Historically, the two sections of town are segregated: East Waco is black, and West Waco is white. The Brazos splits Waco into east and west. Likely, this draws from the river, named El Rio de los Brazos de Dios, or the River of the Arms of God, by Spanish explorers, evidently because it was the first water to be found by some desperately thirsty travelers.
The city has a kind of languorous rhythm. When I picture a river, I picture the Brazos as it runs through Waco, Texas, where I was born and raised, and where Darden has lived and worked for nearly fifty years. As Darden writes in the afterword to the second and final volume of Nothing But Love in God’s Water, his 2016 book tracing the music from sit-ins to Resurrection City, “The image that I kept in the back of my mind as I read and researched and interviewed was that of a river-God’s water-that flowed then and flows now in an unbroken stream.” Many of the symbols are drawn from nature.
Ollow the lyrics of black sacred music, from the spirituals through emancipation and the civil rights movement to present day, as gospel music historian Robert Darden has in his three books on the topic, and certain images recur.
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