Beautiful voices and dutiful filmmaking combine in a rote documentary on the history of gospel music, “Rejoice and Shout.” Archival footage of such acts as the Staple Singers and Mahalia Jackson is thrown together with largely trivial interviews with such talking heads as veteran singers and historians.
Mostly, the talk is about how lovely the singing voices were. No argument here, but I wanted to know more about the personalities behind the music. When, for instance, we hear that there were Blind Boys singing groups from both Alabama and Mississippi, we aren’t told anything about what they thought of each other. Nor, despite half-hearted efforts, does the connection between gospel and the civil rights pioneers get developed much, and we don’t really learn about gospel’s influence on later forms.
Only rarely does the film present a genuine insight, such as the observation that many black people loved to dress up in their finest for church because, during the week, they were so often dressed as servants and manual laborers. More often, the talk is vacuous chatter, such as “The Staple Singers were probably my favorite gospel group of all time.”