I’ve had plenty of opportunity to get to know Robert Darden and Stephen Newby. Bob is a distinguished writer and teacher, and in our youth, we lived a few houses apart on 30th Street in Waco’s Castle Heights neighborhood. With Bob, I was named to the Baylor University committee a few years back tasked with helping choose the Lev Prichard Chair in the Study of Black Worship, awarded to the great composer, scholar and worship leader Stephen Newby. Stephen and Bob did the research, thinking and writing for the new Oxford University Press trade book Soon and Very Soon: The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andraé Crouch. It’s a remarkable book, and their partnership is a remarkable story I’m privileged to share with you.
Greg Garrett: Bob, you were for many years the gospel music editor at Billboard. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that job and how it might have led you in the direction of Andrae Crouch.
Robert Darden
Robert Darden: Waco was the home of Word Records. I had grown up with gospel music in the Air Force, so I leaned that way very early and started writing for not just Billboard as a freelancer, but for a number of the other Christian retail journal type things because Word was here.
One of my editors at the Waco Tribune Herald saw a note in Billboard that said, “Looking for our gospel music editor, weekly columnists send clips.” I had written about the merchandising and marketing and point of purchase as well as artist and labels. And they called me and interviewed me, made sure I was legit, asked me tough questions about obscure gospel folks, and I kept that weekly column for about 15 years.
The last three, they brought in an African American writer to do Black Gospel and switched me to Contemporary Christian exclusively, and that was kind of the beginning of the end. But what Billboard meant was that when you called people, they called you back. I got to interview many of my heroes, Pop Swen and Pop Staples and Andrae and Shirley Caesar. Billboard on your resume helped you get other pieces, and that was the reason I had four years to work on People Get Ready.
GG: Stephen, my intro to Andrae Crouch was singing “My Tribute” with 10,000 other white kids at an Oklahoma church camp. I grew to love Crouch not because I knew about him, but because I knew his work. One of my questions is how Andrae might be an entree to issues for audiences who don’t share his identity. And then the other question that I have: Our friend Ella Prichard has mentioned to me how you have said sometimes when you invite a Black musician into your white space, it means you don’t have to ask the hard questions. So I’m wondering if Andrae helps us ask the hard questions, and if not, how could he help us?
Stephen Newby
Stephen Newby: That’s a hard question. In WEB DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folks, he talks about a double consciousness and how you are fully aware that you are in these spaces that never were created for you. And you don’t need an introduction to that notion.
Andrae stepped into these spaces knowing what was coming into fruition were the prayers of our ancestors. And simply put, Andrae sung his prayers. I don’t recall him ever saying that 11:00 in the morning is the most segregated place in America. Obviously King said that. But Andrae wanted us to focus not on Martin Luther King, but on Jesus the king.
He understood that if we lift up Jesus, everybody would be drawn to Jesus, because Andrae really tried to live out this idea of evangelism. The Bible, these words, these ideas, it’s not only for everybody, but also, I can put this in all of these musical genres.
So when he stepped into a place, he believed he needed to be in places for everybody. If there was anything about race that he was going to talk about, it was the Christian race.
GG: One of the things I find so inspiring about this work is that the two of you did it together. Could you talk a little bit about the process? I was telling Stephen earlier that I see your individual fingerprints all over this book. I know you both and I know your areas of expertise. So if you could talk a little bit about this collaboration and maybe a little bit about why you think it’s important for people to see you working on it together.
SN: Well, maybe we can go back and forth, but I do want to say this. I think Andrae modeled that for us with Bill Maxwell. Andrae was a pianist. Bill Maxwell was a drummer. I’m a pianist. Bob is a drummer.
RD: And I’m the white guy.
SN: And you are the white guy. The right guy. You have to partner with the right people. Before we even got to this project, we invited Bob to Seattle. He saw the kind of radical racial reconciliation work I was doing through gospel music. And I think gospel music for me always has been a resource to bring people together.
Andrae Crouch
I saw Bob’s heart with it, how he would treat people, what his research was about. And I’ll say it this way, if you really want to know what people are like, see who’s in their homes, who’s going to show up at their weddings, what their funerals are going to look like. Bob and Mary (Bob’s wife, writer and visionary Mary Landon Darden) have such an open, welcoming, Holy Spirit hospitality.
I think this kind of scholarship is necessary, is critical. We’ve talked about this a lot; the process and the journey is just as important as the end result. Because if we get so focused on creating an artifact, we miss the art in the fact that we need to be together.
