In 1994, then living in northwest Indiana, I stopped off at some record store in a town nearby, for reasons I no longer remember. There, I accidentally stumbled on a four-CD set entitled Roots and Blues: A Retrospective, put out by Columbia. There was, at that time, no category for what we now call “Americana” or “No Depression” recordings, and the most important compilation ever made of southern religious recordings from the 1920s to the 1940s, the six-CD set Goodbye Babylon, was more than a decade from being released. (Side note: the Roots and Blues compilation is still one of the best of this genre that you can get, much superior even than the famous “Anthology of American Folk Music” collected by Harry Smith in the 1950s and now available on CD.)

Coming home and sampling the CDs, I came across a cut from the Reverend James M. Gates, then completely unknown to me. He was doing his classic “Death's Black Train is Coming.” I did not then know that this particular side, innovatively captured by Columbia engineers with recorded by the Rev. Gates in his home congregation in 1926, had sold more than 54,000 copies as a single after its release. The Rev. Gates's most popular recordings outsold contemporary pressings by Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and almost every black artist of the era. From the royalties of just two of most popular sides alone, Gates made as much (about $1200) as did Professor Benjamin Mays annually for his teaching at Morehouse College, or as did the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. (a friend of Gates's), for his pastoring a large church in Atlanta.

Record companies in search of talent caught dozens of black sermonizers in that era, and for a period from the mid-1920s until the early 1930s (and, for Gates, even down to World War II), pumped out a plethora of their pulpit stylings for consumers to purchase. They advertised aggressively in black newspapers, especially the Chicago Defender, that had a national market of distribution, and they kept their records available for purchase in local grocery stores (and, later, chain stores such as Woolworth's, even though the Rev. Gates recorded one fierce sermon entitled “Say Good-bye to Chain Stores”). Some of the sermonizing performers were successful, none more so than Gates. Some were not. One who flopped was the Rev. Sutton E. Griggs, a well-known minister and member of the black literati of the era. “To succeed as a race we must move out of the age of the voice,” he had said in the 1910s. But in 1928, he cut a recorded sermon, done in a “respectable” style according to the norms of what Lerone Martin refers to as the “Black Protestant Establishment.” The market gave its verdict on Griggs's effort, and he was never invited back to record.

Contrasting the experiences of Gates and Griggs suggests much about the meaning of studying all this preaching on wax. Perhaps most importantly, replaying black religious ritual on the phonograph “packaged the central ritual and tenet of Protestant Christianity for the marketplace; the preached word” (5). As Martin also puts it, “preaching on wax made black Christianity a mass-produced commodity.” Recorded sermonizing, moreover, made straight the path for later generations of modern religious broadcasters, and helped to create the first generation of “commercial celebrity preachers.” There is a straight line, in other words, from the Reverend J. M. Gates to the Rev. C. L. Franklin and later to the Rev. T. D. Jakes. “The difference between black commercial celebrity preachers of then and now,” Martin argues, “is one of technological and financial scale, not religious ideology” (8). Even as the status of the black ministry was in relative decline through the interwar years, the status of the celebrity preachers was in ascent—and this had to do with marketability of the message and delivery, not education or any traditional basis of moral authority.

Precisely for that reason, as well, preachers on wax faced limitations on what they could and could not preach. Market power overruled moral authority. The Rev. Gates could preach against chain stores, and late in his career sermonized against racism, but in general, as Martin argues, “there was little room in the phonograph industry specifically, and the commercial entertainment business more broadly,” for aggressive critiques of the trends and ills of modern consumer culture,” precisely because their products were the creations of that culture (168).

One of those “ills” actually involved the process of producing the tens of thousands of records demanded by consumers on short order. They came from a factory in Grafton, Wisconsin, in which workers labored in terrible sweatshop conditions, with shellac dripping on them in rooms that could be well over one hundred degrees in the summertime.

The short epilogue to this work briefly gestures at the generation of even more successful sermonizers—most notably the Reverend C. L. Franklin—who were to come in the post—World War II era. I might have liked to see that point developed more fully at the end of this work. But that is my only (and very minor) criticism of a stellar first book from this important young scholar. Martin's work joins a new generation of scholars exploring the porous boundaries of “religion” and “entertainment” in twentieth-century black life, recently including books by Cara Caddo, Wallace Best, Nick Salvatore, and others.

After reading this book, I now understand again, but really for the first time, what it was that entranced me when first listening more than twenty years ago to the Rev. Gates, a moment that altered the course of my scholarly career since. Thank you, Professor Martin, for that.