=== Passage I === He heard a whistle, a train coming toward him, southbound from Columbia. He moved off the inside track to the track next to the river and watched it approach. The engineer was waving at him in what at first seemed a greeting, but as the train screamed past he realized it was a warning. He jerked around. The 'Columbia! Next stop Columbia!' northbound train he'd just left was bearing down on him, its own whistle masked by the other's. Orville glanced out the right-hand window. Out of the top of a hill he saw Olana, the Persian-turreted mansion built by the nineteenth-century landscape painter Frederick Church. Its limestone face was against the lowering sun, and he felt the breath of the acrid scent of creosote. Grabbing his backpack from the overhead rack, he walked to the space between the cars. He would be home in a couple of minutes. No he would not. The train screeched with a lot more oomph, and fought itself to a stop. Orville and the other passengers waited. Nothing more. For the first time in his life he saw himself as a part of some whole, some whole world to which he was seamlessly connected. He felt alive, as if something else had clicked. After another fifteen minutes Orville had had enough of the sweltering Amtrak car. Feeling good out in the unconditioned air, he opened the door and jumped down from the car. The wet heat smacked him in the face like a big, sweaty hand. Shouldering his backpack, he walked along the cinders to the front of the train. There were two tracks. Orville stretched his arms out to the slopes of the Catskill mountains through the green, shadowed foothills to the inlet at Catskill Creek with its oil tanks and red neon sign for Mike's Pizza, and felt the rough, twisting pain in his chest. He clenched down on it, trying to make it go away. He fought back tears. 'What's wrong, honey-bunny?' Dread was rising, the pain was going. He broke eye contact. Feeling her fearful concern, he said, 'Nothing.' He turned and ran back out the door. Now, standing on the tracks, he realized that moment had been one end of the thread that had unspooled all these years in a life spent running, a life restless with questions. Realizing that now there would be the train arriving, his sisters meeting him on it—he hurried on. As he rounded, the vista north opened up. There was the sight of the Persian-turreted mansion in his hometown, Columbia. === Sister Rosetta Tharpe === Passage III Mahalia Jackson in May 1937, but they did so poorly that the label dropped her and didn't venture back into the gospel field until it took a chance on Rosetta seventeen months later. With her bell-like voice, winning smile, and Cotton Club notoriety, Rosetta had the combination of the musical goods and showbiz flair that Sister Rosetta Tharpe, as she was billed, was not supposed to be a highlight of the 1938 Cotton Club revue, headlining Cab Calloway and the Nicholas Brothers. The young dancers who thrilled audiences with their acrobatic elegance. Originally, this emerging gospel singer was just a gamble, signed by Herman Stark for two weeks. Like other new attractions, Rosetta constituted one part of a huge supporting cast, performers who largely filled time between the big numbers. Early print advertisements did not mention her name. Yet from the outset, audiences were thrilled by Rosetta's unusual sound and style. New reporters, white and black, struggled to describe her. Most used some variation of 'swinging' to convey the rhythmic quality of her music, calling her a 'swinger of spirituals,' a 'spiritual swinging favorite,' a 'hymn swinging evangelist,' and a 'hymnswinger.' Still others compared Rosetta to Bessie Smith, the blues singer whose career was cut short by a 1937 car accident. Like Smith, Rosetta presented a picture of black female self-assurance. Indeed, her 'gospel blues' and secular blues were not all that distinct. Both sprang from sources in slave culture and both confronted the harshness of the world with determination to 'make a way outta no way.' For gospel singers, this 'way' was through God; for blues singers, it was through self-reliance. From October to December 1938, the main purpose of the passage is to describe the characteristics of gospel music and the characteristics of blues music.