The vaunted Clark Sisters, Fred Hammond, the Winans family, Rizen - Michigan has produced them all. Now the state has produced one more promising name for the gospel genre: Marcus Cole.
Cole's debut project, "Write My Song," sounds as polished as anything those veterans have produced.
His label, PureSprings Gospel, was started by one of the Michigan legends, CeCe Winans.
But Cole, of Saginaw, seems to be on his way to making a name for himself. The mix of songs on his 11-track CD is fit for gospel music lovers of any age.
And unlike some artists who sometimes venture into songs for no clear reason,
Cole takes care to make sure his songs really mean something.
That's clear whether he's singing about inner peace on the opening track, "That's Alright," telling how blessed he is on "The Lord Has Been Good," or making the uplifting praise and worship tune "Celebrate" actually sound like a celebration. He closes with the touching, stirring "Bless My Soul.
" Catch Marcus Cole now, because this cold-country artist is just starting to heat up.
"Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement" by Davis W. Houck and David E.
Dixon, editors (Baylor University Press, 1,002 pages, paperback, $44.95)
The social revolution that discredited America's laws and traditions of racial discrimination half a century ago has, for better and worse, taken on an aura of transcendent reality.
In contrast with the destructive and deadly violence that permeates contemporary wars around the globe, the inspiring struggle of an unarmed and largely nonviolent racial minority to overcome segregation now seems almost mythological and legendary in character.
That is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from this voluminous collection of 130 powerful exhortations from the American civil rights movement.
The editors, both scholars of that singular period in our history, have drawn exclusively from tapes and transcripts of speeches, sermons and other forms of public discourse to make their case: that the pen (and tongue) can truly be, in certain magical moments, mightier than the sword.
Professors Davis W.
Houck and David E. Dixon begin their volume of rhetorical flourishes with a January 1954 Emancipation Day address in a Baltimore church by Howard University President Mordecai Johnson. They conclude, some 900 pages later, with a December 1965 sermon of invitation by the Rev.
Kelly Miller Smith, pastor of a black Baptist church in downtown Nashville, Tenn., in which he proposed a merger of his congregation with a white Baptist church nearby (the overture was rejected).
No matter how immediately persuasive or successful these and all the other discourses in this volume may have been at the time, they reveal in combination and in retrospect the dynamic power of preachers and other orators to move the masses to act collectively and courageously for social transformation.
Martin Luther King Jr. makes only a cameo appearance in this gallery of great orators (apparently, the editors hint, because access to his words is now regulated by toll collectors in the copyright booth).
But even without the silver-tongued martyr of the movement, there is so much eloquence and inspiration in these pages that it is hard to imagine how the segregationists stayed in the fight as long as they did.
All they had, after all, were a few shrewd and cagey wordsmiths (George Wallace, Richard Russell, James J. Kilpatrick) and a legion of vicious or buffoonish shouters (Ross Barnett, Lester Maddox, James Eastland). The egalitarians, by contrast, had courageous voices such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Fred Shuttlesworth, Benjamin Mays, Dick Gregory and a host of lesser-known but equally powerful witnesses for a new social contract.
Looking back from the present, where wars and violence and weapons of mass or individual destruction permeate our consciousness, it is astounding to recall that the most potent weapon the black minority and its few white allies in the civil rights struggle had to fight with was words, just words.
John Egerton is the author of numerous books of nonfiction including "Speak Now Against the Day," on the early struggle for desegregation in the South. His most recent work is "Ali Dubyiah and the Forty Thieves: A Contemporary Fable.
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WorldCrafts is a nonprofit outreach of Woman's Missionary Union, an auxiliary of the Southern Baptist Convention. It sells handmade items from more than 30 countries to help poor artisans. Hundreds of products are available online - beaded necklaces from South Africa, puzzles from Mali, hand-painted frames from Peru, painted eggs from Kazakhstan.
According to the site, the artisans receive money to buy supplies and to provide fair wages. The site also suggests activities, games and recipes for a WorldCrafts party at a church or home.
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