As his musical ability improved, Thomas began playing for churches, house rent parties, bordellos, and women’s teas to help supplement his family’s income. In 1916, at the age of 17 ...

February 25, 2020 • Almost 40 years since its cinematic release, a restoration brings this documentary featuring Thomas A. Dorsey and Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith back to life. January 7 ...

In Pilgrim’s heyday, Dorsey attracted singer Mahalia Jackson, founded the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses and started a publishing house to ... as well as Thomas A.

Narrator] At age 13, Thomas Dorsey dropped out of school and got a job selling sodas at the 81 Theater, a vaudeville house in Atlanta's Red Light District. - You had a lot of honky-tonk ...

Built in 1890, the church became a catalyst for the popularity of gospel music in the 1930s under choir director Thomas Dorsey. A massive fire in Chicago has destroyed a landmark church.

Like most obituaries, the death notice for Thomas A. Dorsey offered a lot of facts, but told little of the life behind them. It said that he was the father of gospel music; that he had written ...

An inarticulate misery, and yet the desperate need to articulate it, is what brought the thunderous wonder of Thomas A. Dorsey’s ... to the Obama White House. “R.F.K. Jr. got so much ...

One of my prized possessions as a song historian is a 1977 recorded interview with Thomas A. Dorsey. I learned that in 1899, Dorsey was born into the home of a black minister in Villa Rica ...

Georgia Tom: Thomas A. Dorsey, the Father of Gospel Music, Bailiwick Repertory. Writer-director McKinley Johnson’s new musical biography combines powerful church-choir singing, Christmas-pageant ...

He came to the United States in 1937. Thomas Andrew Dorsey (July 1, 1899, Villa Rica, Georgia - January 23, 1993, Chicago). He is known as "the father of black gospel music" and was at one time so ...