Feeling Blue? Cure it With Powerful Southern Gospel Music Lyrics

Whether read or listened to, southern gospel music lyrics have the focus and the message that grounds you in an attitude of thankfulness and humbleness, whether you are Christian or not.

Of all the genres of music popular today, one of the most authentically original is black gospel and souther gospel music. The gospel music song lyrics are one of the most searched for items on the internet, and for one good reason. They uplift. They pick you up.

Let's look at two of the most popular gospel songs and see why.

Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace is perhaps one of the most famous and popular American songs, well beyond the gospel category. Here are the opening lyrics:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me.... I once was lost but now am found, Was blind, but now, I see.

Aside music itself, which sends shivers down your spine from the opening notes, the lyrics speak to a universal condition. All of us, at various times, feel lost and unworthy, blind and hopeless. So this song's lyrics bring a powerful message of the bliss of when we find our way, our purpose, whatever that might be.

Beulah Land

This song is one of my favorites. It is so short, but it speaks to the longing for a home that we all feel: a place where our separations and sorrows of this world will no longer intrude:

I'm kind of homesick for a country To which I've never been before. No sad goodbyes will there be spoken for time won't matter anymore.

This song is a great example of how universal the southern gospel themes are, breaking out of the bounds of bible-thumbing Jesus-saved me politics, and speaking to the human condition in a timeless way. Beulah Land closes out with these amazing lyrics:

I'm looking now across the river where my faith will end in sight. There's just a few more days to labor. Then I will take my heavenly flight.

Cure Those Blues Now

How ironic that another great southern music tradition is the blues, and this phrase has entered our language to denote 'being down.' If you think about it, perhaps it's only logical that the 19th century slavery experience would lead 20th century African American culture -- still segregated and oppressed for much of that century too -- to develop two great music traditions that denote the depressed condition (the Blues), and provide the antidote (Gospel Music).

So pump yourself up with some gospel music - you can either listen to it online or, one of my favorites, is to print out the lyrics to my favorite songs. Once you're up again, feeling good, and all jazzed up, then it's time to listen to the third great black southern music tradition, Jazz. But that's another whole story.