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Julie Cooke: It's a source of strength and courage, comfort and wisdom.

It's gospel music.

Hello, I'm Julie Cooke, and today we're talking about the history, influence, and current state of gospel music in West Tennessee.

Let the conversation begin.

FEMALE_1: That's so cool.

MALE_2: Then that's when I said that.

FEMALE_2: The problem with that idea is.

MALE_3: Wow, that was amazing.

FEMALE_3: Then I came up with a solution.

MALE_4: What was that about?

MALE_5: Here's what I think about it.

MALE_6: Now, we're talking.

MALE_7: West Tennessee PBS presents.

Tennessee is talking.

Let the conversation begin.

Julie Cooke: Welcome to today's show.

Our guests today are Reverend Shontaviar Beasley, who is pastor of Greater Springfield Baptist Church in Bolivar, Tennessee.

He's also a professor at Lane College here in Jackson, also with his, his wife, Mrs. Zekydia Beasley, who is a chorus teacher of Jackson Central, Mary Middle, and High Schools.

Welcome to you both.

Shontaviar Beasley: Thank you.

Zekydia Beasley: Thank you.

Julie Cooke: Already, just in our conversation off camera, I picked up some fascinating facts about you two.

You are a married couple?

Zekydia Beasley: Yes.

Julie Cooke: Have known each other since three years old?

Shontaviar Beasley: Yes.

Zekydia Beasley: Yes.

Believe it or not, we actually grew with each other in a wedding, he was the ring bear, and I was a flower girl.

He was three and I was four.

That was just so amazing to even think about.

We was in a wedding when we were little, now we're actually married.

Julie Cooke: Did you all grow up singing together?

Zekydia Beasley: Well, not really, of course, by him, being brought up in a different county, we would always meet up in the summer, but we never did get to sing together until we actually, I guess you could say, started dating.

Shontaviar Beasley: We always ended up at some of the same church as growing up.

My aunt's church and their church always fellowship with each other.

In some type of way, that's one reason I remember her as being the girl with the big glasses playing the piano growing up.

Julie Cooke: Even back when they weren't in style.

Shontaviar Beasley: Even no style, yeah.

She got the big glasses on now, but that's where I remember her from the girl playing the piano with her dad's quartet group and some of the singers they would have on Saturday night.

That has been a big part of her life and my life also, all of our lives.

Julie Cooke: That's where most of our famous folks that we know, so many, have started right there in church.

That's where it was for you.

Shontaviar Beasley: Yes.

Zekydia Beasley: Yes.

Julie Cooke: What led you to teach your course teacher and was music just always in your blood?

Zekydia Beasley: Music has always been in my blood.

Like my mother always says, it's from the womb.

I was introduced to music at the age of two by my maternal grandmother, Mrs. Esther Taylor Thomas.

She was an educator, and I song my first song, two years old at church, I will never forget, bless the Lord, oh, my soul and all that is within me, bless his holy name.

Ever since then, that foundation started.

It started not just with her, but with my father, with my mother, with my immediate family.

Just music everywhere.

Not even just of vocally singing, but music as well.

Musicians.

Julie Cooke: You had the opportunity to perform and teach?

Zekydia Beasley: Yes.

Julie Cooke: Teaching is a whole different animal.

I know people who love to perform, but I mean, there's nothing like seeing a light go on in a child or a young person.

Zekydia Beasley: It is not.

Especially when you're reaching students, and you're asking them where you, first, you're trying to see what they like because you don't want to bore them.

You start off asking them, okay, what type of music do you like?

Because Mrs. Beasley loves all genres.

When you can touch them and try to find a song that is decent and in order for them to perform, you start off with that.

Then when they be like, you know what, she really knows what we like, so we're going to keep going.

When I see that, it is just a wonderful feeling that I can't even explain.

I just love it.

I do.

Julie Cooke: Teaching is just, it's in your blood just like the music, isn't it?

Zekydia Beasley: It's in my blood.

