The success of Marjoe, Aretha Franklin's recent gospel album, and various gospel-rock and Jesus-schlock groups, singers, and Broadway shows, has stirred up a public interest in sacred music that has been burgeoning since the Edwin Hawkins Singers' chart-topping hits of several years ago. This inexorable historical trend has prompted Bernard Klatzko, a collector and researcher of early Afro-American music since the Fifties, to reissue some of the finest surviving recordings of early black gospel music (with comparative examples of contemporary white groups) in a definitive and long-overdue three-record series. Klatzko's friend and fellow collector Nick Perls' Yazoo label had already issued Ten Years of Black Country Religion, a collection of individual singer/guitarists and duets, so Klatzko concentrated on group recordings and on the extremely rare legacy of Blind Joe Taggart. It's apparently no accident that, heard together, the four records present a well-rounded picture of the roots of gospel music in this country while avoiding duplications.

Though the importance of African musical traditions to the early sounds of black America has long been given lip service, the details of cross-cultural interchange have remained obscure. It has been widely assumed that gospel simply developed when black Africans were taught/forced to learn the Anglo-American hymns of the protestant tradition, but even a cursory comparison of the Herwin and Yazoo records with field recordings from West Africa demonstrates that the process was much more complex. In Early Jazz, composer/musicologist Gunther Schuller lists "three basic canons" of West African music: "The foundations of a regular substructure, in other words, the beat; the superimposition thereon of improvised or semi-improvised melodies in variable meters and rhythms; a call-and-response format." Elsewhere in his book, Schuller identifies "the repeated refrain concept" and "the chorus format of most recreational and cult dances" as typical of African formal procedures. All these elements are present in the recordings of early black sanctified artists like Bessie Johnson, Lonnie MacIntorsh, and Elder Richard Bryant. It is true that the material these artists work with often comes from the white tradition, but this material is in most cases shaped and twisted to fit the African aesthetic.

Bessie Johnson, for instance, begins the verses of "What Kind of Man Jesus Is" where the last beat of the preceding measure would ordinarily fall; a comparative recording of the same tune by a white group (both are on Herwin 202) reveals a Western sense of order. Here the verses and accents are regular and symmetrical. On the same album, Bessie Johnson's collaborations with guitarist Lonnie MacIntorsh are especially revealing. Their two incontestable masterpieces, "The 1927 Flood" and "The Latter Rain is Fall," deal with the flooding of the delta farmland in 1927, an important impetus to the urban migrations which followed. In addition to presenting performances of incredible intensity and power, the tunes follow the African canon. They tend toward superimposed meters over the basic pulse and feature call-and-response and repeated refrains in a chorus format which, in a sanctified service, doubtless stretched far beyond the three-minute limits of the 78 rpm record. The melodic content and shouting harmonizing on these cuts is reminiscent of music from the central African rain forests. European elements, such as a tendency toward more metric regularity and a suggestion of white hymnal chord changes, take a back seat.

In fact, MacIntorsh's guitar (also represented on Yazoo 1022) is as reminiscent of the halam of the Wolof minstrels of Senegal as it is of the early white Pentecostal guitarists. Blues authority Paul Oliver has traced blues guitar traditions to the griots, or wandering entertainers, of Africa's Savannah region (the grasslands separating the desert from the rain forests), thus demolishing another cherished assumption of musical historians, namely that the blues developed from an amalgam of spirituals, work songs, field hollers and the like. Since religious music was acceptable to whites, where the wandering bluesman with his aggressively sexual and sometimes anti-establishment attitude was not, it seems logical that the earliest bluesmen should have represented the "forbidden" African heritage.

Apparently the earliest blues styles are those of musicians like Charlie Patton, who was well into middle age when he recorded in the 1920s. His two-part "Prayer of Death" on Yazoo 1022 includes several traditional hymns (the religious folks didn't sing blues, but blues singers often sang religious songs), but there are also sections where Patton alternates half-sung preaching with arrhythmic interjections from his guitar, a pattern which many African griots still employ. On the same album, Crumpton and Summers' "Go I'll Send Thee" juxtaposes irregular verses of various lengths over a drone accompaniment, in classical Savannah style. As recordings spread they bred standardization, so that the "second generation" of recorded bluesmen for the most part abandoned such "irregularities" in favor of Western song forms and the codified 12-bar blues structure.

While the Yazoo album consists of uniformly excellent religious efforts by bluesmen like Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Jaybird Coleman, and Blind Willie Davis, Herwin 204 focuses on one bluesman-turned-evangelist, Blind Joe Taggart. Taggart came from the Southeast, and much of his music reflects the interpenetration of black and white country styles that has always been characteristic of the region. Vocally, Taggart is an impressive singer, somewhat reminiscent of Patton. His guitar playing often features a thumb roll not unlike that of the southeastern ragtime guitarist Blind Blake. Several of Taggart's pieces introduce the young Josh White in his first recordings; many of them are reminiscent of the guitar evangelists of the Bahamas, notably Joseph Spence, whose original version of "Great Dream from Heaven" (recently covered by both Ry Cooder and Van Dyke Parks) is on the Nonesuch album The Real Bahamas.

An entire album of Taggart may be too much for the casual listener; the Yazoo collection is broader and more representative. God Give Me Light is valuable for its juxtaposition of white and black sanctified styles and for a few unforgettable selections like the rocking "Memphis Flu" and the strangely prophetic "Babylon is Falling Down." But Bessie Johnson is the gem of the series. Little is known about Bessie, beside the fact that she belonged to the Church of God in Christ and recorded in Chicago, Memphis, and Atlanta. Her voice sounds like it could have leveled buildings and parted the waters; it certainly must have brought a multitude of sinners back to the fold. A number of aficionados consider her singing far superior to that of Bessie Smith, and certainly her recordings with Lonnie MacIntorsh and with the Memphis Sanctified Singers rival John Coltrane's Ascension for their concentration of ecstatic spiritual energy. Hers is an essential body of work, as exciting and moving as anything in the history of Afro-American music.

Herwin records are $5.95 separately, $5 each for two or more, from P.O. Box 306, Glen Cove, N.Y. 11542. Yazoos are the same, from 54 King Street, New York, N.Y. 10014. Postage is included. (RS 119)

ROBERT PALMER