Peace be Still by Robert M. Marovich
James Cleveland produced the bestselling gospel album ever, Peace Be Still (1963)—until Aretha Franklin topped him with Amazing Grace (1972). Perhaps it’s no surprise that Cleveland was featured on Franklin’s LP. For many years he was among the most respected writers and arrangers in the field.
Chicago radio host and gospel historian Robert M. Marovich explores the session that resulted in Peace Be Still and wonders why the title track, Cleveland’s arrangement of a once forgotten 18th century hymn, resonated so loudly. It’s heard on the kitchen radio in the film version of August Wilson’s Fences and is sung in Kathryn Bigelow’ Detroit. It’s still selling 60 years on.
Gospel music played an obvious role in the civil rights struggle of the ‘60s. However, as Marovich points out, “Peace be Still” “was not a freedom song or a protest song, at least not in the conventional sense. It worked on a different plane of consciousness” as an encoded call for patient resistance and optimism. In 2020, Black activists in St. Louis called their antiviolence rally Peace be Still.
Marovich’s lucid account looks to a time when Black migrants from the South recreated their folkways in Northern cities—and how those urban settings changed the tone and volume of the music and culture soon enough. It’s the history of a song, the evolution of its meaning and of the gospel genre it influenced.
