How A Good Word Will Make Our Entire Body Sing “Hallelujah!”

Reverend C. L. Franklin gazed at the sea of Black faces in his congregation. They were waiting.

He cleared his throat, and the air in the church became electric. They knew what was coming. Before he could even begin whooping, someone yelled, “Take us home Rev!” 

Whooping is that gravelly, breathy musical style of preaching Black preachers do after delivering a sermon. Franklin’s whooping is probably the most studied and imitated in the history of Black preaching. 

Franklin’s Sunday evening radio show was so popular that preachers nationwide scheduled their own services around it. 

Between the 1950s and the 1960s, Franklin recorded roughly 70 albums. His discography includes sermons and gospel music. 

Franklin’s whooping influenced preachers, Black church culture, and even music.  Most of all, it influenced his daughter Aretha. 

In the musicality of whooping, we find the fusion of jazz, stories of African griots, tonalities of Afro-Diasporic languages, groans of the enslaved, and the call and response between the pulpit and the pew. 

Whooping is our body's way of saying “hallelujah” to the sacred histories living within us.