Saturday, August 29, 1998

Whoop it up: Younger pastors revive a fading tradition among black preachers

By Linda Jones

The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS -- It's a Sunday morning at Greater El Bethel Baptist Church and a young black minister is preparing to engage in an old preaching tradition called whooping.

The Rev. Daryl McNealy has just delivered a sermon from the Book of Ephesians. As he approaches the end of his message, he sets the Bible aside and lets the Spirit take over.

His voice becomes melodic. He pants between phrases, unleashes a scream or two and stretches single syllables to the max ...

"Every time I think about the goodness of Jesus

"My soul, Ha!

"Cries out

"My souull, Ha!

"Cries out

"My sooouuulll, cries out!"

He struts before the pulpit, holding a microphone to his mouth and mopping sweat from his brow.

"He's my wheel, Ha!

"In the middle of the wheel, Ha!

"I can't see him but I can feel him I

"I got fire!

"Aaaaahh!

"Fire!"

On that note, McNealy ends his sermon, but the congregation remains deep in the moment, clapping, shouting and singing praises.

Black ministers have a saying that may best describe the sermon-enhancing technique called whooping:"Strike fire, go higher, get them on their feet, then take your seat."

Whooping is a remnant of old-time religion in the black church, an art form with roots in the African storytelling and call-and-response traditions. But as the masters of this technique age, and as church members demand more substance and less theatrics, whooping is fading from many of today's pulpits.

At the same time, some younger ministers -- like McNealy, 30 -- are trying to preserve the technique.

"I love it," says McNealy, whose father, grandfather and uncles whooped as ministers."It's sort of like celebrating as far as I'm concerned. If the Spirit doesn't lead me in that direction, I don't go there. But I'm always hoping and praying that it does because I love to whoop."

"This is something that is important to our culture," says Martha Simmons, a San Francisco minister who has studied the technique and its practitioners. She's completing a book called "I'd Whoop If I Could: The Evolution of an Art Form," which she plans to publish next year."There are a lot of folks who think it is fading, but my research has shown that there are a lot who still whoop. It will be around for years."

In fact, some say it's changing with the times.

"Whooping has evolved, and in the process it has ceased to be something only country preachers do," says Henry J. Mitchell, a professor of homiletics at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta and author of seven books on black preaching. He points out that the technique is being embraced by white ministers who want to diversify their congregations or liven up their sermons.

Whooping traditionally occurs at the end of the sermon after the minister has delivered the biblical message, though some younger ministers have been known to whoop several times throughout their talk.

It is heard most commonly in Baptist and Pentecostal churches.

The Rev. Sheron Patterson, pastor of Jubilee United Methodist Church in Duncanville, Texas, says her congregation looks forward to hearing her whoop.

"If I didn't whoop, I think I'd be in trouble," says Patterson, who is in her 30s. She says whooping rarely took place in the Methodist church she grew up in."Black Methodists in the '60s and '70s really prided themselves in being sedate and still," she says."But once I discovered (whooping), I knew it was the way to go."

Simmons divides whoopers into two categories:"old-style" and"new-style."

"Old-style" whoopers usually begin slowly and methodically, then follow a single, dramatic crescendo."New-style" whoopers often have a faster tempo and have multiple crescendos before ending their sermons.

The Dallas area has both. Simmons holds up the Rev. C.A.W. Clark of Good Street Baptist Church in Dallas as one of the legends, along with the late Rev. C.L. Franklin of Detroit, father of soul singer Aretha Franklin, and Atlanta minister Jasper Williams, pastor of Salem Baptist Church.

Simmons names Frederick D. Haynes III, 37, pastor of Friendship West Baptist Church in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, as a notable new-style whooper.

Regardless of style, whoopers need more than the Spirit to move them, Simmons says. They need to be knowledgeable about Scripture, good storytellers and masters of metaphor. They usually have a flair for the dramatic and can carry a tune.

While some may not be as musical as the masters, the tonality is there, Simmons says. The new-style whoopers also tend to reach several climactic moments during the sermon, instead of just one. Haynes"is one of the best examples among younger preachers of the (multiple) crescendo effect of whooping," Simmons says."He speaks very fast and early on in his message there is a cadence and a rhythm that occurs."

Haynes says he doesn't consider himself a whooper in the traditional sense. For one thing, he explains, he can't sing."I don't have the musical gifts," he says."But I do want to feel that I'm in a groove."

Some critics of whooping say the practice is unsophisticated and outdated. Whooping ministers, some churchgoers argue, place more emphasis on theatrics than on the sermon itself.

"I'm one of those who doesn't care for all of that," says Bettie Rorex, a member of Eastgate Baptist Church in Dallas. Rorex says she needs a spiritual message that gets her through the week. If the content of the sermon is sufficient, what happens at the end doesn't matter to her."I don't go to see whether he's gonna dance across the floor or not."

Gwen Smith, who was raised Catholic but now belongs to Friendship West Baptist Church, enjoys the energy of whooping but says whooping alone is not enough."The whoop ties me to my culture, and it holds my interest," she says."But there has to be the information. If it were whooping without the information, I'm lost."

Some whoopers are perceived as having a limited education and have been accused of using whooping to compensate for intellectual shortcomings. Simmons says there is a historical basis for that.

Many of the whooping masters who are older than 60 grew up when educational opportunities were denied to them simply because they were black, Simmons says. They had to draw on life experiences to augment their spiritual messages.

"They were experiential preachers," she says."What they lacked in educational training they made up for in their love of the Bible and their study and understanding of life."

But the stigma that whoopers are uneducated still exists, she says."When I tell people I'm a whooper, they want to know whether I went to seminary," says Simmons, who is in her 30s."They are surprised to find out I have three degrees."

She holds a bachelor's degree in criminal justice from Bradley University (Peoria, Ill.), a master's degree in divinity from Emory University (Atlanta) and a law degree from the New College of Law (San Francisco).

Detroit minister Charles Adams, 61, pastor at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church, also dispels the myth of the uneducated whooper. His scholarly preaching skills earned him the nickname"The Harvard Whooper" while he was attending seminary.

Some younger ministers grapple with whether they should help uphold the tradition of whooping even though it doesn't reflect their personal style.

"It's a wonderful tradition, but if you don't do it, does it somehow diminish your profile as a (black) preacher?" says Robbie Morganfield, a seminary student at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth."I've done it, but I always felt it was kind of contrived. For me it's just not natural. It's either in you or it's not. It's something you have to feel.

"I'm a little bit more cerebral and a little less emotive in terms of my own approach," Morganfield says.

Of course, traditional whooping isn't something that was taught at seminary. It's a style informally passed on from preacher to preacher, or that some say comes naturally.

"It was a God-given gift," says Clark, 83, who has been preaching for 68 years."You don't really learn to do it. You wake up one morning and there it is."

These days, he only occasionally whoops, but admirers remember when he was at his peak.

"He was smooth, powerful and passionate," says Simmons, who first heard Clark preach in her hometown of Chicago when she was a child. She has heard him at least 20 times since.

Haynes says whooping was so discouraged at Dallas' Bishop College (now known as Paul Quinn College), where he attended seminary, that students received a failing grade if they incorporated it into their classroom sermons.

"They wanted to make sure students concentrated more on substance," he says.

The younger ministers who have chosen to carry on the whooping tradition recognize that they must work harder to have substance in their sermons or risk losing the interest of congregations that want to be stimulated intellectually, not just emotionally.

McNealy says he is striving to do both.

"We shouldn't just let it go," he says."Whooping is part of our history as a black church and as a black people. But we can't just get up there and ramble off. Those days are over."

(c) 1998, The Dallas Morning News.

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