Every pain too great to be put into words has wrung a prayer out of someone before it ever became a sentence. So it was with Thomas A. Dorsey: a blues pianist who, in the depths of grief, wrote the song that would become comfort to millions around the world.
Thomas Andrew Dorsey was born on July 1, 1899, in Villa Rica, Georgia, the son of a traveling Baptist preacher and a church organist. As a boy, he moved with his family to Atlanta and later to Chicago, where he studied music and encountered the blues scene.
Under the stage name Georgia Tom, he accompanied singer Ma Rainey and, alongside guitarist Tampa Red, recorded dozens of blues songs, including the major commercial hit “It’s Tight Like That” in 1928. At the time, he lived divided between the nightclub stage and the faith he had learned as a child.
Two nervous breakdowns, in 1920 and 1926, brought him close to despair, including thoughts of suicide, as he tried to reconcile his secular music career with the call he felt toward sacred music. For years, he resisted giving up the blues, which supported his family.
In August 1932, while traveling for work, he received news that his wife, Nettie, had died in childbirth, followed soon after by their newborn son. In the grief of that week, he wrote “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”, joining the aching melody of the blues to a Christian plea for help.
From that loss onward, he devoted himself to sacred music and helped found the convention that would bring together African American gospel choirs across the country, shaping the form that Black church music would take in the decades that followed. This fusion of blues and hymns met resistance from part of the more traditional clergy, who saw the new style as profane, and Dorsey himself used to say he had been thrown out of some of the finest churches in the country because of it.
He also served for decades as music director of Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago and was a mentor to the young Mahalia Jackson, who would become gospel’s most famous voice in the world. Over his lifetime, he composed about a thousand sacred songs.
“Take My Hand, Precious Lord” has been translated into more than 40 languages and sung at funerals, services, and vigils on nearly every continent. Dorsey died in Chicago in 1993, at age 93, after years of decline caused by Alzheimer’s disease, leaving behind an entire genre born from the meeting of human pain and faith.
