Then Sings My Soul

Abstract

This ambitious book on southern gospel music reexamines the music's historical emergence and its function as a modern cultural phenomenon. Rather than seeing the music as a single rhetoric focusing on the afterlife as compensation for worldly sacrifice, the book presents southern gospel as a network of interconnected messages that evangelical Christians use to make individual sense of both Protestant theological doctrines and their own lived experiences. The book explores how listeners and consumers of southern gospel integrate its lyrics and music into their own religious experience, building up individual—and potentially subversive—meanings beneath a surface of evangelical consensus. The book traces an alternative history of southern gospel in the twentieth century, one that emphasizes the music's interaction with broader shifts in American life beyond the narrow confines of southern gospel's borders. The book's discussion includes the “gay–gospel paradox”—the experience of non-heterosexuals in gospel music—as emblematic of fundamentalism's conflict with the postmodern world.