Nobody has more vividly evoked the kind of supercharged evangelist-gospel atmosphere of Aretha Franklin's childhood than Black Novelist James Baldwin (a onetime Harlem storefront preacher). In his 1963 book, The Fire Next Time, he wrote:
THERE is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so...
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