New York, Gospel In

New York, Gospel In The term “gospel” was not commonly used in New York until the 1940s, but its musical and social precursors had a firm presence in the city for several decades before that. Although New York’s black population dated back to the 1700s, it was the mass arrival of Southern black migrants before World War I that brought the musical and spiritual tenets of gospel performance to the city. Attempting to escape economic hardship and brutal racial oppression, migrants settled in and…