Roberta Martin
Roberta Martin trained as a classical pianist before a chance encounter with touring gospel singers redirected her toward the church, where she became one of Chicago's defining gospel composers, arrangers, and choral organizers. Leading the Roberta Martin Singers from the 1930s through the 1960s, she helped invent the modern gospel quartet-and-piano sound and used her own publishing house to launch a generation of gospel composers, including a teenage James Cleveland. She died in 1969, having shaped both the sound and the business of gospel music for over three decades.
As a young accompanist for the Young People's Choir at Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1931, Martin worked directly under choir directors Thomas Dorsey and Theodore Frye; witnessing a 1933 performance by gospel pioneer Bertha Wise's ensemble alongside Dorsey convinced her to abandon a planned concert-piano career for gospel entirely.
listen forDorsey's grave, hymn-like directness on 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' — a plea sung straight, without ornament — reappears in the sober, proclamatory delivery of the Roberta Martin Singers on 'God Is Still on the Throne.'
Scholars of gospel piano credit the blind Pentecostal pianist Arizona Dranes — whose driving, ragtime-and-barrelhouse playing on her 1926 Okeh sides was one of the first times such piano appeared on a gospel record — as a direct model for Martin's own playing, alongside her classical training.
listen forDranes's percussive, rolling left hand and ragtime syncopation on 'My Soul Is a Witness for the Lord' resurface, softened by Martin's conservatory technique, in the driving piano underneath the Roberta Martin Singers on 'Only a Look.'
With Dorsey's encouragement, Martin and Ebenezer choir director Theodore Frye organized the Martin-Frye Quartet in the early 1930s — the vocal group whose chorus-and-response, congregation-facing style of leading a room established habits Martin carried into the Roberta Martin Singers for the next three decades.
listen forNo commercial recording of Frye's own singing is known to survive, so listen instead for the traveling-revival call-and-answer structure he and Dorsey pioneered at Ebenezer — it's audible in how the Roberta Martin Singers pass the lead vocal back and forth against the full group on 'The Old Ship of Zion.'