Obituary : Gwendolyn Lightner; Choir Director Gave Gospel Music on West Coast a Modern Beat

Gwendolyn Lightner, who as a pianist and musical director for church choirs in Los Angeles was a dynamic and pioneering figure in the evolution of gospel music on the West Coast, has died.

Lightner died Aug. 22 after a two-year battle with cancer. She was 74.

“She put the oomph in gospel music in California,” said Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, a professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA who co-edited “California Soul: Music of African Americans in the West.”

Born in Brookport, Ill., the fourth of six children of Mace and Florence Capps, Lightner began playing piano when she was 8. A year later her father died and an area family gave her mother a piano to help with Lightner’s musical education. By the time she was 10 she was playing for school activities and the church choir.

She attended Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and Lyon & Healy Academy of Music in Chicago.

After finishing her classical training in the early 1940s, she became seriously interested in gospel music through contacts with gospel giants such as Kenneth Morris, Roberta Martin and Emma Jackson, who also lived in Chicago.

In the 1940s, Morris began using a new style of piano accompaniment to gospel performances. The music had what one scholar, Bernice Johnson Reagon, called a “bounce” to it.

Reagon, the founder of the influential gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock, is curator emeritus in the division of community life at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

In reality the “bounce” heard in church had the same “beat” then becoming popular in secular music, and the use of those rhythms caused some controversy in traditional churches.

Lightner heard the “bounce” and asked Morris to teach her to play this new style that, with its opportunities for improvisation, often went against her formal training.

In the process, she created a sound that was a cross between Morris’ down-home earthiness and the more traditional style of gospel playing familiar to her.

Lightner, whom Reagon called a “brilliant exponent of classic gospel playing,” moved West after the war and was one of several musicians to bring the new sounds emanating from Chicago with her.

In her essay in “California Soul” titled “The California Black Gospel Music Tradition,” DjeDje says there was no great gospel music tradition in Los Angeles when Lightner arrived.

Up to that time, traditional hymns were being sung in churches. Shortly after her arrival, Lightner was hired to be the pianist at St. Paul Baptist Church by the Rev. John L. Branham, a Chicago native who wanted to incorporate that Midwest gospel sound in St. Paul’s services.

“The fact that she was hired to be the pianist at St. Paul was extremely significant to forging a new direction in gospel on the West Coast,” DjeDje said.

Along with J. Earle Hines, a nationally known gospel singer who became the director of St. Paul’s choir, Lightner formed the Echoes of Eden Choir and began moving away from the staid hymns of the past.

Albert Goodson, who grew up in Los Angeles and as a young man performed with the Echoes of Eden Choir before establishing himself as an influential gospel composer, organist and choral director, told DjeDje that in his youth “Hines was one of the first here with this . . . new type of singing. With all of this new music . . . the choir grew to 250 voices and nobody had heard a sound like that in this city. It just made people flock.”

The choir became the focal point of a nightly radio program on KFWB-AM (980), then owned by Warner Bros., said DjeDje, that was eventually heard in 17 states and had an audience believed to number about 1 million.

“People came from everywhere,” Lightner told DjeDje of the popularity of the choir and radio show. “We had people like Hattie McDaniels, Louise Beavers and Joe Louis. Nat King Cole was a friend of Rev. Branham. People would crowd into that church on Sunday night. They would get there early because we started at 10:30. And they would come to early service, like at 8, to get a good seat.”

Echoes of Eden became one of the first choirs in the country to record commercially, which it did for Capitol with two albums recorded in April and June 1947.

In the late 1950s, Lightner, this time with Thurston G. Frazier, another influential gospel director and composer, founded and organized another choir as a fund-raising effort for the March of Dimes. This choir, the Voices of Hope, became nationally known and stayed together to record albums and perform on television and throughout the country, including Disneyland.

By the early 1960s, Los Angeles had become a haven for gospel singers, according to DjeDje. That meant events such as the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses and the National Baptist Convention, which were usually held in the Midwest or East, were now coming to Los Angeles.

Lightner’s influence in the community continued to be significant. She became the musical minister for Bethany Missionary Baptist Church (now First Bethany) in 1956 and stayed in that position for the next 43 years. She taught music at Victory Baptist Day School for nearly 30 years.

On the national level Lightner was, among other things, the pianist for the National Baptist Convention U.S.A. for more than five decades and was director of music for the Western Baptist State Convention.

In the late 1960s, Lightner became the accompanist for the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson and stayed with her, both touring and recording, for six years until Jackson’s death in 1972.

Lightner’s health began to decline two years ago but she still insisted on attending conventions and playing when she could. Two weeks before she died, she wanted to attend a luncheon banquet in her honor at the Western Baptist State Convention.

In February, Lightner was a special guest and panelist for the National Conference on African American Gospel Music at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. She also recorded for “Wade In the Water,” a compilation of pioneering gospel composers from Smithsonian-Folkways Records.

She is survived by her husband, Peter Lightner; her children Deborah Lateef, Ricke Howell, Donna Ishibashi, Copelia Lightner, Raphael Lightner, Barron Lightner and Shelly Woods; one sister, Rosina Cargyle of Atlanta; 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.