In A City Called Heaven, gospel announcer and music historian Robert Marovich shines a light on the humble origins of a majestic genre and its bond to the city where it found its voice: Chicago. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns to its triumph as the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. Marovich mines interviews with nearly fifty artists, ministers, historians, and relatives and friends of gospel pioneers to recover forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines how a lack of economic opportunity bred an entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and opened a gate to social mobility for a number of its practitioners. From Mahalia Jackson to the Staple Singers, and with all the station stops in between, A City Called Heaven celebrates the sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold. - Back cover.

"This work is by no means an exhaustively detailed study of gospel music in Chicago. Its intent is to chronicle the development of Chicago gospel music during its first five decades, from pioneers such Thomas Dorsey and Sallie Martin to the start of the contemporary gospel era of the 1970s, when the focus shifted from Chicago to California"--Page 7.