Bob said this so well in his article, we’re better together. I became not only a better writer, better communicator, better thinker, but I became a better person. You have to learn how to practice the fruit of the Spirit, being hospitable, being kind, being patient, having joy, having self-control. I’d say something, Bob would say something, and we are biting our tongues, but at the same time, we’re abiding in the Spirit. We were living life together and we still are.
RD: We thought we were in for disaster when the pandemic hit. But all of a sudden with the pandemic, people would let us into their homes and we could do multiple interviews in a day if that’s what people wanted, and we insisted that both of us be on each one.
And that mattered to the people we were interviewing, Black and white, but particularly Black. We were talking about that this morning. Doors were opened to us emotionally, spiritually, memory. Not everything we could use in the book, but they saw our honesty and our love for what this was and for each other.
As Skip Gates (Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates) said, “Man, I was afraid this was going to be a hagiography, but there’s warts and all in here.” I think that had to be true to the people who were talking to us.
We’d been friends and colleagues working together right up to the pandemic. Never lived in the same town. We’d see each other once a year. But we knew once the pandemic was over our relationship had changed. The later chapters are better for it, and that’s partly because we decided early on, unlike some of my earlier books, we’re going to do this chronologically for the exact purpose that we wanted to experience in real time what Andrae was trying to do and see how he learned, and then how we learned with it. And our questions meant, of course, we had to go back when we got to the end for the stuff we had missed.
GG: Why does Andrae Crouch matter for us right now?
SN: It’s this idea of going back to the core of what gospel music is really about. This song, you don’t have to jump any pews, run down the aisles, no chills run down your spine, but you’ll know you’ve been born again. Gospel doesn’t have to try to be cool, but if you’re tied into the idea of what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus and to love God with all your heart, soul and mind, to love your neighbor as yourself, that’s more cool than whatever could happen in the music.
When you do that, then the music you do is going to be phenomenal. It’s going to rule the airwaves because you’re actually doing something that advances the kingdom. And God is going to say, “I’m just not going to let this sit dormant. I’m going to lift this up. I’m going to do something with it.” And so that’s what we can learn about Andrae. Andrae was not trying to be popular. He was trying to be kingdom of God relevant.
RD: He was a pastor. He probably could have been a lot bigger with his live albums if he hadn’t given a rat’s ass that it was a live album and that this particular congregation in Manchester, England, needed ministry instead of pop songs. The bands talked to us later and they said, we hadn’t played some of those songs ever. And he goes into old hymns because it’s an older audience, and he read the room instead of reading his ego.
“It never was a performance, it was always a service.”
SN: Bob, he read the room and people need to do that more.
RD: That’s what we can learn. It never was a performance, it was always a service. This works because of who Andrae is and what he believes and does. But it also works because the crafting of the songs is eternal. They will still be singing these songs 50 years from now because they have that ministry component.
Every song had a Bible verse or more. Each one was drenched in prayer and the absolute best musicianship money could buy, players much up above his record labels’ weight. Because when they would hear “Soon and Very Soon,” in the process of playing this song, secular people would say, “This song is anointed.”
A singer said, “We had to stop singing because the Holy Spirit overwhelmed us and we all collapsed into tears. And I have done a thousand of these sessions for our secular and religious artists.”
Hadn’t happened before, hadn’t happened since. And some of the fun stories we got to use were people from the rock and roll world like Buddy Miles sitting in, had come off doing Them Changes in another studio and by the end of the song is on the floor, face down worshiping the Lord like he hadn’t done since his childhood.
GG: What is giving you hope and giving you courage to move forward?
SN: Well, I think working with the next generation. When I see these young minds, I know God has called me to teach here at Baylor. It is a form of discipleship at the highest level, I think. And that gives me joy to come on campus and to be with the students. I mean, this is a beloved community. I’m very thankful to God for that.
And someone asked, “How do you feel now that the book is done?” And I said, I have joy. I had been holding those Andrae Crouch albums that take me back to being a kid and listening and looking at the inserts and looking at the beloved community, folks who were Black and white and Hispanic. I said, I want to play with Andrae one day. Never got to do that. But I never imagined I’d be able to write about him at this level.
RD: Not having to come on campus brings me a great deal of joy. I loved teaching right up to the last minute. I was spoiled rotten. But the actual answer I hadn’t known until we started doing interviews together, I have learned so much about not just Stephen, but about Andrae from our interviews because we’ve walked out of several interviews saying, “I didn’t know that” to each other. He has brought out things for me that have made it richer.
But mostly living with Stephen in these close quarters as I watch his mind work, as a white guy and a drummer. The book continues through Stephen to teach me a great truth. I have thought this would be my last of this kind of book. That part of it’s given me so much happiness and joy that I would consider another if it was a topic I felt this strongly about.
Greg Garrett
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.
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