A stirring picture book biography from ALSC Children’s Literature Legacy Award–winning Carole Boston Weatherford and award-winning illustrator Bryan Collier, about gospel composer and preacher Charles Albert Tindley, best known for the gospel hymn “We’ll Understand It Better By and By.”
At a time when most African Americans were still enslaved, Charles Tindley was born free. His childhood was far from easy, with backbreaking hours in the fields, and no opportunity to go to school. But the spirituals he heard as he worked made him long to know how to read the Gospel for himself. Late at night, he taught himself to read from scraps of newspapers. From those small scraps, young Charles raised himself to become a founding father of American gospel music whose hymn was the basis for the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”
Told in lilting verse with snippets of spirituals and Tindley’s own hymns woven throughout, Carole Boston Weatherford’s lyrical words and Bryan Collier’s luminous pictures celebrate a man whose music and conviction has inspired countless lives.
* “Simply written, evocative text . . . expressive watercolor-and-collage artwork . . . This picture book conveys that Tindley lived his life with purpose and left a lasting legacy of faith expressed through gospel music.”
“Weatherford tells Tindley's story in rhyming verse that captures his drive for spiritual growth, service, and musical expression. Collier's strong, vivid watercolor-and-collage illustrations enhance the text and visually depict the various facets of Tindley's life. . . . A lively salute to an important, influential life of music and service.”
“Weatherford’s couplets thrum like drumbeats, and they’re interwoven with italicized lines from songs (identified in end matter as coming from spirituals that inspired Tindley and hymns he himself wrote). . . . A sonorous readaloud.”
“Weatherford’s first-person, somewhat singsong-y rhyming narrative includes italicized lines from Tindley’s hymns (some of which also appear in the art), further emphasizing the preacher’s foundation in his faith. Collier’s watercolor and collage images beautifully reflect the man’s life and times, from the wide expanse of emerald-hued fields in which Tindley labored as a child and the bright blue sky above, to luminous, larger-than-life portraits of him orating as an adult.”
