Robert F. Darden and Stephen M. Newby, "Soon and Very Soon: The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andraé Crouch" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Robert F. Darden and Stephen M. Newby about their new book, Soon and Very Soon, The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andre Crouch.

If you don't know Andre Crouch's name, you probably know his music. And if you don't know his music, I implore you to listen to the song from which the title of his book was taken, Soon and Very Soon. Andre Crouch revolutionized gospel music and popularized it on a global stage. Without Crouch, modern music would look very, very different. Since he passed in 2015, little scholarship has been done on his life and work. Soon and Very Soon is the first serious biographical treatment of Crouch.

I'm grateful to get the opportunity to speak with two of the world's leading scholars of gospel. Thanks for joining me today, Bob and Steven. Pleasure. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it. Yeah, this was, this was a really fascinating biography. I, I have to confess, I didn't really know anything about Andre Crouch. I knew, I knew some of his music and, and, you know, as I, as I read the book, I realized that I knew a lot more of his music than I, than I thought I did. Um,

I absolutely love gospel music. I think it's just so, you know, when you're when you're feeling down, it's like the best music that there is. It's really it really is medicine in many ways. And Andre Crouch really is such an important person. And I think that that that more people should know his to know his name. You should be his name should be up there, you know, with with.

with the likes of Bob Dylan and Michael Jackson and other people that he had a tremendous influence on. But before talking about Andre Crouch, I was wondering if each of you could just tell us a little about yourselves and your background. Sure. I'm Bob Darden. I'm a emeritus professor of journalism at Baylor, retired two years ago. I grew up in the United States Air Force, and it was integrated when it was founded. So I grew up with friends who played gospel music

It's been the foundational music of my life. And I was gospel music editor for Billboard magazine in New York for 15 years. And this is my fifth book on gospel, but one that hits closest to me because this is the first artist that I ever saw live. And it was a transformative moment for me. And I was a fan from that moment on, not to the exclusion of everybody else,

but I always look for Andre's music first. I'm Stephen Newby. I serve at Baylor University as the Lev H. Pritchard III Endowed Chair in the Study of Black Worship, Professor of Music, and I also serve as the Ambassador for the Black Oscar Music Preservation Program at Baylor as well. Ah.

My first encounter with Andre Crouch was as a young child. My father was a pastor at Missionary Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan, New Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church. My mother was the minister of music. So gospel music was playing in my house. James Cleveland and Aretha Franklin, everything gospel. I couldn't play jazz. I couldn't play rock and roll in the house.

but Andre could be played. And I'll never forget the early Andre, take the message everywhere. I heard those vibraphones and I heard the acoustic drums

the acoustic upright bass and all that. I said, oh my goodness, this is jazz. No, wait a minute. It's gospel, right? I can listen to this. So as a kid, I was enthralled with Andre and I'd been listening to his music for all of my life. So I've been a student of his music. I'm also a composer. I compose concert music, oratorios,

gospel songs. I toured with Maranatha music and the worship and praise, got a couple other gospel albums out there. So I've been in this all of my life. So connecting with Bob, when Bob invited me to consider working on this with him, I just said, oh man, you know, I guess, I guess so. I wasn't sure at first because I had never written music.

other than term papers and, you know, on, on gospel music in such a way. But then in the process of exploration, I ended up writing master's thesis of theology on, on it. And then just an avid reader of gospel music history, because I studied with Horace Clarence Boyer at the university of Massachusetts. So nonetheless, I'm, I'm so,

enthralled and engaged to be working on this project the book is done but the but the music and the message is still alive and bob and i get to go around and tour together and talk about this music yeah the you know the the issue or maybe it's not an issue but i've done interviews in the past about musicians and the problem of course is that you know when you're just reading

the written word, there's always a lot that's left out. I do think that what's great about this book is that

Sometimes you read biographies of musicians and there's very little music. It's just about their life, about their scandals, about who their mom was, who their dad was, who their kid was. And that's great too. But this really is music forward. So I think you give also a great, in many ways, a great playlist for people to listen to. I'm wondering as far as the collaboration process is concerned,

is concerned you know what that was like the two of you coming together to write to write that you know did you pick sections did you uh you know uh sit down and and and try and try and go sentence by sentence how did you uh collaborate well i i think it was a it was such an integration um uh

