I’ve said this many times before and will say it again here: You just never know what you’re going to find when you start looking up information about a piece of music. My choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale here in the Denver area, is closing its October 2022 concert with the piece “The Storm Is Passing Over.” The composition credit is listed as “Charles Albert Tindley, arranged by Barbara W. Baker.”
So the obvious question was, “Who were these people?” Let me start with Tindley, a fascinating figure in American history who was born before the Civil War and ended up as the pastor of a 10,000-member mega church. And this was before mega churches were even a thing. A-a-a-a-a-nd, he’d been the janitor of that church to begin with. It’s a great, great story. Tindley was the son of a slave father and a free mother (how that happened I have no idea), considered to be free himself because of her. When his mother died he went to live with his mother’s sister in order to keep his free status. But he was expected to earn his keep, as it were, and was routinely “hired out,” never having the opportunity to attend school. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say: