New York -- Spirituals Tour Celebrates Harlem Culture, History

NEW YORK - They wanted to hear gospel music, the tourists on the bus said. As Christa Herrmann, from Wiesbaden, Germany, explained in her precise English, "It is very rich and rhythmic."

Specifically, they wanted to hear gospel sung in a Harlem church. "Going to church in Belgium is boring," a Flemish pop singer named Koen Wauters added.

But they were also a touch nervous. From the subway stop a block away, an A train could have whisked them uptown to Martin Luther King Boulevard - 125th Street - in 10 minutes for a dollar and a half. But what if they got lost, they worried, and stumbled into an unsafe neighborhood? They had heard, two sisters from British Columbia said, that Harlem looks "like London after the Blitz."

So 38 foreigners (and two Floridians) bought $33 tickets and gathered in Times Square to board a Harlem Spirituals tour bus, one of a dozen the company was sending uptown on a recent Sunday, offering gospel excursions in French, Spanish, Italian and German.

Harlem Spirituals, which ferries more than 50,000 visitors a year through the nation's best-known African-American community, arranges for visitors to attend worship services at various churches. This group was bound for East Ward Baptist, which proclaims itself "The Church Where Everybody Is Somebody and God Is in Control."

When Harlem Spirituals President Muriel Samama began escorting travelers to Harlem a decade ago, the demand was scant.

Now on busy summer Sundays, Samama now needs 20 buses to meet the demand. Rival tour companies have clambered aboard: Gray Line New York Tours has been averaging 10 busloads a month, and New York Apple Tours began sending its double-deckers to Harlem churches last spring.

In fact, near-gridlock can sometimes result when too many tourists descend, clogging streets with buses and threatening to outnumber the parishioners in some churches.

Many have listened to African-American music - not just gospel but also R&B and jazz - in their home countries for years. Several of today's bus riders, such as management consultant Penny Ryan, even perform in gospel choirs themselves. But she knows it's somehow different, singing praises to the Lord in Sydney, Australia. Today she figured she'd encounter the real thing, at the source.

"Before you lies Harlem," guide Peggy Taylor intoned into her microphone as the bus passed 110th Street. Careful to point out elegant town houses, new retail businesses and the still-gracious apartment houses where Duke Ellington and Paul Robeson once lived, Taylor told her flock how greatly Harlem was improving. But not all of it.

"Here we see the blighted area," she announced as the bus passed singed buildings with plywood-covered windows. Everyone dutifully turned to look. "You see how the city has boarded them up to prevent people from using them as shooting galleries for drugs."

The tour stopped briefly at 125th Street, so the visitors could pose beneath the Apollo Theatre marquee and see the murals of cherry groves and tropical forests that local artist Franco the Great ("Name it I Paint it") had created on metal storefront grates.

Heading crosstown toward East Ward Baptist on First Avenue, Taylor issued caveats that have become gospel-tour standards: "No picture-taking in the church, please. No videotaping. But you can clap your hands and sing along. If you're feeling a little cool now, you'll be warm soon."

Harlem churches, lures for American visitors and gospel fans as well as foreigners, have been struggling to accommodate this sometimes overwhelming fascination. At Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion on West 137th Street, ushers seat visitors in the balcony; that way, they can leave before the sermon (which many will not be able to understand) without causing disruption in every pew. At Canaan Baptist on West 116th, hosts and hostesses greet guests at the door to forestall problems like snacking in the sanctuary. Abyssinian Baptist, where the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. preached, bars buses altogether.

Deaconess Bernice Singletary welcomes the visitors, but wonders, sometimes, why people pay so much and come so far for just one hour's worth of a three-hour service: "Maybe they're not looking to be saved . . . Maybe they're just looking for entertainment."

The Harlem Spirituals tourists filing into the rear pews of the modest, windowless sanctuary - East Ward's building once housed a branch of Chase Manhattan Bank - seemed a little awkward at first. They'd come in jeans and Nikes while their hosts were dressed to the nines, the ladies in elaborately trimmed hats. They wondered why two nurses in crisp white uniforms and caps were stationed on either side of the sanctuary. (To help out in case worshipers were overcome by religious fervor and fainted, it was later explained.)

And when the Rev. Willie Harrison chided from the pulpit, "It's mighty quiet in here today. How many come to praise the Lord? Give Him your praise. Get on your feet. Hallelujah!" - they weren't sure how to respond.

When was it proper to yell "Thank you, Jesus"? Or murmur "Yes, Lord"? Should they stand and raise their arms to Heaven, as some worshipers did, or just sit quietly and watch?

But music hath charms. The choir marched in singing "Oh, How I Love Jesus," and everybody - parishioners and visitors alike - swayed along. The women's chorus offered a rendition of "I Still Have Joy" so rousing that a couple of choir members began to dance in the aisle.

The tourists were soon clapping and stomping along with their hosts. It was a joyful noise.

As the bus headed back toward midtown, everyone was saying how marvelous the service was - the emotion, the soaring voices, the expressions of bedrock faith. The people who sang with gospel groups in British Columbia and Sydney looked particularly chastened.

"It's got a passion here you don't find in Australia," Penny Ryan said humbly.

Her friend could only agree. "I was thinking," he said, "of converting."