Documentarian George T. Nierenberg's newly restored effort finds two gospel pioneers passing the torch to a younger generation in Chicago.
spent time with three onetime stars of tap dance, giving them a chance to shine on film at a moment when the genre had yet to enjoy its 1980s revival. His 1982 film does something similar for Chicago-style gospel music, though in this case the idiom had hardly faded; in fact, elderly subjects Thomas A. Dorsey and Willie Mae Ford Smith had been eclipsed commercially by stars who could have been their grandkids.
But this version of sacred music was not immediately accepted, even in the black congregations that would come to be most identified with it. Smith, a singer who teamed up with Dorsey in the early 1930s, recalls ministers telling her "we don't want that coon-shine stuff in here," and saying she "might as well be Bessie Smith." But Willie Mae Ford Smith was not a weak-willed sort.
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