The Tompkins Square record label specializes in digging up treasures of American music history, often finding rarely heard gems and re-releasing them—as they did in the magnificent gospel compilations Fire in My Bones (2010) and This May Be My Last Time Singing (2011). Now they've done it again with a release of all 16 songs ever recorded by blind pianist Arizona Dranes, who revolutionized gospel music in the1920s via her raucous playing and singing. The album comes with a booklet about Dranes' life, a compelling read that's almost as good as the music itself. Here's an abbreviated version of those notes.
When Arizona Dranes, blind and broke and a little wary, took a train from Fort Worth to Chicago in June 1926 to record for OKeh Records, there was no assurance that anything would come out of the trip. OKeh told her they were only making "test records" with no guarantee to release them for sale.
No one had ever made a gospel record before that featured piano. And no label had yet tried to market the raucous, sanctified sounds of the Pentecostal church to the new "race records" audience. Arizona Dranes would be the first of her kind.
Whatever trepidation OKeh might've had evaporated on June 17, 1926 when Dranes sat at the piano and, with six songs recorded that day, created a spirit/ flesh communion that would later be known as "the gospel beat." Her locomotive hands drove each other, with the percussive left—the rhythm section—dancing on and around the beat like a jazz bassist, while her right improvised octaves and ran syncopated motives alongside the melody.
This drawling church lady from Texas was playing ragtime, barrelhouse and boogiewoogie! But her piercing, otherwordly voice and lyrics of deep praise were so filled with the Holy Spirit that the music was undeniably Christian.
The first musical star of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the Pentecostal denomination that brought instruments, dancing, and polyrhythmic handclaps to the black church in an era of assimilation, Dranes is strangely unknown today except to small baskets of admiring musicians and prewar record collectors. Perhaps that's because she always listed her occupation as missionary or evangelist—not musician—and looked the part.
Dranes didn't release a record again after 1928 and rarely played public concerts, drifting into an obscurity which suggests that what happens in church stays in church. Until recently, the only known photo of her was a smiling blur from 1943.
There was no obituary marking her death from a stroke in 1963 at age 74. Nothing in the papers about the first known gospel piano player, who could claim as a legacy the rich tradition of female pianists in the field. While most great keyboardists of R&B and jazz were and are male, the gospel field counts Roberta Martin, Clara Ward, Evelyn Starks, and Mahalia Jackson's pianist Mildred Falls as all-time greats. And they were all influenced in some way by Dranes.
Among those whose ears perked up in August 1926 when OKeh released the first two 78s by "the Blind Race Evangelist," was Thomas A. Dorsey, who would go on to be called "the Father of Gospel" after penning such standards as "Peace In the Valley," "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," and "If You See My Savior."
In a 1961 interview, Dorsey gave Dranes some credit with opening his mind to laying secular styles under religious themes. Although he was a Baptist, Dorsey liked to step inside the heat of sanctified services for inspiration, as did his protégé Mahalia Jackson. "If I can put some of what she does and mix it with the blues," Dorsey said, recalling his first exposure to Dranes, "I'll be able to come up with a gospel style."
All heaven broke loose
There's no way to overstate how much Dranes' music was driven by her affiliation to the Church of God In Christ. What sets Pentecostals apart from other religions is the belief that the speaking in tongues is the only true evidence of Holy Ghost baptism. Being "slain in the spirit" brings a sacred kind of pandemonium to Pentecostal services, with the "saints," as the COGIC faithful call each other, running down the aisles, falling out to the ground, banging on tambourines and uttering the Hebraic-sounding "glossolalia." When Sister Dranes flowed all that emotion through her piano and voice, all heaven broke loose.
An image from the booklet
While the dominant Baptist and Methodist churches of the time were looking to distance themselves from the dark days of captivity and servitude, COGIC founder Charles H. Mason, the son of slaves, believed in embracing the past all the way to West Africa. Pentecostal dancing was called "shouting" because it was based on the Ring Shout of slave services.
Because it was that rare area in which the original African-Americans could express themselves freely, music was a highlight of their conversion to Christianity. Slaves were especially fond of the hymns of British pastor Isaac Watts, whose revolutionary 1707 songbook "Hymns and Spiritual Songs" contained more personal offerings of praise than the stodgy church music of the day.