Julie Cooke: Well, Reverend Beasley, how do you think that growing up singing gospel led you to now being a pastor?

Shontaviar Beasley: Well, music has always been part of my life and remembering my grandmother, my grandmother was a singer.

My maternal and paternal grandmother were singers.

We always had a radio in the house.

Every morning starting at five o'clock in A.M. we had one station where we call WBOL.

It's actually a broadcasting actually owned by representative Johnie Shaw; it's now 94.7 FM.

Music played in our house every morning.

My grandmother worked at a factory, so she would be up at like four o'clock in the morning.

Radio came up at five o'clock in the morning, and she would be playing gospel music as we were getting ready for school.

We actually in the house, we sang gospel songs and going to church.

The church that I actually grew up in has a strong history of being near Ames Plantation in Grand Junction, Tennessee.

I don't know if you all ever heard of that, that plantation, Ames Plantation.

But the church that I grew up in was actually the church built by my great, great grandfather, and his brothers shortly after slavery during reconstruction.

That was a very big part of our family, very big part of our history and heritage.

Going there also was introduced to music as a child.

We sang different songs that even dated back to the time of slavery, with spirituals and different hymns and all those different things that led up to what we call gospel music today.

We still held onto that heritage during that time.

I've had a lifetime of doing that and being a pastor, the music in the church helped enhance the worship service and also helped enhance the preaching.

Sometimes in our churches, the singing is so powerful, you don't have to preach so hard.

Julie Cooke: It takes a little pressure.

Shontaviar Beasley: It takes a lot of pressure off.

Julie Cooke: It is powerful, and I guess if you ever attend that type of service, or we see it in the movies and everything.

It's just a whole different realm of worship, and it's really amazing to see.

Now, do you participate in the church choirs and in the service at your husband church?

Zekydia Beasley: Yes.

Well, I try.

As of right now, since we have been appointed at a new but yet home place, I'm always available to help whenever it's needed.

I told my husband, I said, this time Mrs. Beasley is going to sit back and just really enjoy service because the other pastoral appointments that we have been churches, I have been one of the musicians.

Being at our home church, it just feels good to sit back and enjoy and just to enjoy service from the music to the preaching to the praying, just everything.

Julie Cooke: You're going to take it in?

Zekydia Beasley: I'll take it in, yes.

Julie Cooke: Good for you.

You're going to enjoy that good preaching and all that singing.

Well, I wonder to me it seems that gospel music is totally alive and coming up in young people who are in church.

What is your take on that?

Do you feel like the heritage is being preserved as it should be?

Shontaviar Beasley: Me, a lot of it has been lost as far as the gospel music is concerned.

Because we know we have different types of gospel music.

You have your contemporary gospel music, you have what you call your worship and praise gospel music now.

It has taken away a lot from what we would call the spirituals and the hymns that we know one of the first gospel songs were written by Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of gospel music.

If you ask most young people who was Thomas Dorsey who wrote ''Precious Lord Take My Hand,'' they may not even know who he is.

A lot of the churches have moved away from a lot of the traditions I know in the African American church has moved away from the tradition of the church I grew up in we had what we call call-and-response hymns that were acappella, and where a person would yell out a line and then the congregation would come along and catch up that line, and they would sing it out together.

A lot of that's being lost as an art and singing in our churches due to, I think, of a lack of understanding on what the music was for.

Because when I was little I was like, well, why are they singing that song that way, and why are they crying, and why are they just up shouting and hollering all over the building?

But as life passed by, that has become part of my soul because I can remember my great uncles and my grandmother singing these songs.

Now as I get older, I'll find myself singing those songs and tears running down my eyes just thinking about actually the message that the song was giving.

I think it's really being lost in a lot of our churches.

Julie Cooke: I know my observation with a lot of the contemporary Christian music, and some of it is very beautiful and very moving, and some of it is repeat, repeat.

I don't feel the same as with the old traditional hymns that I grew up with.

You think that a lot of that's deluded, but a lot of people will argue, well you've got to keep young people interested, you've got to go where people want to go with the music.

