By Ed Boyer—1999

If I tried to name Los Angeles’ Number 1 tourist attraction, I would probably start as much controversy as Our Times did with its recent list of the 103 most influential people in the Greater Crenshaw area.

So I won’t even try. But I will tell you what was Number 1 for some friends of mine who were visiting Los Angeles from Spain last week.

Sure, they wanted to go to Venice Beach, Hollywood, the Santa Monica Promenade, Century City and downtown. But at the top of their list was 7 a.m. ‘‘mass’’ at West Angeles Church of God in Christ.

‘‘I have never seen a religious service so moving,’’ said my friend, Encarna, who was visiting with her friend, Iosu. ‘‘And the music, the singing, it gives me piel de gallina (goosebumps).’’

Encarna and Iosu are Basques from San Sebastian in northwestern Spain, near the French border. Encarna owns a chain of successful restaurants. Iosu is an intellectual, a novelist and a student of Basque history.

On the day they arrived, they were preoccupied with a front-page story in the Times on Basque separatists ending their long truce with the Spanish government. Neither was sure what ending the truce would mean for their region of Spain. They hoped it would not mean a return to the bombings and kidnappings that had characterized the Basque demand for independence.

But those concerns in no way diminished their determination to get to West Angeles. USC Cinema professor Amanda Pope had taken Encarna to West Angeles several years earlier, and I had the distinct impression that last week’s return visit was much more than a tourist stop.

The music and the service had genuinely moved her when she first went there. The second trip was definitely a voyage of the spirit.

Such is the power of the African American style of worship. Such is the power of gospel music.

‘‘Of course that’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe,’’ the Englishman said calmly, as though I were an idiot for asking. ‘‘She’s a goddess.’’

I was traveling in Europe two years ago when I came across a small church very much off the beaten path in Paris. Outside hung a small poster advertising that an American gospel group would be giving a concert there in a few weeks. I didn’t recognize the name of the group, but a church official told me that tickets were selling briskly.

That encounter reminded me of an afternoon in a Spanish plaza decades earlier when I had heard a young English guy break into gospel lyrics: ‘‘Up above my head, I hear music in the air.’’

‘‘That’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe,’’ I turned and said to him in a tone almost demanding to know how he knew that music.

‘‘Of course that’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe,’’ the Englishman said calmly, as though I were an idiot for asking. ‘‘She’s a goddess.’’

At that time, probably fewer than one American in a thousand could have identified a Sister Rosetta Tharpe song. She was a queen of gospel music before Mahalia Jackson–a woman who traveled the country giving concerts at churches large and small.

However unknown she might have been in her own country, she had become a giant in England where fans collected and sang her recordings on Decca Records.

Of course, gospel music is now an international phenomenon with thousands of fans and practitioners in countries around the world.

The late Rev. James Cleveland was instrumental in making the music the force it is today. Acknowledged in gospel music circles as ‘‘King James,’’ Cleveland founded the Gospel Music Workshop of America in Detroit in 1968 to promote and preserve the musical tradition. The organization has since grown to more than 200 chapters with more than 20,000 members.

Cleveland was the first gospel performer to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He won four Grammys, had six gold albums, played Carnegie Hall and collaborated with Aretha Franklin on her seminal 1972 album, ‘‘Amazing Grace,’’ which is often credited with generating renewed interest in gospel.

And as gospel has spread around the world, the world has come to America to hear and learn it in its natural habitat.

A few years ago, Yuko Nagata moved to Los Angeles from Japan to sing in the West Angeles choir.

Born and raised a devout Christian in Nagasaki, Nagata discovered gospel on television one night when she was sinking into depression under the weight of heavy academic demands.

‘‘I felt very emotional, like I was helped,’’ Nagata said of the television concert. ‘‘I had been going to church since I was very young, but I felt something for the first time. It was like I was in shock.’’

Many of her Japanese friends and relatives, who knew little or nothing about African American culture, simply could not understand why she was so captivated by gospel music, she said.

‘‘There is a cultural difference,’’ she said. ‘‘Japanese people are very different. But this music speaks to me. I feel I can reach God more in the United States than I can in Japan.’’

Can I get an Amen? ◼︎