A link between the "Negro spirituals" of the antebellum south and the Christian blues of Chicago in the 1930s and '40s, Dranes and her piano told a story. HIS story. But her own biography has been a gap-filled guessing game, and little is known about how Dranes came to invent "Christian barrelhouse."
No young primitive spitfire, Dranes was 37 years old when she made those first landmark recordings. She had been playing piano for 30 years, but evidence, as best we can expect this many years later, shows she was a relatively recent convert to Pentecostalism in 1926. Man had created the skilled musician before the Holy Ghost made her play with such fire.
Early roots
Arizona Dranes was the youngest of three children born to Milton and Cora Drane, who divorced when Arizona was young. Milton Drain, as his surname was spelled (even on his death certificate after he was hit by a train in 1935), remarried and lived in Sherman, a block away from his first family. Arizona added the "s" to her surname after she left school.
Considering her tough landing in life, being born blind could've been a blessing for "Arazoni," as she was called (even on enrollment records in 1910). She received the best free education a black person in Texas could at the time by attending the Institute for Deaf, Dumb and Blind Colored Youths in Austin. Founded and funded by the Texas Legislature in 1887, the blind institute was "neither an orphan asylum, a children's home, nor an asylum for embeciles, but a school for the educable blind and deaf."
Her schooling focused heavily on music, which was seen as a way that a blind person could make a living. Dranes was studying octaves and vocal tone production as an eight year old. By age 10 she was tinkering with sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, as well as modern compositions by Liszt and Rubinstein. To build her voice and breath control, she was taught the Italian vocal method and was singing arias by her third year at the school.
After graduating, Dranes headed back to Sherman where her 45-year-old mother picked cotton to pay the bills and lived in company housing. The times called for religion, and mother and daughter most likely attended Payne's Chapel, a black Methodist church two blocks away.
Meanwhile, COGIC focused on expanding its territory in Texas when Bishop Mason sent one of his most trusted elders Emmet Morey Page to Dallas. The efforts to spread the Pentecostal message of spirit possession by Page's predecessor had been met with derision and even a tent-torching. Pentecostal "holy rollers" were becoming a "savage" embarrassment to mainline black churchgoers. But Page, a progressive thinker who stressed social uplift through education and community involvement, gained respect in Dallas' black Christian community. When he arrived in Texas in January 1914, there were only about eight missions in the state and not a single proper church. By 1919, there were 35 COGIC churches in Texas.
Page would later become a key figure in Dranes' rise as a COGIC song leader. He first heard about this dynamic performer in 1923, hearing that the singer-pianist also "raised the house" at Rev. Crouch's Trezevant Hill COGIC in Fort Worth. Then she'd take the electric Interurban Railway from Fort Worth to Dallas to play Rev. Page's church. What a godsend Dranes must've been for preachers who could reinforce their sermons by introducing the musical embodiment of what they'd been talking about. Her mix of technique and hysteria no doubt got the spirit to manifest itself in a hurry.
"Jesus knew what I needed most Filled my soul with the Holy Ghost."
Saucy new language
In 1922, Dranes moved to Wichita Falls, "the City Built on Faith," which had a growing COGIC presence thanks to charismatic preacher J. Austin Love. Love started with four believers in a living room in 1918, but had a packed First Church of God In Christ at 413 Humphries Street by the time Dranes arrived. This was almost certainly the church where the first Pentecostal music star was "called out" (converted).
Within two years, Dranes was a fulltime singing missionary for COGIC. The 1923 Wichita Falls directory shows no trace of Dranes, Doran or Rev. Love, because they were down in Fort Worth, where Elder Page had sent Love to oversee construction of the White Street Holiness Church (now called Greater Love Church of God In Christ).
That must've been some grand church opening with Dranes displaying the saucy new language of gospel music. Just as a preacher has stock phrases that he'd interject into otherwise improvised sermons, Dranes had an array of musical tricks she'd throw in to get the congregations going, including her favorite 1-6-5-1 octave bass line. Since most sanctified churches could afford only one instrument, the piano was its orchestra. Under Dranes' playing hands the black and white keys became a symphony of harmony, rhythm, melody and tone, but mostly rhythm. Her left hand ostinato—constantly repeating a melodic fragment—was hypnotic.
