Work the Works: The Role of African-American Women in the Development of Contemporary Gospel

Recent marketing strategies that include concert tours, music videos, e-mail listservs, downloadable ring tones, concert DVDs, and movies have placed the genre's profits well above other forms of popular music. Today, artists such as Yolanda Adams, CeCe Winans, Shirley Caesar, and the Clark Sisters have defined and in some cases redefined the sound and image of contemporary gospel and placed it in the realm of mainstream popularity that continues in the vein of singers Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Clara Ward, who spread gospel beyond the boundaries of black churches and popularized it on concert stages and in nightclubs during the 1940s and 1950s.