The New York Times, February 6, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

February 6, 2005 Sunday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 7; Column 2; Book Review Desk; Pg. 27

HEADLINE: A Preacher in Motown

BYLINE: By Angela D. Dillard.
Angela D. Dillard teaches history and politics at New York University's Gallatin School and is the author of a forthcoming book on religion and politics in Detroit from the 1930's to the 1960's.

BODY:
SINGING IN A STRANGE LAND
C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America.
By Nick Salvatore.
Illustrated. 419 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $27.95.
IN these days of growing affinity between evangelical Christians and the right, Nick Salvatore's life and times of the Rev. C. L. Franklin -- ''the preacher with the golden voice'' -- ''Singing in a Strange Land'' is a reminder of an earlier, happier age. Although Franklin's theological underpinnings were, like those of many other black ministers of his day and ours, deeply conservative, his politics were staunchly progressive. Pastor of Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church from 1946 until 1979 (when he was shot by burglars and entered a coma that lasted until his death more than five years later), and one of the leading figures in the Northern branch of the civil rights movement, Franklin helped set the tone of protest in the Motor City and beyond.
But it was as a preacher and a performer that Franklin came to prominence. At the height of his fame in the 1950's and 1960's he had a nationally broadcast Sunday radio program and traveled the country on the gospel tour circuit alongside the Clara Ward Singers, Little Sammy Bryant and Sam Cooke. Salvatore, who teaches American history at Cornell University, deals with both the sacred and the secular dimensions of Franklin's life and career: the influences of both the rich oral tradition of black Baptist preaching and the pulsating rhythms of the blues.
''The Afro-Baptist sermon was, at root, also a musical experience built as much on rhythm as on Scripture,'' Salvatore notes, but few other preachers' oratorical style had such ''an undeniable blues sensibility'' as Franklin's. His passion in the pulpit was matched only by his charismatic stage presence, particularly during the years spent touring with his equally talented children. His daughter Erma's hit song, ''Piece of My Heart,'' won her a Grammy nomination for best new artist in 1968; his daughter Aretha would become the Queen of Soul.
Franklin's ability to link prayer and song, preaching and performing, serves as the book's central motif. Born in 1915 in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, Franklin grew up poor and nearly illiterate. He was sustained by faith but also by the Delta blues that were sired by fellow Mississippians like B. B. King, Son House and Charley Patton. Salvatore makes ample use of lyrics and remembrances of Delta bluesmen to depict the brutality and beauty of Franklin's childhood.
The church saved him. In his early 20's, Franklin escaped from a probable life of sharecropping by parlaying his reputation as ''a boy preacher'' into the pastorates of small congregations he visited on a rotating basis. His journey toward respectability and fame paralleled the pattern of migration from rural to urban and from South to North trod by generations of Southerners before and after him. As Salvatore tells the story of Franklin's voyage from the Delta to Memphis and its fabled cultural crossroads, Beale Street, in the late 1930's, to Detroit in 1946, he traces the evolution of Franklin's use of radio and of his preaching style.
Franklin was a ''whooper'' -- a minister with a highly emotional and improvisational style, not a ''manuscript preacher'' who works from a tightly prepared text -- and it was in Memphis that he began to shed the constraints of biblical literalism and to explore the uses of radio to reach larger audiences. Although he struggled to overcome his lack of formal education, his sermons were intricate and learned. Much to Salvatore's credit, he explores the structure as well as the theological underpinnings of Franklin's signature sermons.
In ''Dry Bones,'' for instance, Franklin takes his text from Ezekiel 37: 1-4, using the Babylonian captivity of the Jews to draw a parallel to the situation of ''the Negro, when he embarked upon these shores'' and found an America that was ''a valley: a valley of slave huts, a valley of slavery and oppression, a valley of sorrow; so that often we had to sing; 'One of these days, I'm going to eat at the feasting table'; 'One of these days, the chariot of God will swing low.' ''
Salvatore helps us understand the passage and Franklin's symbolic appropriation of the scriptural valley of dry bones -- unusual among historians outside of religious studies, and welcome -- but is less successful at clinching the broader connection between Franklin, the black church and the transformation of America. Salvatore's discussion of the institutional significance of the black church in local struggles, for example, seems rushed and lacking in nuance. Still, the book is an absorbing study of a fascinating figure, and the author is not a hagiographer. He describes candidly Franklin's sexual and financial lapses, among other matters.
Just as he did in his biography of Eugene Debs, Salvatore displays an eye for detail and a willingness to hunt down new information. For example, the long and lyrical description of Franklin's baptism on the banks of the Sunflower River, on the fourth Sunday of August 1929, notes the ''white robes and white caps,'' the ''sloping green limbs of the cypress trees'' and the immersion symbolizing spiritual rebirth.
Salvatore spent hundreds of hours in Detroit talking with relatives and friends of Franklin and older members of the New Bethel congregation. He seems to have absorbed much of the city's distinctive political history, and to have tapped into the soul that moved Franklin in song and sermon and that thrived beneath the beat of Motown.