The word came down to Texas in May 1926 that OKeh Records in Chicago was looking for talent in the church music field and Rev. Crouch recommended Dranes to the label's race records supervisor Richard M. Jones. Page sent the label a letter of endorsement which read: "Since she is Deprived Of Her Natural Sight, the Lord Has Given Her A Spiritual Sight that all Churches Enjoy. She Loyal and Obedient, Our Prayers Assend for her."
Although it's been reported that Jones heard Dranes in Fort Worth on a talent scout tour, it's much more likely that the first time he'd ever heard her perform was when he produced her in the studio on June 17, 1926. Jones had his hands full up in Chicago that year preparing a group he'd organized called Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. The Hot Five recorded three tracks in the same studio, with the same producer, the day before Dranes made her recording debut. Two days in one room in Chicago and neither jazz nor gospel would ever be the same again.
Dranes was in Dallas, living next door to Page's church, when OKeh contacted her a month after her first session to tell her some good news. "My dear Miss Dranes," OKeh's George Bradford wrote. "The samples of your records just came in today and they are truly wonderful."
The correspondence between artist and label, which writer Malcolm Shaw obtained access to for a 1970 article in Storyville magazine, wasn't always so dear. Dranes had to almost beg for money sometimes and detailed various ailments that kept her from playing. On September 6, 1926, a month after her first two 78s ("John Said He Saw a Number" / "My Soul Is a Witness For the Lord" and "It's All Right Now" / "Sweet Heaven Is My Home") were released to impressive sales (at 75 cents per record), Dranes sent a letter to Bradford asking for a $50 advance. "This is very necessary and I hope you can do this for me," she wrote. Bradford declined, writing that an advance "is against one of our most strict rules and policies."
In November 1926, Columbia Records bought OKeh in part because of its pioneering black music department. After Mamie Smith had a smash on OKeh in 1920 with "Crazy Blues," the first recorded blues song with vocals, the other three main labels—Columbia, Brunswick, and Victor—also started making 78s for the black audience. With the sale to Columbia there came personnel changes that immediately affected Dranes' recording output. Her producer Jones was out as recording director, replaced by Tommy Rockwell, a gregarious Irish-American, who would start managing Satchmo in 1929.
Unfair treatment
For almost all of 1927, Dranes was living in Fort Worth with her mother. The correspondence between label and artist stopped for the year. So did royalties owed.
In February 1928, a frustrated Dranes wrote to OKeh's Bradford: "Of coarse I didn't know anything about record making or prices on them and I didn't even consult our white friends down here," she typed (or dictated). "I took what you said about everything and was confidence that you would treat me fair. Now I'm asking that you please consider me as I am disable to work and have to be confined to my room."
But Bradford was also no longer with the label. Elmer Fearn, who owned Consolidated Talking Machine Company (which ran OKeh's Chicago office) replied that he would send Rockwell, who was in Memphis recording Mississippi John Hurt, with the money she was owed. Rockwell visited Dranes, but she was still broke after he left. "He offered to let me have money, providing I record," Dranes wrote back, "but I am not able to record."
Fearn immediately sent Dranes $60. Her records had sold well—around 10,000 copies each—and he wanted her back in the studio when she felt up to it. "The flue has tied me down," she wrote Fearn from Memphis. The city had been hit especially hard in the epidemic of 1928-29, as noted in the tune "Memphis Flu" by Elder Curry and Elder Beck.
During the late '20s, Dranes split time between Memphis, Chicago, and Oklahoma City. In Oklahoma City she lived on East Second Street, the R&B/ jazz haven known as "Deep Deuce," where she may have heard a young guitar player on the street named Charlie Christian. More likely he heard her, as Dranes was becoming a bit of a local sensation. In a 2003 interview, Helen Davis, then 90, recalled seeing A.J. Dranes at Page's church in Oklahoma City in the 1920s. "She'd get the whole place shouting," Davis recalled. "She was a blind lady, see, and she'd let the spirit overtake her. She'd jump up from that piano bench when it hit her." Such displays masked the formal musical training that gave Dranes such command.