Bob focused more on the history. I focused more on the music. But as you can see with throughout the music and the theology and the ministry, but as you can see throughout the text, from my perspective,

it's a relational scholarship that was in play and that is still in play that I think you can describe it, but unless if you've actually lived this out and done this kind of work, you know, I guess you can see, you know, I'm an African-American male from Detroit, Michigan, and Bob, you know, is a white brother from, you know, all over the place. And so, you know, it's just, it's,

an eclectic dialogue and engagement. It's like a quilt intertwining that, that that's been some of my experience. And, and I'd write some things and Bob said, Oh, use this word or that word. And then Bob said, you know, man, I, you know, this is kind of tricky for me to write. You know what I said? Yeah, but you have permission to do that, but then say it this way. Let's flip it this way because it takes a village to, to raise children. And it took this kind of, um,

partnership, I think, to deeply get into Andre. And I think Bob articulates it very well. He says, you can't know the... Say it, Bob. I don't want to speak about the man and the music and the music and the man. The best thing about it for me, other than getting to become dear friends with Steve, and we had been friends before, but certainly not at the level of talking every day and during the pandemic zooming every day,

was the fact that in my previous books, I was a white guy trying to knock on doors of legendary Black artists who didn't know me from Adam. And it's a very relational community until somebody will vouch for you. And eventually we did. But it's hard. You know, I spent months on the south side of Chicago to get a handful of interviews.

But in Birmingham, when I was working on a book on civil rights music,

After the first couple of people saw that I was legit, they would say, do the interview, and they'd say, you know what? You know who you need to talk to. Let me call them down at the restaurant and set up an interview. But with Stephen, we did nearly 200 Zoom interviews for this book. And so when the people would come on the screen, they'd see a handsome brown-eyed man and an old fat white guy, and it was a whole lot easier for them to feel comfortable.

And we got interviews that I never would have gotten by myself. And perhaps Stephen wouldn't have gotten the same amount of material had he been by himself. Right. And let me interject this too. And the white musicians that play with Andre, when both of us were interviewing, they got it. I think they even became more transparent because they're saying, oh,

These guys are community. They're in partnership and community and collaboration together. I get that because that's what I did with Andre, some of the white musicians, Spanish musicians, Filipino musicians. So when Bob and I showed up on the screen, it was multicultural. It's like I think people felt like they could breathe in the spirit of Andre because that's what he was about.

Go ahead, Bob. No, that's exactly so. And if you've read the book, Caleb, you know that Andre's great collaborator that allowed him to do many of the things he did because he was the steady rock that Andre was allowed his creativity to flow from.

was his white drummer, Bill Maxwell, his best friend. And the two of them created something that would have been difficult for either of them to do alone, in our opinion. And one of the funny things is, as we've been doing interviews on this, the fact that it's a white and a black scholar co-writing something comes up way too often. In the year 2025, this should have been just a

A little footnote, but it's sad and disturbing a little bit, but it's also heartening that there's no objection. It's just that, oh, here's two scholars in different races who have been enmeshed in each other's lives to create something greater than they could have done alone. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, it's really fascinating, you know, hearing you talk about how, you know, even getting that sense when talking with musicians that Andre performed with, that they, you know, maybe talk differently than they would if it was just either of you on your own doing it. And I do think that collaborative projects are always really interesting because rarely...

uh you know really is there a collaborative project where both people are coming at it you know in the same way or with the same expertise and i always i always like talking to uh to to to

uh, to authors, you know, where they, they come, you know, multiple authors of one book or more than one author, because, you know, it shows how scholarship isn't just the solitary process that it's something that is, you know, even if it's just one, one book, it can be done in dialogue. Um, you know, as far as, as Andre, uh, Crouch is concerned, um, his life is really, is really just, just fascinating because, um,

He really was there for so many different movements and, you know, new musical stylings that came out and, you know, had his foot in different communities. But before talking about all that, can you just share a little bit about Andre Crouch's early life, what his childhood was like? Steven?

