A Place to Sing About
It is Wednesday night on East 99th Street in Inglewood, just a block from Hollywood Park racetrack, its card casino and other earthly temptations. Overhead, jetliners roar on their descent into LAX.
But none of that seems to register with Margaret Pleasant Douroux as she sits at the keyboard inside the green-carpeted and wood-beamed sanctuary of Greater New Bethel Baptist Church and starts to rehearse the congregation’s choir.
“When the Lord says move, mountains shake, valleys quake ... When the Lord says move, you’ve got to move.”
The 16 women and two men are practicing one of Douroux’s many songs. After work and dinner, the choristers look tired. Their harmonies aren’t meshing, their pronunciations aren’t crisp. But excuses aren’t good enough for the 65-year-old Douroux, a nationally revered -- and a bit feared -- teacher and composer of the gospel art.
“Come on, altos ... come on, tell us!” she shouts, acting at times like a sergeant with exasperating recruits and then like the encouraging grandmother she is.
Gradually, and then suddenly, the harmonies meld and become beautiful. Thrilling, actually. It doesn’t matter that airplanes thunder or some singers are absent. The choir members, swaying and waving, sing from the heart, and Douroux seems pleased yet unapologetic about working them hard.
After all, she stresses, singing gospel is a form of prayer.
“The music ministry is so crucial to the black church. I’m kind of protective of it,” Douroux, the daughter and sister of pastors, explains later. “I want it to be as special as I think God would want it to be.”
Her catalog of more than 200 songs (“Give Me a Clean Heart,” “Trees,” “Mercy That Suits”) landed her in the International Gospel Music Hall of Fame. Six of her pieces appear in the interdenominational African American Heritage Hymnal.
At a recent gospel convention in Dallas, more than 300 musicians lapped up her humorous, stern and deeply religious lectures like freshmen before a storied professor. Music experts on university campuses have included her and her traditional style of gospel in their research.
“Every Sunday morning, some church somewhere in the United States is singing a Margaret Douroux song. She is that prominent,” said professor Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, chairwoman of UCLA’s ethnomusicology department, who has written about gospel music.
But one goal still eludes Douroux.
For more than 20 years, she has tried to establish what she calls Gospel House, a museum and concert hall in the Los Angeles area that would celebrate music that has nourished black churches and deeply influenced the secular world, from Motown to Broadway, since the 1920s.
“It’s a rich heritage,” she explained. “It has been a strong foothold for black America for its entire history, and it is one of the truest art forms of America.”
Though her plans have been stymied for decades, she and her nonprofit Heritage Music Foundation continue to press for Gospel House. “I’m really, really hoping,” she said. “I have to pray that God will lead me to the right spot.”
*
Douroux grew up in a family, neighborhood and time that left her with a deep respect for tradition and an ache for its losses.
Her father, the Rev. Earl A. Pleasant, was a singer who toured with his friend, gospel superstar Mahalia Jackson, before he founded Mount Moriah Baptist near the Coliseum. Her mother, Olga, who died in July, organized choirs and taught her five daughters and one son to play piano.
Douroux, a shy organist, gradually took on choir leadership at the church in the 1960s, eventually succeeding her mentor, Thurston G. Frazier, who had been music minister there and who founded the well-known Voices of Hope choir.
She wrote her first song, “Give Me a Clean Heart,” in 1970, and it caught on after Frazier introduced it at a national gospel convention.
Douroux studied music at Cal State L.A. but never intended it as a career. She earned a master’s degree in education at USC and worked as an educational psychologist in Los Angeles schools.
In 1963, she married Donald Douroux, a now-retired brick mason. He plays electric bass at church and is, she says, a “genius” with sound systems. (They have a daughter, Mardy, and three grandchildren.)
After the 1974 death of Douroux’s father, a painful schism at Mount Moriah caused the Pleasant family to leave the church. Her brother, also named Earl A. Pleasant, became pastor at Greater New Bethel, where she later took over the music.
“It was like a bird pushing us out of the nest,” Douroux said of her father’s death.
Douroux got a boost outside black churches in the early 1980s when Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker recorded her “We’re Blessed” and “If It Had Not Been for the Lord on My Side.” Because her husband earned a good living, she soon quit her school job to pursue music further.
Douroux, who looks a decade younger than her age despite a touch of gray atop her shoulder-length hair, composes mainly away from the piano, often hooking onto an idea while driving or doing chores in her suburban ranch-style home in Agoura. “You Got to Move” was inspired by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. It refers to divinely ordered storms and quakes, but Douroux also had in mind how California brush fires can destroy one house but skip another.
“It’s things you can’t explain that make us understand the reality of a higher source, a higher being,” Douroux said in her tiny church office. “It’s the mystery of how God works.”
In 1983, Douroux formed her foundation. Its motto: “Classical music has Carnegie Hall, country music has the Grand Ole Opry. Gospel music needs a museum and theater: the Gospel House.”
