Song From the Heart
Right around the world people know it and sing it. They love it because of its profound message of hope and faith.
Written in 1932, it continues to appeal deeply to people living in a new millennium. Although composed by a young Afro–American blues pianist, his song crosses the lines of race, gender, age and ethnicity. It is sung by congregations in the High Church of England, played at Catholic masses, and swayed to by Charismatics. Mahalia Jackson, as well as the Five Blind Boys of Alabama—regarded as among the finest gospel singers in the world—have sung it. Rock legend Elvis Presley recorded it.
“Precious Lord” is a unique piece of Christian music. Acclaimed as “the world’s greatest gospel song,” the song was inspired by a horrific tragedy that engulfed the life of its composer, Tommy Dorsey.
Thomas Andrew Dorsey was born on July 1, 1899, in Villa Rica, Georgia, USA. His father, Reverend Thomas M Dorsey, divided his time as a subsistence farmer and itinerant preacher. Dorsey’s mother, Etta Plant Spencer, sang in the church choir and frequently led congregational music. In his home, Dorsey was introduced to the blues guitar playing of Etta’s brother, Phil Plant. Thus, as a child he had significant exposure to religious music and secular blues music. That experience was the foundation on which Dorsey would later create blues-based gospel and come to be known as the “father of gospel music.”
In 1908, the Dorsey family moved to Atlanta. There, Dorsey lost interest in the regimented style of education found in local schools. He preferred to devote his considerable and emerging talents to music, specifically piano. By the age of 12, Dorsey left school, becoming a professional pianist playing at house parties throughout Atlanta’s black districts. All the while, he seized every opportunity to listen and learn from prominent pianists in the Atlanta area. He briefly took private music lessons with a teacher affiliated with the Atlanta Baptist College, today’s Morehouse College, but still averse to the regimen of formal learning, he terminated her services, continuing to teach himself the basics of music composition using instruction books.
Attempting to find more secure employment, Dorsey left Atlanta for Philadelphia in 1916, where he worked in naval shipyards. However, he first stopped in Chicago to visit an uncle, Joshua Dorsey, who was a pharmacist. After three years of moving between Philadelphia and Atlanta, Dorsey settled in Chicago to pursue a career in music. There he played, sang and published blues compositions, often under the name “Georgia Tom.” Music critic Stephen Calt described Dorsey, saying he “ranked as the most self-conscious, serious and accomplished blues lyricist of his time. Far from debasing the medium, he raised the blues to new levels of inventiveness, and brought a degree of wit and sophistication that had never previously been known to blues lyrics.”
On August 1, 1925, Dorsey married Nettie Harper, but a year later had a nervous breakdown and was unable to work for two years. To survive, his wife took a job in a laundry. At the urging of his sister-in-law, Dorsey attended a church service where he experienced a healing of his emotional state. That event, combined with the sudden death of a young neighbour, prompted Dorsey to commit himself more fully to God and Christian music. To mark his new way of life, Dorsey wrote his first gospel blues song, “If You See My Savior, Tell Him That You Saw Me.”
With Dorsey’s reputation as a gospel musician spreading, he accepted an invitation to become choir director of Chicago’s Pilgrim Baptist Church, a position he would hold for nearly 40 years. As the Great Depression wore away at Americans, Dorsey found more inspiration for writing and composing gospel songs, viewing them as an important ministry. Dorsey expressed awareness that his songs “lifted people out of the muck and mire of poverty and loneliness, of being broke and gave them some kind of hope.”
In August of 1932, Dorsey was scheduled to be the featured soloist at a large revival meeting in St Louis. At the time he and Nettie were living in a small apartment on Chicago’s south side. Nettie was pregnant with their first child. He kissed her goodbye and made his way to St Louis. The next night, as soon as he finished playing, a Western Union messenger came up to the stage and handed Dorsey a telegram. “I ripped open the envelope. Pasted on the yellow sheet was the words: ‘Your wife just died.’”
Dorsey recalls the evening as a surreal moment. “People were happily singing and clapping around me, but I could hardly keep from crying out.” He rushed to a phone and called home. All he could hear was someone hysterically shouting, “Nettie is dead. Nettie is dead.”
Racing home, he learned that Nettie had given birth to a boy. “I swung between grief and joy,” he recalls. “Yet that night the baby died. I buried Nettie and our little boy together in the same casket.”
He managed to get through the funeral visitation and service. When it was all over, he withdrew from family, friends—and even his beloved music. “I felt that God had done me an injustice. I didn’t want to serve Him anymore or write gospel songs. I just wanted to go back to that jazz world I once knew so well,” he said.
In the midst of despair, a friend visited Dorsey, persuading him to leave his apartment and go to a neighbourhood music school. There the friend had arranged for Dorsey to be left alone in a music room with a piano. “It was quiet; the late evening sun crept through the curtained windows,” Dorsey recalled. For the first time in many days, he sat at a piano using his hands and fingers to browse over the keys.
Dorsey describes what transpired in the next few magnificent moments: “Something happened to me then. I felt at peace. I felt as though I could reach out and touch God. I found myself playing a melody, one I’d never heard or played before, and words came into my head —they just seemed to fall into place.”
And these are the words he wrote:
“Precious Lord, take my hand,/ Lead me on, let me stand,/ I am tired, I am weak,
I am worn./ Through the storm, through the night,/ Lead me on to the light./ Take my hand, precious Lord,/ Lead me home.” “Precious Lord” was an immediate and permanent hit. Dorsey himself said, “This is the greatest song I have written.” He sang and directed “Precious Lord” around the world, including Paris, London, Rome, Athens, Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem and the West Indies. “Precious Lord” has been translated into 32 languages.
The price extracted for “Precious Lord” was high. Looking back at that time in his life, Dorsey said: “The grief, the sorrow, the loneliness, the loss—the uncertainty of the future—but I was repaid with double dividends and compound interest. The Lord blessed me with another wife, Kathryn, and two fine children. . . . I’m happy.”
Tommy Dorsey died on January 23, 1993, in Chicago. He once explained that his intent was to compose and write music with a universal purpose: “I don’t write songs for black men or white men or red men or yellow men or brown men,” he said. “I write songs for people, and I want all people to sing these gospel songs.”
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This is an extract from June 2004
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