He was a PK, a pastor's kid with expectations. You know, he had these expectations. Anybody, everybody knows, man, in the black church, when your daddy's a pastor, you better live right or you ain't gonna make it to heaven. And so his parents were strict in one way, but yes, he was on the West Coast.

He wasn't living in the South. He wasn't living in the East. He wasn't living in the Northeast. He wasn't living in the Northwest. He was living in the West Coast in L.A. So his childhood was framed with the idea and sensibility of a global citizenry that shaped. He had more opportunities as a young black man than actually some blacks would even have today. He had access to liberty and

And liberty was given freely to him. He was immersed in the music and he was immersed in church. He was immersed in the idea of evangelism. And he had freedom with that. He had boundaries. But as the great composer Stravinsky says, I am more free when I know where my boundaries are to be created.

And his parents set him up in a way to be free within these boundaries so that he would be able to excel. And of course, his twin sister was pretty much like his guardian angel. You want to talk a little bit more about that, Bob?

Yeah, I love the idea. And it was so much fun for Stephen and I. All of my research had been in either Chicago, Birmingham, Memphis. And it's a different world for music in general, but gospel in particular. And Andre and Sandra coming out of the, particularly the Southern California, all the way up to San Francisco.

meant that his earliest audiences were not black, unlike every other gospel artist I've ever written about. André's audiences were white, and he played bigger and bigger and bigger white churches with his new group, the Disciples, which made him, because Southern California was the epicenter of the Jesus movement and Jesus music and eventually contemporary Christian music,

He was a star in an entirely different genre before he was ever accepted into gospel music. Yeah. Which meant a lot of resentment, I'm sure, among particularly James Cleveland and some others, but

It gave him, as Stephen said, this worldview as a young man, that there was no musical boundary he could not cross in his pursuit of the evangelical message. There was no message he could not frame if it was in the pursuit of the evangelical message. So his gospel music, as was the Hawkins and as was some others who eventually came from there,

And it made him the father of what would be called contemporary gospel music. But what we didn't realize, I think we both knew intuitively, was in that process of going from Jesus music to eventually contemporary gospel through the...

He created what we now call praise and worship, which is a dominant theme in many evangelical churches, unfortunately to the point that it's even squeezing out gospel in some black churches.

But Andre was at the founder of two of those movements and the star of a third. Yep. As we talked to old Jesus music musicians, they were all in awe of him. Even those who came from a popular secular world where they'd been stars. Andre's level and presence, because he was not constrained by the

you know, Chicago quartet, five handsome black men in slick gabardine suits. He wasn't constrained by any other element of gospel music. He was constrained only by the limits of his imagination. As far as the sect of Christianity that he was raised in, what was the message that he was, you know, the version of Christianity that he was brought up in? And

How did that influence him and affect how he thought about both Christianity, but also just about his relationship to the world? Well, the Church of God of Christ denomination, clearly, historically, we've seen that they're big on evangelism and they're big on the creativities.

Yet there are these sects within the Kojic Church that are very strict with regard to attire, with makeup, earrings, all of that. But eschatology is a big deal in the Kojic Church. The last days, the coming of Christ, the saving of the soul, being able to be filled with the Spirit.

And what does that mean? There's all these other little sects within this kind of black Christian spirituality. There's apostolic, there's church of God and Christ, and then there's holiness. So basically, he came out of a holiness tradition. Faithfulness, I think his father preached faithfulness to God by any means necessary.

And so the difference between the culture and Andre's upbringing and my upbringing in the Baptist church, I couldn't bring jazz in the house, jazz records. But Andre's dad said, listen to the lingua franca of the world. Listen to this. You think you can play this, Andre? Listen to this country music. Listen to this jazz music.

Because it came out of a curiosity, and his father wanted him to be able to connect with the languages of the world. Be in the world, but not of it. And I think that Kojic really pushed that. They pushed that.