Dranes recorded 16 tracks in just three sessions—June 17 and November 15, 1926 and July 3, 1928—for OKeh. Each time in the studio, she used a different backing configuration, but the piano and her voice were always dominant. Dranes also recorded two instrumentals on the first session, including "Crucifixion," which would become her signature song through inclusion on various compilations in recent years. On two tracks that June day she was loosely backed on vocals by producer Jones and noted blues singer Sara Martin, who had a 1922 hit with Fats Waller's "T'ain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do."
When OKeh sent her back to Chicago for round two, Dranes brought along F.W. McGee, a COGIC minister and faith healer she met in Oklahoma City around 1924. Dranes, McGee and the Jubilee Singers recorded four tunes in the call and response vein used in Pentecostal congregational singing. "Lamb's Blood Has Washed Me Clean," in which Dranes declares "Jesus Christ knew what I needed most/ Filled my soul with the Holy Ghost" is awash in an otherworldly spiritual fervor that set the tone for the sessions. The "Hallelujah!" shouts did not sound rehearsed.
Dranes' third and last session showed that she was developing as an artist beyond a Pentecostal pounder. Such cuts as "Just Look" and "I Shall Wear a Crown" are fuller, more melodic than her earlier stomps. The standout track is "He Is My Story," a rewriting of "Blessed Assurance" by blind hymn writer Fanny Crosby. Where the Crosby version has a chorus of "This is my story / This is my song," Dranes makes it all about God. "He is my story / He is my song," she sang with a voice quivering like an arrow at impact. If not for Dranes' exuberant presentation, the song could almost be considered country music. Par for Dranes' career, OKeh didn't release "Story," her most commercially viable track.
Gospel meets blues
The cross-pollination of gospel and blues is exemplified by a remark by electric blues guitar pioneer T-Bone Walker, who told music historian Paul Oliver that the first time he heard boogie-woogie piano was at a Pentecostal church in Dallas. He almost certainly heard Arizona Dranes, which means that the first person to play blues on an electric guitar and the first to play secular piano on a gospel record were in the same COGIC church the same day.
Developed in East Texas when piano troubadours aped the rhythm of steam locomotives carrying lumber from the Piney Woods, boogie-woogie became the hot new thing in the early 1920s when Texans George and Hersal Thomas (the older brothers of Sippie Wallace) published sheet music to "The Fives." Called "Fast Texas" (or "that Santa Fe thing" in Texas in reference to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway), the percussive, repetitive style dropped right into Dranes' bag.
Her recordings display special fondness for another form of music with roots in Texas: ragtime. Although Scott Joplin (1867-1917) of Texarkana didn't invent the genre, which was based on an Afro-Euro mixture of minstrel "coon songs," jig music, and Sousa marches, Joplin's emphasis on syncopation and cross rhythms refined it as a piano form. The left hand recalled the stomp of dancers, while the right hand played fiddle and banjo lines.
The first African-American musical style to be considered popular music, ragtime made a splash at the 1893 Columbian Expo in Chicago and quickly pulled itself out of the sportin' houses, saloons, and riverboats and into the mainstream. Joplin's 1899 composition "Maple Leaf Rag" sold more than a million copies of sheet music and created a sensation that was still going strong in the 1920s.
Black Baptist and Methodist churches of the time wouldn't think of including ragtime at their services. But early Pentecostals erased the divide between secular and sacred because in their perspective all experience was religious. They could only dance at church, so they snatched the good stuff from the devil, colored it in deep devotion and had a Holy Ghost party every Sunday. When the "saints" got together in praise, it was a time of jubilation, not assimilation—an unflinching celebration of blackness.
Before long, mainline black churches had to begrudgingly incorporate elements of the "hard gospel" style or risk losing even more parishioners to the Pentecostal churches. The "tongue people" started a musical renaissance that eventually gave birth to soul music and rock and roll.
Musical outpouring
COGIC used to dedicate 20 days every year to a big revival-like gathering. Like the Pentecost of Christ's time, the National Convocation is a harvest festival of sorts, held every November 25-December 14.