What do you say to that?

Zekydia Beasley: I was getting ready to say that.

For example, you mentioned of like the hymns per se, we don't hear hymns anymore.

But now, like my students always say, Mrs. Beasley, you're going to do the remix.

What does that mean?

What they mean is Mrs. Beasley remix music in order to get the students more involved.

I know some people are probably like, here we go.

But at the same time you're not trying to lose what we grew up under, but we're dealing with a different generation.

To change it up a little bit, as long as it has the same definition, the same meaning, to change it up a little bit.

Julie Cooke: Because we know music get sampled just in pop music or samples of old 30, 40 year old beats.

Zekydia Beasley: Of course.

Julie Cooke: Is that what you're saying you're trying to mix?

Zekydia Beasley: Yes, what I'm saying.

Yes, because like right now, there's a particular song that our choir is working on now and it is very upbeat, it is very going, and I noticed how they reacted when I introduced it to them and they was like, Mrs. Beasley.

Yes.

One young lady was like, that's a gospel song.

They were so excited, but yet, and still, I tried to incorporate what we grew up under but it's just represented.

Julie Cooke: That's your part of preserving the heritage.

Do what you can.

Zekydia Beasley: Yes.

You have to do what you can.

Julie Cooke: Well, as far as the church, how does the church try to do that as far as preserving?

Do you stick with more traditional hymns?

Shontaviar Beasley: >> Well, sometimes it depends on what area you're in.

We try to have a mixture of songs where it builds in the worship service.

A lot of times we have started out with a hymn, and then we may sing what we call a gospel song and then we sing what would you call an anthem song, and then we'll end with a meditational song, something like that.

It builds according to the areas that you live in.

Now, you have some churches that they may not actually sing choir songs.

We know that in this area, quartet is very popular also.

You may have some churches, just for example, as you go further south and towards the Mississippi line, you'll see that most of the choirs, they don't sing like a lot of choral music.

They sing a lot of quartet music.

It differs when you go to different areas because actually the church where I pastor, when I first went there, I went there when I joined there when I was 14 years old.

When I got there they said, open your hymnbook up to so and so on.

I'm like, well, what's a hymnbook?

Because at the church I grew up in, we didn't have hymnbooks.

Julie Cooke: You just learned from the crib.

Zekydia Beasley: Yeah, from the crib and the hymns we saw were actually to call and response hymn and it wasn't a hymn that you got out of a book.

It was a little different.

It just depends on where you are, the area that you are.

Julie Cooke: Well, I was going to ask you that because you said, I know down towards Mississippi, they do such and such is a lot of the gospel preservation or just the performance in church is that territorial around West Tennessee and beyond, in the South or different parts of the country?

Shontaviar Beasley: Yeah, I think most of it that's in the South and in this area, in the Mississippi area, where a lot of the great gospel singers in the southeastern region of the United States.

That's where a lot of them come from.

I don't know, we have several great gospel singers, and artists who came just from this West Tennessee area.

The Reverend Clay Evans from Brownsville, Tennessee, who was a pastor of the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church who had a span of over probably 50 or 60 years of gospel music with big choirs in Chicago.

The Reverend Clay Evans, we have Aretha Franklin, who was actually the daughter of CL Franklin who actually grew up in Memphis, even though they moved to Detroit, she grew up in Memphis and then we know the great Elvis Presley and he had groups in gospel music.

A lot of things he came from, when I watched the movie, he actually came out of the tradition of the Church of God and Christ, who also has a big hold in gospel music also.

It depends on the area and also the denomination also.

I grew up Baptist, she grew up Methodist.

Julie Cooke: I had the best of different worlds.

I grew up as a CME, which is Christian Methodist Episcopal.

Zekydia Beasley: My father, of course, he was CME, my mom grew up Baptist.

So I had the best of, I guess you could say both worlds.

In the summer, I would stay with my grandmother, we were out for school.

I would go to church with her which is now The Historic First Baptist.

