Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays in Mormon Music by Michael Hicks

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays in Mormon Music by Michael Hicks Nathan Rees Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays in Mormon Music. By Michael Hicks. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2020. [x, 232 p. ISBN 9781560852865 (paperback), $17.95; ISBN 9781560853855 (e-book), $9.99.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, index. [End Page 84] Michael Hicks conceived of Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays on Mormon Music as the third in a series on music in the belief and practice of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Unlike his earlier monographs—Mormonism and Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015)—this volume is a collection of Hicks’s essays on diverse topics spanning the early nineteenth century to the present, ranging from historical studies to personal reflections. Published by Signature Books, a Utah-based press devoted to Mormon studies, the book is aimed at readers who are already versed in Mormon history and culture. Still, the volume offers important research that brings new perspectives to contextualize Mormon music within its historical and contemporary cultural spaces. The book is div ided into three roughly chronological sections. In the first, Hicks focuses on the nineteenth century, addressing many of the same issues discussed in Mormonism in Music but adding numerous findings that he made in the intervening three decades. The section begins with “Joseph Smith’s Favorite Songs (or Not),” a chapter that explores the sundry musical forms circulating in the early LDS Church by investigating a selection of songs favored by the church’s founding prophet. Hicks creates a rich image of Smith’s musical world within contemporaneous US culture, in contexts ranging from militarism to temperance. Chapter 2 is a critical reevaluation of early Mormon music from a feminist perspective, detailing Emma Smith’s work in creating the first LDS hymnal. Emma Smith was not only Joseph Smith’s wife but also an important Mormon leader in her own right as founding president of the Relief Society, the female corollary to Mormonism’s exclusively male priesthood. Hicks uncovers the gender dynamics attending the book’s production and reception, as Emma Smith struggled to maintain institutional support for her hymnal against competing publications launched by male church leaders. Hicks explores how Emma Smith’s strategic selection of texts— and deletion of texts in a later revision—supported the intimate personal piety that she espoused, in contrast to her husband’s focus on communal religious experience. Hicks tracks this narrative up to the present, demonstrating how the current LDS hymnal, in use since 1985, bears the traces of this struggle through the erasure of Emma Smith’s imprint. In the third chapter, Hicks offers a case study of the musical eclecticism that characterized the early development of Mormon hymnody, speculating on possible musical sources for one of the church’s most popular hymn tunes, “The Spirit of God.” He convincingly argues that the tune, long assumed to have been adopted from an unknown non-Mormon source, was instead likely composed by LDS musicians by combining melodic elements of several popular hymn tunes. In chapter 4, Hicks returns to cultural-historical analysis by detailing the prevalence of blackface minstrelsy in nineteenth-century Mormonism. He shows how musical representations of Blackness paralleled developing LDS perspectives on race. Limited early openness to African Americans ended in the 1850s with the establishment of racist doctrinal pronouncements denying people of African descent leadership roles or entry into the church’s temples. In unearthing and contextualizing the presence of blackface minstrelsy beginning in early Mormonism and continuing into twentieth century Utah, Hicks makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the history of race in Mormonism. Hicks could go further in theorizing the intersection [End Page 85] of race and music in Mormonism. His conclusions are focused more on the reasons that Mormons embraced black-face minstrelsy than on the impacts of its performance, whether in its direct effect on African American Latter-day Saints or in its broader reinforcement of racist beliefs and practices in Mormon history. The three essays in the second section address Mormon...