Drenched in the Spirit

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality.

-- Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane

"I just feel good all over when I sing gospel songs."

-- Mahalia Jackson

In pop music, lyrics about sex and violence are often crystal clear. Talk of God, though plentiful, is usually veiled or mixed up with more worldly matters. Prince and Madonna peddle images of salvation but marinate them with eroticism. In one of his songs, rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg imagines confronting a supernatural being in a near-death experience -- but he doesn't make clear whether it's God or the devil. In an MTV Unplugged appearance, Kurt Cobain of the alternative band Nirvana performs a song called Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam. Is he being serious or ironic? His secular cool masks any religious intent.

Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions, an ambitious new series on National Public Radio, brings to listeners the passion and joy of spiritual music unfiltered. Much of the emotionalism of modern pop music -- the call-and-response involvement of the crowd, the sense that music can offer catharsis for both performer and audience -- is taken directly from the sacred-music traditions of African Americans. Listen to the secular love songs of Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston or Toni Braxton; close your eyes, ignore the lyrics, and you might as well be in a black Baptist church in Georgia. "When you listen to popular music, in America or worldwide, you can hear the African-American musical tradition," says Bernice Johnson Reagon, Wade in the Water's narrator, conceptual director and guiding spirit. "What a lot of people don't know is that so much of what is in the black-music tradition comes out of the black church."

Wade in the Water is a welcome baptism of knowledge. In 26 hour-long segments that begin airing this month on most NPR stations, the program is as entertaining and informative as the best documentary series on PBS, a sort of Eyes on the Prize for the ears. Each episode examines, through music, a part of the history of blacks in America -- in all covering 200 years of spirituals, hymns and gospel songs.

The series captures rare voices from the past, as in a 1910 recording of the Fisk Jubilee Quartet or a 1935 recording of a South African choir that shows the influence of African-American music worldwide. More recent performers are featured as well, including the Soul Stirrers, the Staple Singers, Jessye Norman, Aretha Franklin and James Cleveland, all the way up to such contemporary neo-gospel acts as BeBe and CeCe Winans.

The series is something of a personal journey for Reagon, who is a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and the founder of the Washington-based a cappella black female singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock. In the series Reagon frequently relates the development of sacred music to her own experiences: singing in church as a child in southwest Georgia; hearing a blues song for the first time (her reaction: "My God, I've found a piece of myself!"); touring with the Freedom Singers in the 1960s and fighting for civil rights by singing at protest marches and even in jail cells. "I find that when I'm singing," says Reagon in one episode, "I always know who and where I am."

Reagon first envisioned a series on black spiritual music 15 years ago. It took five years to produce, at a cost of $1 million, quite a sum for radio (most of the funding came from the National Endowment for the Humanities). The production crew unearthed rare archival material and conducted more than 250 hours of interviews. Some of the older gospel singers interviewed died before the series was completed, and that brought home to Reagon the importance of her efforts: "I realized I was creating a record of a part of society that would probably be passed over if we were not doing the series."

Modern pop music has borrowed from sacred music but missed its heart. "You can listen to a song and be moved," Reagon says in one episode. "But within the African-American tradition there is a high value put on being caught up in the singing." Listening to Aretha Franklin's graceful flight through the softly powerful hymn Never Grow Old, or the Barrett Sisters' vocal exodus through the redemptive gospel song I Don't Feel Noways Tired, one cannot help being caught up, regardless of one's personal faith. Wade in the Water is a deluge of joy that sweeps the listener away.