Whereas in the Missouri Baptist tradition, no, you know, yeah, we're in the world. We're not of it. You can't even don't even learn the language. That was some of my upbringing. But at the end of the day, I think the Kojic denomination, they have hatched and launched so much creativity. Twinkie Clark.

Marvin Winans, Vanessa Bell Armstrong. The list goes on in that particular denomination because where there is imagination, there's freedom, and this idea of the last times, there's this urgency in their evangelism.

Just add briefly to that the Baptist, Black Baptist tradition, which had been dominant in gospel music right up until the 1960s, was to the Maharia Jacksons and Thomas Dorsey. And it's primary keyboard driven. Wouldn't they allow instruments at all? When they... When the Kojiks become ascendant, and they had been from the beginning the most evangelical musically of all the different denominations,

They just put a punch of energy into gospel music by bringing in what they were hearing in their churches, drums and guitars and horns. Hammond B-3, too. Oh, and the Hammond B-3, which will come to define gospel music as opposed to the great big scary church pipe organs, which many of those churches had. Secondly, the Kojiks have their home base in Memphis, right up from Beale Street.

And the original founders, Mason and the others, that's what they were hearing, and that's what their original parishioners were hearing, this more diverse musical palette to choose from.

And finally, and I've written about this a lot lately, the Kojics helped introduce the Holy Ghost into gospel music in a way it hadn't been acceptable to do before in the case of the vamp, where at the end of the song, maybe as long as the actual song itself, you give up over to the beat and to the expression of the Spirit.

Stephen was just on PBS on the We Want the Funk talking about the connections between the fam and the dance orientation of giving yourself up to the beat in funk music. Direct line in our mind. And Andre is the one that burst through those barriers in a way that we haven't seen before or since. And I would say too that Andre gave white audiences particular

permission to participate in that tradition. And when you look at Andre, you look at his early band, it was an echo of Flyin' a Family Stone. And both of those bands, Andre's band and Fly's band, they had white drummers.

So if the white drummer is keeping the beat, it must be OK for me to try to keep the beat, too. And some of them tried and some of them, they made it. They were in the groove. So I think that, you know, once again, through a spirit of evangelism, it's just Andre was so invitational in his music.

Yeah, it's really fascinating to learn about his religious upbringing and how, you know, it makes one wonder like if he had been in a different sect just slightly, if he would have become the musician that he did. And, you know, often I feel like that.

you know one's childhood can set the limits um limits of what they are able to uh to do um the what i i find really interesting that this you know the discussion of his early life his first his first group the kojics and then also his his time at the teen challenge center where he kind of um

you know, it sounds like where he really deepened his own connection to religion. I was wondering if you could talk about that sort of period of his life when he first is becoming an adult and, you know, first performing, you know, really performing for audiences and also, you know, having that experience away from home. This was an era that I think was not just new to us. It was probably going to be new to most of the people who read the book. That

One album he made for the Attucks Choir, his poor distribution and long out of print. But it was both a seminal period in Andre's life that he stopped what he was doing to a degree. He had been going to churches and working on the early days of becoming a gospel music artist. And he puts a lot of that on hold. The God talks to him and says,

Your dad has talked his whole life about taking care of the most marginalized people in this community and the homeless and the drug addicts and the lost kids. There's nobody in the 1960s more needy. And he makes this astonishing about face, moves out of his home and moves in this rambling old house in Southern California.

and lives with the people they're ministering to. It's part of that wider evangelical thing that Nicky Cruz and others had begun, the crossing the switchblade and the wider working to those youth. But from a black standpoint, he was pretty much alone. Does it impact his music?

A lot of that, frankly, on that album is not particularly good. It's his early working through how to be a composer. But Steve says, no, you got to get where you're going. You got to go through that. So Stephen was more of a fan of it. And I'll let him take it from there.

Yeah, I saw, you know, Bob, I saw him, you know, we say this in the book that he was a composing resident. He was blending innovation with practical theology. You know, what do I believe is connected to what I practice? What I practice is connected to what I think.

