To celebrate Black Music Month, I recruited Levine Museum of the New South historian Tom Hanchett. If you’ve never heard one of Hanchett’s talks please make a point to attend one of his lectures. He can explain everything from the city’s confusing street names to the rise and fall of historic black communities uptown.
In this edition of Black Music Month, Hanchett writes about Charlotte shout bands.
Charlotte is one of the centers for the trombone “shout band” tradition. These praise bands, comprised of as many as a dozen trombones supported by drums, tuba and baritone horn, are found only in the United House of Prayer for All People. The music may have started in the Newport News area of Virginia in the 1940s; by the 1950s it had spread throughout the whole of the church, extending from the Carolinas and Georgia up into New England. Charlotte holds the denomination’s biggest North Carolina congregation, the “mother house” on Beatties Ford Road, along with more than a dozen churches in outlying neighborhoods, and each has one or more shout bands – the largest concentration of the music in the U.S.
Be at the mother house Tuesday evening Sept 14 for the annual GospelSHOUT! concert co-sponsored by Levine Museum of the New South highlighting this special musical tradition.
