Gospel Minstrelsy

Abstract

American Religion 1, no. 1 (Fall 2019), pp. 137–149 Copyright © 2019, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.1.08 Review Essay GOSPEL MINSTRELSY on Bob Dylan, Trouble No More: 1979–1981 The Bootleg Series, volume 13 Columbia Records (2017) Kathryn Lofton Yale University, New Haven, USA You have to begin by capturing in words something that is only partly about words. It isn’t not about words. It is just that words are the wrong way at it. Gospel is the sound of spirit. A particular kind of song and lyric, yes. Mainly, though, a spirit you use sound to achieve. Braxton Shelley says, “gospel music is a means by which to make one’s way through the world.” In his language, gospel is a sonic phenomenon that deploys a combination of repetition and intensification “to organize both sound and perception in pursuit of transcendence.”1 I am now going to write about something that we should hear to know.2 1 Braxton D. Shelley, “Analyzing Gospel,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 1 (2019), 196, 239. My work about Bob Dylan in music history is inspired and informed by the scholarly and pedagogical contributions of Daphne Brooks and Gayle Wald. 2 Listening to gospel music while reading or writing about gospel music helps correct for some of this sensory hermeneutic confusion. If you would like a soundtrack to your reading, consider pulling up The Bootleg Series Vol. 13: Trouble No More 1979–1981. On streaming services, you find the standard two-disc edition. From that double album I American Religion 1:1 138 Of course: we talk a lot about gospel. We talk about its formal chronological beginnings (the 1930s) and the regions that intersected to forge its emergence (i.e., “Gospel music is the twentieth-century form of African American religious music that evolved in urban cites following the Great Migration of Blacks from the agrarian South in the period surrounding World Wars I and II”).3 We talk about its predecessor and contributing genres (spirituals, blues, jubilee, and camp-meeting songs); we talk about its founding father (Thomas A. Dorsey, 1899–1993) and his signature song (“Precious Lord”).4 We talk about its defining attributes (the call and response format, ample room for improvisation, rhythm, and frequent use of the flatted seventh and third in melodies).5 We try to write out how we got from there to here, from Mahalia Jackson (1911–1972) to Yolanda Adams (1961-), James David Vaughan (1864–1941) to Kirk Franklin (1970-), Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973) to Valerie June (1982-). We try to say what is so special about this sound alongside other sounds, and why this sound could make communities stand up, and feel together. Whatever our studies of gospel music address, they invariably try to name this feeling of gospel sound. Where does that feeling derive, and what does that feeling do? Gospel songs “are emotionally inspired—by visions, trouble, sorrow, thanksgiving, and joy,” notes George Ricks.6 Gospel songs are trying to—in the words of Thomas Dorsey—“help somebody else” through an upbeat retelling of the “good news.”7 Throughout the history of Christianity, the concept of gospel was connected to an idea of a singular life story that needed to be told to others so they could know something they might not about the recommend tracks 5 and 12 from the first disc, and 6 and 16 from the second. The eleventh installment in the Columbia bootleg series of Dylan’s recordings, Trouble No More is available in three versions: a two-disc set common to the rest of the series after the first three volumes; a four-LP album version of the standard set; and a nine-disc deluxe version including a DVD. 3 Mellonee V. Burnim, “Gospel,” African American Music: An Introduction, 2nd ed., ed. Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby (New York: Routledge, 2015), 189. 4 Burnim, “Gospel,” 171. 5 Robert Darden, People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music (New York: Continuum, 2004), 183. 6 George Robinson Ricks, Some Aspects of Religious Music of the United States Negro: An Ethnomusicological Study with Special...