Their Joyful Noise : Gospel Music Fills a Quaker Church

On a balmy evening, gospel music billows rich and soulful from the doors of a hilltop church. The notes carry the sound of the Mississippi Delta. But this hill overlooks no heartland of black gospel, and this church is hardly Southern Baptist.

It is a Quaker Church in a very-white corner of Orange County, and almost all the people in this unusual gospel choir are white.

Here, at Richard Nixon’s childhood church, music has meandered across lines of race, religion and age, gathering in its arms a group that simply wants to praise the Lord with song.

The 14 members of the Yorba Linda Friends Church gospel ensemble, which gives its first performance on Sunday, are young and older, white and black, Quaker, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist. All say they are driven to bring the Lord’s message to the unreached.

“Race has nothing to do with it,” said Bert Ferguson, 59, a dentist who was raised a Baptist and is one of only two black members of the group. “We come from different religions, too. But there’s a feeling among all of us that we are just singing for the Lord.”

Directing this friendly, eclectic group is Sylvia Cotton, a black woman steeped in the Southern Baptist gospel tradition, a cousin of gospel legend Mahalia Jackson and a powerful singer in her own right. She said she organized the ensemble because she sensed that members of the congregation craved a more emotional expression of their faith.

When she started the choir seven weeks ago, Cotton saw that her charges had a long way to go before they let go of the restrained, conformist styles of worship and singing that they have known since childhood.

“They were church mice, very quiet, they had a humble spirit,” Cotton said. “They wouldn’t move. They stood like their feet were in concrete. They wouldn’t sing out, put anything in it. Now, they move and clap and sway and really get going. Now I can’t keep ‘em still.”

Cotton, 36, cut her musical teeth in the gospel choirs of her native New Orleans, where Mahalia Jackson sang in her church. As a teen-ager whose family moved to the West Coast in the late 1960s, Cotton sang with many gospel choirs in South-Central Los Angeles. Organizing her Orange County group, she labored hard to teach them the most authentic gospel and spiritual styles she could.

At a recent rehearsal, the ensemble was still struggling to perfect the step-and-sway motion, the arm-swinging and hand-clapping that Cotton learned in choirs as a child. But they had pretty much mastered the word pronunciations she had taught them, trying to keep as close as possible to a singing style that traces its origins to the days of slavery in the Old South. Their voices blended into a slow, shaded spiritual.

“ Soon-ah will be done wid da trouble of da worl’... “ they sang. “ Goin’ home to live wid God... “

As the ensemble practices, three small, blond children cavort in the church, the two boys running about the aisles, while the girl, a tiny toddler, swings her hips and claps joyfully to the music. Cotton, her fingers easing over the piano keys, black-white, white-black, rolls her head back, her soprano voice improvising a shimmering, triumphant melody above the choir.

Ensemble members say the expressive style of singing, so different from what they knew growing up in church, has opened up new emotional vistas for them.

“All my life, I sat there in church when everyone was singing, and I wanted to raise my hand or say something , but I never felt like I could,” said Cheryl Roach, 28, a dental assistant who grew up Methodist.

“Now, with gospel music I feel like I have a much more personal relationship with God. I don’t worry about what people around me think. I just sing God’s praises.”

One member of the ensemble told Cotton that he had been feeling “bundled up inside” for years, as if he was waiting for some kind of release, and when he began to sing in rehearsal he burst into tears.

Although gospel choirs are not limited to blacks anymore, there are few--if any other--primarily white gospel groups in Orange County. The anomaly of bringing the fervent, boisterous music of gospel into a Quaker church, whose style of worship has traditionally favored long periods of silence, has not escaped Cotton. But she says all worshipers need the power it offers.

“When you sing, it’s a ministry,” she said. “People come to church empty, starved, depressed, hungry. They want to be relieved, to express themselves, to give some kind of witness that God is working. God honors different ways of worship, and he says to make a joyful noise.”

At the 81-year-old Friends Church in Yorba Linda, the oldest Quaker congregation in Orange County, gospel music is just one of many departures from Quaker tradition. Unlike most Quaker churches, communion and baptism are offered here. The nonconformist style of the congregation has made it comfortable for people of many denominations, members say.

Karen Miller, 47, who has attended Quaker and Baptist churches most of her life, said the songs she is singing with the gospel ensemble will “really liven up” the services. For her, the gospel music, with its roots in spirituals, hymns, blues and jazz, takes her back to her teen years, when she cranked up the stereo for the Platters, the Temptations, Sam and Dave or the Four Tops.

“I always loved that music,” said Miller, a homemaker. “It really gives me an uplift. So when I heard about the gospel ensemble forming, I thought, ‘That’s my kind of music.’ ”

Jennifer Burke, 37, an aerobics instructor, said the music she usually sings in the more traditional Friends Church choir is “usually not too rip-roaring.” Gospel music offers her a more powerful way to reach members of the congregation and the community, she said.

“Sometimes they need a jolt of something a little different to make a renewed commitment to God.

“The pews are going to rock,” she said, smiling. “Anyone who’s snoozing through sermons is going to be awakened.”

Miller said the group has gotten over its initial reluctance to dance and shout.

“At the first rehearsal, one of the members said, ‘Uh-oh, you can’t dance in a Quaker Church.’ And I said, ‘In the Bible, David played the trumpet, danced, sang and played the harp praising God.’ ”

Like the ensemble sings in their opening song:

We are on our waaaaay/

to that land of perrrr-fect daaay/ We are on our waaaaay/

We’re on our journey home...