am Christian. I prayed about it. I talked to my pastor about it. He said something that was very poignant," he recalls. "He said, 'if you do that choir for 100 years and it blesses one person, it was worth it. 'And I said, okay, pastor. I came back and said, yeah, let's do it."
The choir started with about 20 members, and now has more than 70. They’ve toured the world. And its members come from all kinds of religious backgrounds: Christians, Jews, Atheists, Buddhists, Agnostics, and Muslims.
"There's somebody that said 'Bu-Jew'. A Buddhist Jew," Terrance mentions.
And for him, the choir is reflective of the place where we live.
"The Bay area is kind of hippie central. But out of that 'hippieness' is a spirit of love. 'Cause that is the hippie movement. Really the hippie movement is all about rejecting constriction and opening the heart to love. So in a way, I guess I'm a gospel hippie," he says.
"I believe that Jesus would have been like the very first Unitarian…So, who am I not to be like him?"
Not everybody understands what the choir’s about.
"There have been performances that we have rejected because they want you to come, they want you to be a gospel choir. They want you to wear robes. They don't want you to say Lord, Jesus, our spirit," Terrance says. "Then you really don't want a gospel choir There's somebody else out there for you."
He says, you don’t have to have a narrow definition of “God” to sing, or get something from this music. Terrance says, god can be deity, spirit, or a sense of goodness itself.
This isn't the first time KALW has talked to Terrance. He was interviewed by us almost 10 years ago. I asked him if this type of community is still needed.
"Most definitely," he replies. "The need for an open community will always be there. That's the answer to that."
A few days after that rehearsal, I joined the choir before a concert. During a mic check, I took a break from recording sound. I’m Muslim, and I found a quiet hallway to do my Muslim prayer.
Call it coincidence, or divine timing, but when I bowed down to my God, I could hear a song about troubles and problems bowing down to Jesus, in the background. Its lyrics go:
"Every time we sing / We believe something changes
/ So we stand and agree / We declare and we speak / Sickness, release us / You must bow at the name of Jesus."
I was still thinking about it a couple hours later when the choir performed it on stage.
The funny thing is, this is the first time the choir’s performed this song, called “I Refuse”, by Anthony Brown. And it’s because Terrance couldn’t get it out of his head either:
"I actually chose that song for me. The first time I heard it, I was in the car. I had to pull over. I was just balling," he remembers.
"I don't know where I was. All I know is I remember pulling over cause I was going through some health challenges and the song got to every sickness, every disease, every danger, seen and unseen, and I realized I couldn't see anything, so I had to pull over. I was like, ooh, I had to pull over so I could listen to the song and cry, just get it out.
I said, that's it. That's it. That's what I believe. I know it. I know it. So I have to share that song, you know, cause that's that. That's how I can, that's how I can have peace. That's how I can sleep," Terrance says.
I understand how hard it can be to have faith when you see news here and abroad. This made me wonder: how does Terrance maintain faith in both God and community in such troubling and divided times?
"The faith in God controls the faith in community because I know that the peace be still moment is coming," Terrance answers. "And sure, we have struggled, but in today's world, I still believe my God is bigger and that's what the song— that really is what the song is saying," he says.
"That's how I can walk through the world without just becoming a hateful person because I believe that my God is bigger than any problem that's ever going to be set in front of me."
And he hopes the same is true for the singers, and audience members, too, whatever they believe.