And I think it was a holistic way for him to bring his passion for God's Word, the Bible, his heart for people, and his heart for music. It was one way just to bring all those things together. And through a kaleidoscopic lens, he created this music that was pretty dramatic. You know, it feels almost like an oratorio. It feels like this...

this hodgepodge of all these different styles. And it was really his musical laboratory that was coming into play. And he got a chance to do that with people who, with just your average people.

And then the genius thing in that era was that these were people that didn't sing. So he learned how to craft melodies in particular keys with particular cadences and melismatic passages. He learned how to be, you know, there's this word called a wordsmith, but how to craft melodies in a way where your average person would be able to sing the song.

It is, I think, interesting to go back and hear the early works of great musicians and to see that they too are human. And even if they are gifted, that they still have to work through the process that everyone has to get where they're going. What was it like for him to first...

Gain some some popularity as a musician. You know, what was that early experience like? Like what caused him to start to break through a little? It was such a unique period. Now, let's talk about the personal side. But he was uniquely positioned in Southern Calipers to have these massive four square churches, which are 100 percent white.

And people like Audrey Meyer and Ralph Carmichael and all of these early heroes of what was going to be a modern popular Christian music adopting him, just saying, this is the future. I don't understand it. They wrote their liner notes for him and said, I don't get this at all, but I know it's good. And I want you to hear it too. So he's not having to go through the process.

Most of the gospel, I'm sorry, I'm not digressing. I really have a thought that the gospel artists that I've written about for the last 40 years had to do the gospel circuit and they would do 300 dates and a year playing at tiny church after church and to church to hone their craft before an audience. And they had to be good or they wouldn't get the love offering with enough money to go to the next little church. I'm really had it.

pretty much acceptance from the beginning in the white community, which gave him the confidence, I believe, to keep trying and being more and more experimental rather than staying with the things that worked. He was accepted by the Jesus music people as pretty much the only black act.

in the whole bunch right away. And that, not in the black church, but in the white church and the Jesus music and in the new rising contemporary Christian music fields, which makes them different than every other gospel artist we've ever studied. Stephen?

He was able to come out of his comfort zone and hang out with white people. And God blessed him for that. He got a lot of support from the white community and they cheered him on. I wouldn't... He was so bound for the promised land. I mean, he could see...

all of God's children being together. And he wasn't just working toward that. He was working in it and trying to bring the rest of the world along that way. You know, when you do Carnegie Hall as a young man, you would think that you would have arrived. And it wasn't, I think for Andre, it wasn't just a destination thing.

but it was like a theological predestination. You know, okay, this is going to be my launching point for the world. Like some people hit Cardi y'all. Oh, this is it. This is it. For not a for Andre. And so he had these experiences that he was willing to come out of his comfort zone. And there was some black artists, um,

during this period and earlier that did not have, they didn't have the capacity to even have that imagination when in some places in the South, they were not allowed to show up in some of those congregations, let alone in the restaurants.

And in the hotels, so you see that there's this geography plays into just the simple fact of how he was supported. I had one quick thing to that. Everybody we talked to said he was probably the most colorblind person they ever met. Just was of no interest to him. He wouldn't talk about it. We found very few interviews where he would even discuss race.

It was all, these people need to be saved. Exactly. One obsession and stardom, quote unquote, which came quick and got bigger and bigger until he was the biggest gospel artist in the world. By all accounts, even those we talked to who weren't particularly close to him, because he was a

obsessive kind of personality. Wrote music all night, slept all day, would spend 12 hours on one song in the studio. He was difficult in a lot of ways. He wasn't terribly verbal in conversation. He was great preaching, but one-on-one, everybody gave us their impersonation of his kind of mumbling, self-effacing style. It apparently didn't go to his head. It's best we can tell. He liked nice things, but he never used them.

He had a big home, but he was never there. He had somebody else drive most of the time his big car. He gave it to friends and didn't get it back for weeks on end. It was all about spending the money in the studio and then taking the message everywhere. So to answer your question, we don't think it impacted him. The stardom seemed to me just another way for him to do what he felt compelled to do, which is share the message to wider and wider audiences.

