![]() ![]() “Peace Be Still” made another high-profile emergence when singer Vanessa Bell Armstrong performed the hymn during the 1980s, he said. So that album was sort of the watershed.” “There were dozens and then hundreds of churches, a lot of choirs and a lot of other groups singing ‘Peace Be Still’ after that. The recording was entered into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry and into the Grammy Hall of Fame, Marovich added. “By the end of the 1960s, it was still selling.” The album would go on to sell up to 800,000 copies in an era when 50,000 copies was considered a hit for gospel recordings, he said. The phones rang off the hooks at the radio stations that were playing gospel music.” “When people heard this song on the radio, they went crazy. 19, 1963, recording was an immediate and huge hit, Marovich said. James Cleveland remembered ‘Peace Be Still’ from his days in Los Angeles.” “They had done two of these albums, and it came around time to do album three and the Rev. “This idea of hearing a gospel chorus in a church setting with congregations speaking back to the choir, and enjoying it, really was quite popular,” he said. And then it just started to disappear.”īut the song began its re-emergence through arrangements and performances in Black churches and other venues in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s, which eventually got the attention of Cleveland, a songwriter, arranger, singer and pioneer “of what you might call the modern choir recording movement,” Marovich said.Ĭleveland, then under contract with Savoy Records, began recording live, in-service albums with the Angelic Choir at First Baptist Church in Nutley, N.J. … Between 1874 and probably 1920 was its great first wave. “It was still pretty much a white Protestant hymn. At this point in time, the song really hadn’t entered the African American church,” he explained. Marovich shared an early cylinder recording of the hymn during the Nov. The hymn was written by Horatio Palmer, choir director at Second Baptist Church in Chicago, and Baptist temperance advocate Mary Ann Baker. For example, when President Chester Garfield was assassinated (in 1881), ‘Peace Be Still’ was sung at his funeral service.” It was sung at funerals in addition to Sunday schools. “We know that the song … was somewhat popular when it first came out. The song, Marovich said, reached both white and Black Christians with “this sense of overcoming, resisting and emerging victorious through Christ.” ![]()
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