Roberta Martin: An Arkansas native helping spread gospel
The Book of Psalms says, “My lips will shout for joy when I sing praise to you.” The angelic voice of Arkansas native Roberta Martin and her inspired music was part of a new generation of gospel music that spread across the nation starting in the 1930s. Martin would become an important part of a new chapter in the history of an old musical style, of singing praise to God.
She was born Roberta Evelyn Winston in Helena in February 1907, one of six children. She started playing the piano at the age of six before they left for Chicago in 1917.
The family was part of the great wave of African-Americans moving to the North during World War I. Millions of African-Americans left the South in those years in favor of jobs in wartime factories, drawn by higher wages, a wider array of job opportunities, and the escape from segregation and racial harassment. And like other African-Americans moving north, the gospel music that had been such a special part of their lives arrived and spread throughout northern communities, taking on new dimensions with new arrangements and music producers recording beloved songs.
Even with the cross-country move, music and church remained a constant in Roberta Winston’s life. She continued to play the piano and sing and started performing in local churches not long after the family arrived in Chicago. She continued to practice through school music programs and professional tutors. By the time she was in high school, she was the pianist for her church youth choir at Ebenezer Baptist Church. After graduation, she briefly studied classical piano at Northwestern University. She became a popular performer in churches across Chicago and at an unknown date married and divorced William Martin. She would keep the last name as her professional career debuted.
In 1932, she became the pianist for the Young People’s Choir. She met Theodore Frye in this group, and the two formed the Martin-Frye Quartet in 1933. She played piano for the popular gospel group and snag several songs solo with the choir of six men. The group broke up in 1936, and Martin formed the Roberta Martin Singers, a mix of several men and women who went on the road to deliver the Word through music. She developed a unique style of gospel music that combined her classical training and blues music that inspired many gospel artists in the years that followed.
As her music career bloomed, she started her own music publishing business in 1939. The Roberta Martin Studio of Music recorded a number of prominent gospel artists and published several of their compositions in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1943, her original song, “Try Jesus, He Satisfies” became an immediate hit. The Roberta Martin Singers would record several gold albums during their career. She married James Austin in 1947, and the couple later had a son. This did not slow her career down much. In 1953, the group recorded another hit, “I’m Just Waiting on the Lord.”
She remained active in her local church in Chicago, serving as music director for Mount Pisgah Baptist Church from 1956 to 1968. She and the Roberta Martin Singers continued to travel across the world. In 1958, they recorded the album Grace, the title track being a re-recording of a popular single from years before. Their popular album God is Still on the Throne was released the next year. Since I Met Him followed in 1961. In 1964, they recorded a live album of a performance at First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, titled From Out of Nowhere.
Martin contracted cancer in the mid-1960s. As her condition worsened, she was forced to stop performing. She was able to record one final album, Praise God, in 1968.
She died in January 1969, less than a month before her 62nd birthday. So beloved she was, her funeral drew thousands of admirers and well-wishers from near and far. An estimated 50,000 people braved a cold winter day in Chicago to pay their final respects.
Her music still resonated in the decades after her passing. The Smithsonian in Washington, DC, featured her as part of a special exhibition in 1981. In 1988, her rendition of “Try Jesus” was featured in the film Mississippi Burning. In 1998, she was one of four early women gospel singers to be portrayed in a series of stamps from the U. S. Postal Service. Her music has also been featured in a variety of films, documentaries, and television programs since. She was also the subject of a biography, Only a Look, by Ronald Greer in 2015. While the echoes of her voice have faded, her music lives on, sung in churches across the nation each Sunday.