How did his work as a musician merge or, you know, work alongside the Jesus movement of the 1970s? I find the Jesus movement really interesting in part because

It's something that I feel, you know, as a person who's interested in 20th century history, you know, learning about the civil rights movement and the hippies and, you know, other, you know, Vietnam War protests. I feel to a certain extent that sometimes the Jesus movement, despite how big it was, is kind of sidelined sometimes, at least in the histories that I've read. So what was the Jesus movement and how did his work merge with that? Yeah.

You're absolutely right. In that topic, you just said this was the last great religious revival of the 20th century. And yet the literature on it is appallingly thin. And part of that

To be honest here, as two academics, academics in general feel awkward talking about things of faith. If they can't quantify it and stick it in a footnote, if they can't get somebody else to say, to even talk about the Holy Spirit.

makes a lot of them shy away. And I suspect university presses are the same way. It's not it's an anti-Christian. It's yet if you're dealing with facts and trying to. Now, we were very blessed that Oxford University Press did not shy away from particularly the last chapter. We tried to say it as straightforwardly as we could, but

If a guy's whole motivation for doing what he's doing, he believes is the Holy Spirit, then we have to address that or it's not an honest book. In the same ways with the Jesus movement. Here's the thing that impacts tens of millions of kids who leave everything they do to go on evangelical walkabouts. And yet there's a handful of books and very few of them by really distinguished presses.

So we felt like we were getting into new territory in a lot of it, writing about things that hadn't been perhaps as written about as they should have been. But we can say from having been there now, the big event of the Jesus movement is Explo 72. And I was there. So I feel somewhat confident that I can talk to that.

He was the best artist, the most musical, most talented, and everybody knew it. And they, to my experience, embraced him wholeheartedly. Was it because it was a black and white band? Did that help? Could be. But he wasn't the only black act at Explode 72, but the other one, Willa Dorsey, was there very early and for a very brief amount of time.

And 80,000 kids took that music home with them and took it to their home churches. And it spread in a way that no other gospel artist has ever had that opportunity to do. Stephen, anything beyond that? No, man. You nailed it.

I get as age, I get to have the prerogative about writing about things I was there to see. So that's amazing. Yeah. I, it, you know, Andre, obviously he, you know, he, he has, uh, plays in different styles, plays with different bands, um, you know, works as a certain musicians that he works with, you know,

very intently with these long partnerships. What was the peak of his fame like? Who was his band? Behind the scenes, obviously, fame always appears shinier than it does. Behind the scenes, how was he doing? The peak of his fame, what was that period like? Music is very collaborative, once again.

Working with Michael Jackson, working with Stevie Wonder, working with the Piccaro brothers, Steve Piccaro, David Peck, those guys from Toto, knowing that, man, you know, Ambrosia's in the next studio over there. You know what? I wonder what they're doing. You know, wanting to lean into some Steely Dan, Donald Fagan, Walter Becker. He was...

He was really, he was on the A-list players and artists during that era when those great albums were coming out. The Take Me Back album, the Soon and Very Soon, the Live in London album. He knew what was going on on the Asia album.

He knew Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. He was very savvy of the musical culture at a time when he knew, oh, I want this harmonica sound. Let's go to Europe and chase down Stevie Wonder. So when he began to have access to these musicians, it's not as if

He was thinking, I'm in the club now. But as you'll see in the book, those other musicians, like the Jazz Crusaders, Joe Sample, Wilton Feldman, they were saying, we're in the club with Andre Crouch. And so the coin was really flipped.

Because Andre was so relational with people. But I think he kind of knew that it wasn't that he made it, but he knew he could have access to great players. This music was going to be incredible because he was writing a community and he was able to invite any musician he wanted to invite. And people were waiting in line to play with him.

We, again, all of those hundreds of interviews, we got very little sense that he was starstruck or that he used that as some kind of swell-headed thing.