I would go every summer, vacation, Bible school, Sunday school, everything.

Then the rest of the year I'm back Methodist.

But I have to say that that was a wonderful experience that I had because not only was I able to identify the different denominations, but I had experience in different ways, like the CME, of course, we stick with hymns.

My experience with the hymns was through the CME.

With the Baptists, we stuck with hymns too, but we stuck with other types of, just regular gospel music like my husband mentioned earlier, the anthems.

I had the best of both worlds and then at home, my father being one of the lead singers at a quartet group, I grew up in a quartet background, and not just my father, but even the history I get from my mother talking about her father that, I didn't get to meet my grandfather, but he was phenomenal, he was a great singer from Haywood County, and his group blew up, gospel quartet group blew up, and he went up north and lived.

Julie Cooke: So it's not only a territorial?

Zekydia Beasley: No.

Julie Cooke: It's from one denomination to the next.

It's a lot of different mixes within the South.

Do you think the South does more to preserve the heritage of the true Gospel, the Old Time gospel?

Zekydia Beasley: I have to say yes.

Shontaviar Beasley: Yes.

I think we probably see that more in the South than anywhere else.

It's mainly because of the attachment still to slavery.

Well, from slavery to freedom, most people didn't move 50 miles away from actually where their forefathers were enslaved.

I think that that still has an attachment to the traditions that we still have today, that they go all the way back to slavery, all way up to freedom up until now.

I think in the South, that's why it's preserved more than it would be in other areas.

But like I said, I do think we've lost a lot because a lot of people didn't pick up a whole lot down through the years.

They didn't have that great uncle and all those things that I picked up a lot of the hymns from them.

I actually recorded some of those hymns on a tape.

For some people they've like, I've never heard of that before, and so I have it on tape somewhere.

But one day I will actually like to do a live recording going back to that old time way and having a live recording to sing some of those songs to keep it preserved and be passed down to the next generation.

Julie Cooke: Well, now you're just new to your church as you just said.

But do you anticipate a homecoming day or heritage days, or are there things like that to where you do go back and take a look at the older music?

Shontaviar Beasley: Well, since COVID hit, a lot of things we used to do traditional.

We used to have home kind of doings.

One of the things that is very traditional in our church, we had choir days.

Julie Cooke: Bet that was a big crowd.

Shontaviar Beasley: We had choir days.

Your choir would showcase so many songs and you may have had 10 different choirs come in.

Julie Cooke: What a competition there was it?

Zekydia Beasley: No.

Well, yeah.

Shontaviar Beasley: When we were younger we would be like, oh, now, you know such such is going to bring it, so we got to bring it too.

But at the same time, it was fun.

Julie Cooke: Well, maybe you can get that back going again because I know both of you are very devoted to what you're doing and to keep on teaching.

But I guess, like I said, I'm partial to the more traditional hymns too, but a lot of the praise music and the modern music and it's a whole different thing.

But I love what you said about doing the mix where you take a traditional piece and put it back into a little bit more contemporary.

Now, do you all do other types?

Do you do like an inspirational?

I'm thinking just right off the top of my head, something like Wind Beneath My Wings or something like that.

Would that be something you would add into your service?

It's not necessarily a hymn or a traditional, but something that you could add into your.

Shontaviar Beasley: I've seen it happen before, but most of the time something like that would probably be song at a funeral.

They sing that more.

Julie Cooke: That wouldn't be something you would add to the church.

Shontaviar Beasley: Most of the time would see, you would hear that mostly at a funeral or something like that.

More appropriate in our church.

Zekydia Beasley: African American churches they save them for funerals.

Julie Cooke: There's a lot to know about, well, the different cultures for one thing but the different, it's just interesting to me what you said about the different territories and the territorial aspect of country.

Listen to me, country music, gospel.

Zekydia Beasley: We can add that too.

Julie Cooke: There's so many of the country artists, and that's one thing we did not mention about how many very well-known artists have gospel roots.

Zekydia Beasley: They do.

Julie Cooke: Ray Charles was huge in country.

