By and By: Charles Albert Tindley, the Father of Gospel Music

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.