He was just so relentless in his pursuit of certain sounds that if it meant Joe Sample or Dean Parks or whoever was the best person to make this one lick, then that's what he wanted. And it didn't matter if it was a famous session player or not. He was relentless in trying to get those sounds, which meant that even though he was a brilliant keyboard player,

he almost always deferred to one of the other keyboard players to play for him much to the dismay of that keyboard player or bill sample said no andre you can play this better no no no i want x that's got to be frustrating

Were there tensions in the studios and were there some backbiting? I'm probably sure, although we heard very little of that. And most, like Steve said earlier, they were very transparent with us. The main frustration we heard was, you don't really want a 50th take of this background vocal. Do you really? Do you really want us to sing this one more time?

We thought the last 20 were gorgeous. No, no, no, I'm hearing, how about you sopranos sing the alto parts this time and vice versa? And it got weary, and some people eventually quit performing with him and recording with him, not because they didn't love him. They would show up on the drop of a hat, but I can't spend all weekend on one chorus.

You know, that also plays into that Ellington-ish and Mozartian effect where you're hearing a particular song, you can hear the music, and he was hearing hundreds of versions of the same piece in his head because the ideas wouldn't stop flowing. He had a connectivity to the otherworldly heavenlies that just kept going.

dumping ideas in his head and it would frustrate people but that's part of what you're dealing with when you deal with that kind of giftingness that's otherworldly yeah it's um it it's uh it's interesting you know that this one of the people that you like obviously steely dan is known for they're known for having that same kind of uh perfectionism you know something was was in the water in la apparently you know among those la musicians and

Um, it is, you know, to the thing with, with, with Andre is also like his, he seemed to be like the go-to, uh, musician for pop stars, you know, when they wanted a gospel sound, did he, was he just happy to, you know, that they wanted to include some, you know, some, some, you know, gospel choir or did, did, did he sometimes look down? He's like, I don't want to work with that musician because they, you know,

I don't agree with their message or something like that. Some of our favorite stories, after during the 10 years that he's not actively recording, when he's working with many secular artists, if he thought he could make a difference, he took a job with Madonna at her most notorious period, knowing that he'd get criticism, not because he needed the work, but because he thought he could use that as a way to evangelize the producers, which he did.

He took work if it fit what he was trying to do. So Color Purple's easy, right? A gospel song in the old style. The Lion King's easy. Harder are some of the things he did because he felt like he had to from an evangelical standpoint. Things that are lost today that are, why would you do the soundtrack for Yertle the Turtle, an animated film?

But every time we talked to somebody, it was always, well, I think I can make a difference with that producer. And it's a unique element of anybody I've interviewed. I mean, we all want to make a living. But he was preaching during the week and going out and doing these sessions. Our favorite anecdote was Hans Zimmer, the great soundtrack artist, wanted a gospel sound. And one of the singers had worked with Andre Hansen.

And Hans turned to her and said, gosh, I really need an Ande Krauts kind of a gospel sound here. And she said, well, I'll call him. And the guy, Hans, drops his hands and says, what? Do you think he would do it for me? You know, that kind of thing. And he said, you know, sure. Shows up his hand.

Alfie or one of the great backup singers puts together a choir and in the afternoon they're recording tracks that we're still humming today. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's a, that's, it's really interesting. Um, and it's hard to also, it's, you know, it's hard to think of a musician today, you know, living today that is like that, that has this sort of, um, you know, especially with gospel, I can't think of a musician in gospel with the gospel, but I,

Even in a different genre of music, someone who's kind of like this all-purpose musician who can go and take their sound and inject it with different artists and is not like, where's my cut? Sort of.

uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the fights, uh, you know, today are, are, are remarkable, but, um, you know, just, uh, to, yeah, there's so much, we just simply don't have time to cover in this, in this book, but, you know, obviously so much of the focus has been on his, his artistry, um, his musicianship, um, his message. What, what was the, you know, the, the sort of the, the, the, the,

near the end of his life like? Because he did experience a lot of tragedies towards the end. So what was it like for him personally towards the end of his life? He was a pastor and he focused on the people. Yet he was a psalmist and he was still composing songs. Sandra Crouch told us that in his house there are

large black garbage bags filled with cassette tapes of music that he composed. Some of that stuff, right now, we don't have access to, but obviously, he was still a psalmist. He was still preaching. He was still

serving people, going to the hospitals and doing what his father did, doing what his mother did, what his brother Benjamin did. And he was serving so much, he wasn't taking care of himself. And you have to take care of yourself. You got to put on your mask first, your oxygen mask first, and then put on some of them. And he didn't do that. And his health declined tremendously. And that was the thing that took him out.