Of course, he started.

There's several, the people that have come up along the way and that they started in church.

They started, and they have a very, you don't necessarily hear it unless you know they say it or listening for it, but a lot of times, have the influence.

What are your plans for your choir?

Zekydia Beasley: Well, we have a lot going on this semester.

We have a choral festival coming up in April.

But, before that, Black History Month is coming up.

So we're getting prepared for that.

Just trying to get our ducks in a row for our Black History program or programs because this year the theme is based on the arts.

It's going to take our entire fine arts department at JCM to make this a great program.

Julie Cooke: Do you combine middle and high?

Do they do?

They're separate.

Zekydia Beasley: They're separate.

We're on the same campus, but they're separate.

They're separate but I have the privilege to do both.

So yes, ma'am.

When I speak of programs, yes, they're going to have their separate program, but the theme remains the same.

So it's going to take the entirety of the fine arts department.

Julie Cooke: How many do you have in your choir?

Zekydia Beasley: I'm glad you asked.

Right now, I'm at number 42.

The school reopened, it has a historical background, but JCM, which used to be JCM High School, now JCM Middle and High, reopened three years ago.

I had to revamp the program from the bottom up.

When we started, I started off with 7.

Last year I had like 23, and this year I have about 42.

Julie Cooke: Wow, that's a pretty good record.

Zekydia Beasley: Yes.

Julie Cooke: That's a good growth rate.

Zekydia Beasley: It is, and I am so excited because I just love working with the young people.

I love working with my students, they are so awesome.

Julie Cooke: Well, have you had time to do anything to prepare for February, I guess, at the church since you've just arrived?

Shontaviar Beasley: No, we haven't.

But we'll have something probably going on before the end of the month and I want her to try to get with some of the smaller children, we're trying to get the children back in church and to probably do a song with them.

Julie Cooke: So you're going to get a job in that church.

Shontaviar Beasley: Yeah, try to get the song.

But it's something always looking forward to to enhance.

It's for the choir, and it's something that I would like to do later on this year.

That's why one of the things we done at our church, we always had a youth choir.

Every year we had this October Music Fest where we all came together.

So one of the things that I hope to do this year is have a choir reunion of all the youth that used to be in the choir.

Julie Cooke: Wonderful.

We didn't mention that you two sing together.

Shontaviar Beasley: Yes, we do.

Zekydia Beasley: We do.

Julie Cooke: Is that for church performances?

Shontaviar Beasley: Church performances, funerals, you name it.

We've done it together.

Julie Cooke: So husband and wife, and you share your music together.

What a life for you two!

Well, I certainly wish you all the best in your new church.

Zekydia Beasley: Thank you so much.

Julie Cooke: Pastor Beasley has moved to Greater Springfield Baptist Church in Bolivar and is professor at Lane College as well.

Then Mrs. Beasley is at Jackson Central-Merry Middle and High School directing the choir there.

Well, it's been a blessing to meet both of you, and I thank you for sharing so much.

Shontaviar Beasley: Thank you.

Zekydia Beasley: Thank you.

Julie Cooke: Our time is just about over, but I wish you well with your upcoming plans and we wish you well in your new church, of course.

We thank you for being with us today.

My name is Julie Cooke, and we have been visiting with the Reverend Shontaviar Beasley and Mrs. Zekydia Beasley.

I think I got that right?

Zekydia Beasley: Yes.

Julie Cooke: And a very joyful conversation today.

We're so glad that you joined us today on Tennessee Is Talking.

I hope you'll look for further episodes on West Tennessee PBS.

Now, you can stream today's program on the PBS app, the West Tennessee PBS YouTube channel, and westtennesseepbs.org.

I'm Julie Cooke and we thank you so much for watching West Tennessee PBS, Tennessee Is Talking.

MALE_8: The program you've been watching was made possible through the generous financial support of West Tennessee PBS viewers like you.

Please visit westtnpbs.org and make a donation today so that we can continue to make local programs like this possible.

Thank you.