Such a museum, she believes, would showcase the sound that marries blues and jazz with traditional hymns and spirituals as it speaks to God and celebrates him.
Its improvisational forms, passionate overriding solos and hand-clapping beats at first shocked conservatives in the 1920s. But gospel pioneers such as Chicago composer and pianist Thomas Dorsey became very popular as the music took hold in many black churches. Over time, gospel powerfully influenced mainstream music too, through the likes of Aretha Franklin and Al Green and the 1969 success of “Oh Happy Day” by the Edwin Hawkins Singers. More recently, it has absorbed rock and rap.
To preserve all of that, Douroux sought at various times an Inglewood nightclub, a city-owned theater in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park and the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple on Wilshire Boulevard. The facility would have a concert hall, classrooms for singing lessons, a library of sheet music and deep archives of recordings.
But she acknowledges her business inexperience may have hampered matters as real estate prices kept rising. No big-bucks patron pledged what Douroux now estimates might need to be $12 million. And, some city officials were leery of the religious overtones and her group’s ability to run a center.
Rodena Preston, national minister of music of the Gospel Music Workshop of America, which is headquartered in Detroit, said she admires Douroux’s persistence. “Probably the average person would have given up by now,” said Preston, a Los Angeles-area resident and sister of the late Beatles protege and keyboardist, Billy Preston.
Finally, two years ago, some good news came from Westwood.
About $38,000 in grants, mainly from UCLA’s Center for Community Partnerships, funded a project called Gospel Archiving in Los Angeles. It linked the school’s ethnomusicology archive and Douroux’s foundation.
Researchers videotaped Douroux’s workshops and concerts, and UCLA archivists last year digitized about 100 hours’ worth for public view. (Her foundation is preparing for classes and concerts Wednesday through Saturday at the Crowne Plaza Hotel near LAX and at Greater New Bethel.)
Douroux’s collection of about 400 LPs and cassettes, including many rarities donated to her foundation, had gathered dust in church closets and her garage. Douroux lent them to UCLA, where some are being digitized for on-campus use.
“The material is tremendous. It is so rich, so rich, and now it is there for everyone to have access,” DjeDje said.
In part, the UCLA project sought to bring Los Angeles gospel out of the shadows of Chicago and Detroit and to honor Southern California artists such as the Rev. James Cleveland, who died in 1991, and fellow Grammy winner Andrae Crouch, senior pastor of New Christ Memorial Church in Pacoima.
Douroux is pleased the university has the collection, but she still holds out hope for her museum. She calls the efforts to found Gospel House a “test of commitment, because once you have a vision, it’s always in your heart.”
*
The hall at the Dallas Convention Center is blander than bland, with rows of folding chairs beneath fluorescent lights.
The air conditioning is beating the 101-degree Texas summer heat. But as Douroux approaches the microphone, the atmosphere warms up for the 300 choir members and conductors awaiting her at the annual Gospel Music Workshop of America convention.
“How many of you have problems with soloists?” she asks to widespread laughter of self-recognition. “Some people can’t find one. Others have too many -- too many of the ones who don’t know that they can’t sing.”
Soft-spoken one-on-one, Douroux becomes a bold and sometimes sarcastic lecturer in public. She has the commanding presence and cadences of a preacher, a path she says she might have pursued if born a generation later and into a different church.
Her class is a highlight of the weeklong convention, which combines old-time religion with the hustle of the modern recording industry.
“People crowd into that class year after year to hear her insult them,” says Douroux’s friend V. Michael McKay, a successful composer. He describes her teaching as a “cleansing.”
McKay recalled how he showed up at a convention a few years ago with a new look: long dreadlocks, flashy clothes and a body muscled up from weightlifting. Douroux confronted him: “You are so fine, we can’t see God anymore. You’re giving us too much of yourself, and we can’t get to your music.”
McKay said he was angry until “I realized it took a Margaret Douroux to be that honest with me.” He later trimmed his hair and removed some of the other “distractions.”
As Douroux tells the Dallas crowd, gospel is about praising the Lord, whether infused with the increasingly popular hip-hop beat or performed in the traditional style she favors.
“You shout because of who God is in your life,” she testifies. “You shout because he kept you all week long. You shout because he kept you on the busy streets and the freeway, and you ain’t seen no freeway until you get to Los Angeles.”
She then gives a cue, and the organist, keyboardist and drummer hit the opening of her “I Am All I Am,” a slowly paced number that takes hold and won’t let go.
“I am all I am because of Christ in my life.”
Douroux, arms whirling and fingers pointing, urges the singers to stretch the “ohs,” climb up to the “joys.” And they do, joyfully.
Earlier, she had talked again about building Gospel House -- even though it already thrives in her songs and her students.
“He’s my joy in time of sorrow. He’s my hope for tomorrow. Oh, I am all I am.... “
Douroux begins a counterpoint solo, her raspy alto riffing over and under the tune in a style so familiar to black churches. As the song is repeated, the huge convention room begins to feel like a holy space, a real Gospel House.
