Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker Brett Grainger Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century. By Vaughn A. Booker. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 344 pp. $35.00. Scholarly narratives on African American religion have long centered on the Black church and its predecessor, "slave religion" (what Albert Raboteau called the "invisible institution"). In both cases, Protestant influences, themes, and institutional forms have dominated discussion. In recent decades, however, scholarship has widened to encompass non-Protestant and post-Protestant modes of religiosity, including Afro-Catholicism, Black Islam, and Afro-Diasporic traditions. Taken together, these developments have decentered the "Black [End Page 78] church" in American religious history by questioning its monopoly over African American religious and cultural life. Vaughn Booker's new work returns our attention to mainstream denominations and church life, but for a different purpose: to show the ways in which twentieth-century jazz musicians leveraged their celebrity to become "race representatives"—ambassadors of Black respectability to the white world—alongside religious leaders, advancing social and cultural progress for other African Americans and helping to transform the reputation of jazz from the devil's music to high art. Drawing upon a rich archive of popular materials—interviews and articles in the Black and white press, private writings, and a number of other sources—Booker demonstrates how jazz musicians embodied beliefs and practices that both mirrored and diverged from those of the Black church. The book is divided into two parts. Part I, "Representations of Religion and Race," describes how, early on, middle-class Black ministers worked to resist the rising popularity of jazz among their younger congregants. Their efforts failed, but with an ironic result: as the press held up jazz men and women as spokespersons for their race, these same artists came to see themselves as burdened with the responsibility of representation, turning the stage into a kind of pulpit. Booker focuses on three ways in which jazz artists performed religion for the public: through their "irreverent performances of African American religious leadership and expressive acts of worship," their "commitment to black Protestants' social and political activism against Jim Crow," and their "sacralization of 'Africa' in narratives of African American history" (13). If the second theme might come as less of a surprise to readers, the first and third themes are less well documented, and Vaughn presents them in especially striking and memorable ways. In chapter two, which focuses on Cab Calloway, Booker surprises and delights by situating the multitalented singer and bandleader within a long tradition of "religious irreverence." Chapter 4, "Royal Ancestry," moves from irreverence to reverence, showing how the "sacred concerts" of Duke Ellington, among other explicitly religious jazz works, presented an African American history "emerging from, and connected to, a sacred African past that included both biblical scriptures and ancient African civilizations," a story that effectively rendered "the enslaved African experience in the United State … as an extension of that sacred African history" (16). In Part II, "Missions and Legacies," Booker foregrounds the religious thought and practice of two pianists and composers, Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams. Booker attends to the ways Ellington struggled to articulate his theological beliefs as he navigated a variety [End Page 79] of religious settings, revealing how his sacred concerts were conceived less as an authentic recapitulation of the Black Protestant traditions of his childhood than an ecumenical religious project directed to an explicitly white liberal Protestant audience. Roman Catholicism receives the most sustained attention in the two chapters devoted to Williams, who Josef Sorett has described as the most famous Afro-Catholic convert of the post-war era, a period that saw a massive increase in African American affiliation with Catholicism. The seventh chapter explores Williams's religious journey to the Catholic faith. Booker ably narrates how Williams's loss of her friend, bebop pioneer Charlie ("Bird") Parker, to a heroin overdose contributed to her decision to convert and how Williams struggled with whether to give up music entirely until a number of friends, including several jazz-loving clergy, convinced her to use...