His relentless pursuit of still writing, still serving people, and he didn't take care of himself. By the end, Caleb, his last album, he could barely stand, but he was convinced he needed some of these messages to get out.

He hardly sang on any of the songs. They propped him up in the studio. But he just felt like he had bad distribution. Didn't matter. These songs had to be heard. And he would drag himself from the hospital bed to do it. And everybody around him knew he was doing this to himself. And everyone we talked to begged him to get help for your diabetes. Don't eat like that. Don't stay up all night. Don't all the things. Don't do this.

it's frustrating he died way too young his later years the creative muse struggled to find full expression because he could barely breathe and we lost him too soon and we don't know what music we lost with that

And all those plastic bags. There may be, you know, the next soon and very soon or the next through it all. And it may only be that the only person who ever hears it is God. Yeah. Thinking as he passed in 2015, which, you know, really, really wasn't all too long ago. When you think about his legacy.

You know, the role that he's, you know, play, you know, like, like, for example, the forward to the book was written by Henry Willis Gates Jr., who's, you know, arguably top five most famous, you know, living professors, at least in America, you know, mostly, you know, a lot of people know him through his show on PBS, but

You know, clearly he had influence on him. You know, when you think about his influence, his importance to the world, you know, where do you see his legacy? You know, how should people think about his legacy today? Simply stated, he never lost his focus. He was a man of the spirit and a man of the word.

And from that, he created some of the most impactful, enduring gospel pieces, hymns, and worship and praise songs of the 20th century and leaning and edging into the 21st century. He sang what he preached.

And he lived what he sang. And there was a consistency there. And what we can learn from that, you know, maybe being popular isn't important, but being relevant and loving people for all our humanity flourishing at the end of the day is really what we need to be about. And I know for a fact that his music has impacted people all over.

over the world. He's the one gospel artist, gospel music composer that when people, when you say, bless the Lord, oh my soul, or through it all, or you're singing to God be the glory, it connects all of us together. And not many gospel musicians can write melodies that are singable. And you hear those melodies ringing all over the globe.

andr is in more hymnals black and white along with the spirituals rangements of the spirituals and thomas dorsey andr is in more hymnals to this day hundreds now we fear in this disposable age that we live in this legacy and this music ten years after his death

maybe isn't as well known as it should. And part of our impetus to write this book was to make sure as much of that legacy is saved, because here's a guy who was totally sold out to his faith, and even at great personal cost. And we feel a little humbled and a little sad that we go into churches and

The kids are nodding along. And then when we play a song, well, we know that. We just didn't know it was Andre Crouch. And things can get lost. This would be a tragedy that if somebody of this stature who is on the Mount Rushmore of gospel music somehow gets lost.

diminished at a time when we need what he's saying the most. Yeah. I, I think his, his message is, uh, and the way that he lived, lived his life is, is really, uh, remarkable. And it is, you know, in many ways, a tragedy that he was so focused on his, his work on his art that, you know, it, it ended up, uh, you know, leading him to, uh, to leave, leave the earth too soon. So, um,

Yeah, thank you both so much for being guests in the new book. It was really just so wonderful to speak with you about this book.

Um, yeah, I, I'll definitely, you know, maybe in the show notes we can include, uh, you know, some songs that you'd recommend, uh, by Andre and then also maybe some other, other songs that, that influenced him too. I think that, you know, a little, a little intro primer playlist, uh, might be, might, might be really useful for listeners. So yeah, thank you both so much for, for being guests. Our pleasure. We love to talk about this anywhere, anytime.