Besides days of fasting and preaching, the convocations are where song leaders from all over the country shared tunes they had written or reinterpreted. Until fairly recently, COGIC congregations didn't use hymn books, so this is how Dranes found most of her material, which she would then adapt to her style and sentiment. The history of gospel music is one of reinterpretation, as there are dozens of different versions of the same songs floating around without true ownership.
Dranes is listed on the Consolidated Music Publishing contracts as the writer of the songs she recorded, but most of her material really belonged to the COGIC congregations. A highlight of the convocation was always the nightly musical outpouring. Such performers as Dranes, electric guitarist Elder Utah Smith, singers Madame Ernestine Washington and Goldia Haynes, plus the piano shout duo of Elders Curry and Beck, would keep the praise songs going until the sun came up.
Perusing the annual convocation yearbooks kept at the McGlothen Temple Library in California, one can see Dranes' prominence diminish greatly through the years. Even though she was closely associated with three of the five original COGIC Bishops—E.M. Page, R.F. Williams and W.M. Roberts of Chicago—there's no mention of her in any of the church histories, even those focusing on women in COGIC. That's partly because she was never a member of the almighty COGIC Women's Department, where names like Mother Lizzie Woods Robinson and Mother Lillian Brooks Coffey are almost as mythical as Bishop Mason. COGIC gave women great responsibility, but reserved ultimate authority for male leaders. Women didn't "preach," they would "teach," from a secondary lectern, never the pulpit.
In the 1953 yearbook, Dranes is identified as the chairman of the COGIC handicapped committee, but that seemed more an honorary title, as no other evidence of such a committee can be found in other church records.
The Holy Ghost's favorite singer
There were Dranes sightings here and there as the years wore on, but, really, if you weren't a member of a black Pentecostal church in Texas, Oklahoma, Chicago, Cleveland, Memphis, Little Rock, St. Louis, Atlanta, Birmingham or Los Angeles, you had almost no chance of ever seeing Arizona Dranes perform.
Her last known public appearance was in Cleveland in 1947, when she was billed the "Famous Blind Piano Player From Chicago." Because of her association with Bishop R.F. Williams of Cleveland, Dranes maintained close ties to the city, where she once played at a massive baptism on the shores of Lake Erie. Her music- and Bishop Mason's sermon- came via loudspeakers from a yacht on the lake.
She spent the last years of her life in Los Angeles, where her old friend Bishop Crouch bought the Lincoln Theater on Central Avenue in 1961 and turned it into the Crouch Temple.
Dranes' death certificate noted that she'd suffered from cerebral arteriosclerosis for years, which could've caused dementia. She was at an assisted living facility in Signal Hill, California, when she had the "acute cerebro-vascular accident" (stroke) that ended her life on July 27, 1963. Never married, her occupation at the time of death was missionary.
Arizona Dranes was buried at the Paradise Memorial Park in Santa Fe Springs, Calif., but no one knows exactly where her body is today.
Investigators discovered in 1995 that the cemetery had reached capacity 10 years earlier, so the owners were digging up bodies in the older sections and reselling plots. According to the 1963 burial record, Dranes was laid to rest in section 183, block 4 and lot F-3. According to Warren Clark, a researcher for Find a Grave Inc., that was one of the recycled plots. Dranes' remains were most likely moved to a mass grave, which was seven feet high and 50 feet wide.
Ghastly to think a pious force of nature would meet such a cruel state of disregard, but Pentecostals, like all Christians, see the body as just a sack for the soul.
She was the Holy Ghost's favorite singer, an otherworldly vessel fueled by faith. This ragged virtuoso of touch and tone had spent her whole life getting ready for when the time came, whether it was a career as a church-wrecker or a chance to sing for God in heaven.
Bye and bye, she's gone to see the King. That's how it ends for Arizona Dranes, gospel music pioneer. And here's how it started. A poor, blind girl from North Texas pressed her fingers down on the keys of a piano in 1896 and knew she'd never be lonely again.
Listen to some samples of Arizona Dranes' music on this NPR report.
Michael Corcoran is a veteran writer and music critic who has written for The Dallas Morning News and The Austin American Statesman. He specializes in the history of music in Texas, particularly in Austin.
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