Thomas Andrew Georgia Tom Dorsey first gained recognition as a blues pianist in the 1920s and later became known
as The
father of gospel blues music owing to his development, publishing, and
promoting the gospel blues.
Thomas A. Dorsey was born in 1899 he learned religion from his itinerant
black Baptist preacher father and piano from his organ music teacher mother. He
came under the influence of local blues pianists when the family moved to
Atlanta in 1910.
He began his musical career known as Georgia Tom (initially
“Barrelhouse Tom”), playing barrelhouse piano in one of Al Capone’s Chicago
speakeasies and leading Ma Rainey’s Jazz band.
Discouraged by his own efforts to publish and sell his songs through the old
method of peddled song sheets and dissatisfied with the treatment given to
composers of race music,
Thomas became the first independent publisher of black
Gospel music with the establishment of the
Dorsey House of Music in Chicago in 1932. Although he published his own
music and others, he include in his establishment, singer Sallie Martin. He
wrote the songs and secured the rights to other songs. Sallie then travelled
the US performing and selling music sheets to black churches. It is Dorsey’s
distinctive style of writing that the majority of church choirs still use today.
Indeed, Thomas was the Father of Gospel Blues.