Charlie Harding

I'm Charlie Harding.

I am the host of the podcast Switched On Pop.

It's a music podcast.

I'm also a music professor.

Christian music is a giant umbrella term that I feel like encompasses all religious music and music that even bleeds over into the secular world, some stuff that happens on the Hot 100.

But it's going to include gospel, Christian contemporary music, worship music, all different kinds of subgenres, including your traditional hymnals.

They're all going to

exists in this umbrella of Christian music.

I think the vast majority of modern Christian music draws heavily from the Black church.

So things like call and response, you know, that comes from a song like Wade in the Water, where you have a church leader or caller who's going to sing a line and then the community is going to sing a line back in response.

And that is used all over the place in Christian music as well as secular music.

Yeah.

Single Ladies by Beyonce is a call and response track.

Oh, yeah.

If you think about the sonic signifiers of gospel music beyond call and response, things like vocal ornamentation, those big, beautiful, melismatic runs that you hear in Whitney Houston, that comes from church music.

If you think about the beautiful harmonic progressions that you get in gospel, all of those sort of chromatic leading chords, those sort of crunchy in-between chords, you hear that kind of thing on Love on Top.

You hear it in Stevie Wonder, Love Is A Needed Love Today,

It all comes from Thomas Dorsey, who is sort of like the godfather of gospel music.

He was born in 1899, sharecropper, family, played blues and jazz, totally secular music, and then brought that sound into the world of gospel.

All of those sonic signifiers are what make gospel music, and they are ubiquitous in music across the board.