I Remember Gospel and I Keep On Singing – Minister Gene D. Viale

I Remember Gospel and I Keep On Singing
Minister Gene D. Viale
Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010
257 pp. with Illus.
www.geneviale.com

Gene Viale has quite a story to tell.

His is a unique perspective on the gospel music business during and after the golden age, and he chronicles it in his recently published autobiography, I Remember Gospel and I Keep On Singing.

Viale was one of the first non-African Americans to sing gospel music to a predominantly African-American audience, and he did it as a member of the Cleveland Singers. (Elizabeth Meagher of the Exodus Singers was another). While Viale was often considered white, he was in fact Latino, and as such encountered similar humiliations as his fellow singers, such as developing kidney problems from having to drive hundreds of miles through the Jim Crow south without access to a bathroom for non-whites. Other trials were particular to his situation, including a tense moment at Chicago’s storied Mt. Pisgah Church when a group of young Black Muslims were ready to mess him up for singing their music, but changed their minds after hearing him.

Interesting stories that Viale tells include how the famed Jessy Dixon Singers served as the background singers on his 1968 solo album, What Color is God (Checker), and how the Caravans might have done the honors. He chronicles the controversy over the album’s jacket cover that all but sunk any chances at continued radio play. Other tidbits, such as how Chicago’s popular radio minister, Bishop James Anderson of the Redeeming Church of Christ, was once a member of the Katherine Dunham dance troupe, are the stuff that make historians fist pump.

I Remember Gospel places the reader in the middle of the golden age of gospel, with all of its triumphs and tragedies, joy and sorrow, elation and disappointment. Along the way, the reader meets Mahalia Jackson, Sallie Martin, Thomas A. Dorsey, James Cleveland, Albertina Walker and the Caravans, Dorothy Love Coates, Sandra and Andrae Crouch, Danniebelle Hall, and so many more — those who gilded the golden age and those who reshaped gospel into a contemporary form.

Written in a conversational style, as if Viale is simply recounting the story of his life around the dinner table, I Remember Gospel radiates a warm and generous spirit on every page. It is written with dignity, grace and humility, a remembrance of a career with highs and lows but always anchored in family, friends, faith, hope and enduring gratitude for blessings bestowed. Gene Viale keeps on singing, indeed, and his resilency as an artist and minister is perhaps the real crux of the story.