African American Gospel Research Articles

Mahalia Jacksonin musiikin ja hänen gospellaulutyylinsä saapuminen Suomeen 1950–1960 luvuilla

Mahalia Jackson (1911-1972), “The World’s Greatest Gospel Singer”, broke path for the worldwide popularity of African American gospel music. Her European concert tours never reached Finland, but since the 1950s, Finnish audiences have been able to listen to her music via recordings, radio, film and other media. This article explores the ways in which Jackson’s music came to Finland in the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, the article shows how the early marketing of her records and music critics’ excited reception of her gospel vocal expression sought to shape local audiences’ listening experiences and appreciation for the artistic merit of her music. This article is based on a study of various sources including advertisements, music reviews, correspondence and other archival materials, recordings, Jackson’s performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959). This article shows that when Mahalia Jackson’s music came to Finland, her gospel vocal expression was recognized for its powerful spirituality and emotional impact on listeners. Yet the ways in which her music was presented to Finnish audiences was often mystifying, decontextualized and guided by the interests of music industry actors. This limited the ability of local listeners to understand the cultural and historical meanings of her gospel vocal expression. At the same time, however, the enthusiasm and admiration demonstrated by music critics paved the way for the enduring influence of Mahalia Jackson’s music in Finland.

Sondheim’s vamps and Africanist musical practice

This article attends to what emerges as, however unlikely, Africanist musical practice in the work of Stephen Sondheim. My analysis considers Sondheim’s use of instrumental vamps as the threshold of song, the articulation of character and the means to dramaturgies of transformation and mood. I hear Sondheim’s vamps as Africanist musical practice, resonating with the African pianism articulated by Akin Euba and J. H. Kwabena Nketia, the appropriated structures of Ghanaian drumming in works by Steve Reich, and the function of African American gospel vamps theorized by musicologist and theologian Braxton D. Shelley. I linger with moments from recent Broadway revivals of Company and Into the Woods, and with feedback I received from Sondheim on my own work as a composer/lyricist and musical dramatist creating songs for West African characters.

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York

Thy Kingdom Come: Racial-Ethnic Oneness in African American Gospel Music

Thy Kingdom Come: Racial-Ethnic Oneness in African American Gospel Music

Black Church Rumor

AbstractIn 1992, Jet published “James Cleveland Infected L.A. Youth with HIV, $9 Mil. Lawsuit Claims,” which detailed how the Chicago-born gospel musician had not only allegedly sexually abused his foster son, Christopher B. Harris, but had also “[given] him the AIDS virus.” This article takes this incident of rumor or accusation as a critical opportunity to think about the archival reality of Black queer sexuality, on one hand, and sexual violence in Black gospel music history on the other. Using the legal documents from Christopher B. Harris v. Irwin Goldring as Special Administrator of the Estate of James Cleveland and commentary from Cleveland's contemporaries, it exhumes Cleveland from dusty church closets for consideration in the history of HIV and AIDS in African American Protestant church and gospel communities and in Black queer studies, ethnomusicology, and gender and sexuality studies. Further, it theorizes “Black church rumor” as a lens for Black queer religious studies and argues that Cleveland's perceived queer sexuality distracted from Harris's allegations of sexual abuse. Thus, it situates Cleveland—the person, the preacher, and the gospel legend—in the literature on “down low” sexuality and explicates the implications of Cleveland's legacy and role in Black gospel music production.

Analyzing Gospel

This article presents an analytical paradigm that employs the repetitive musical cycle known as “the vamp” to illuminate the interrelation of form, experience, and meaning in African American gospel music, focusing on music performed by gospel choirs with soloists. I argue that, more than just a ubiquitous musical procedure, the gospel vamp functions as a ritual technology, a resource many African American Christians use to experience with their bodies what they believe in their hearts. As they perform and perceive the gospel vamp's characteristic combination of repetition and escalation, these believers coproduce sonic environments that facilitate the communal experience of a given song's textual message. Through close readings of four canonical songs from the gospel choir repertoire—Kurt Carr's “For Every Mountain,” Brenda Joyce Moore's “Perfect Praise,” Richard Smallwood's “I Will Sing Praises,” and Thomas Whitfield's “I Shall Wear a Crown”—the article examines the phenomenological implications of gospel's communal orientation, outlines the relationship between musical syntax, musical experience, formal convention, and lyrical content in this genre, and suggests that analyzing gospel offers a way of studying how many black Christians come into contact with the invisible subjects of their belief.

Older People in a Community Gospel Choir: Musical Engagement and Social Connection

This research explores the role of community music in the lives of older Australians. This qualitative case study investigated the meanings and understandings ascribed by participants to their musical engagement in the South of the River Community Gospel Choir. This mixed a cappella SATB choir was formed in 2002 in Melbourne. The choir began with a repertoire of African-American Gospel music and South African Freedom Songs. With time their musical choices have transitioned to include more contemporary Australian composed works. The choir sings in diverse community settings such as high security prisons, palliative care, hospitals and the more common range of gigs such as community events, private events and folk festivals. Data were gathered from individual and focus group semi-structured interviews undertaken in 2016 with the members of the choir and with the Musical Director. Data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis and reported under the themes of Musical engagement and Social connection, Performing and Outreach. The findings confirmed the pivotal musical and social importance of the Music Director; the importance of performance opportunities that support both socialising and community outreach; and the role of ensemble membership in fostering and maintaining understandings of self-worth and self-esteem.

An analysis of performance practices in African American gospel music: rhythm, lyric treatment and structures in improvisation and accompaniment

AbstractAfrican American gospel music is a unique and distinctive idiom that has had a pervasive influence upon the development of contemporary popular music. While there are now many sources available on African American gospel music, the focus of the vast majority of these studies is on the sociological, historical and stylistic aspects of the genre, rather than on identifying and codifying specific musical characteristics and performance practices. This paper extends the discussion of gospel singing techniques in Andrew Legg's 2010 article ‘A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music’ (Popular Music, 29/1) by examining some of the key performance practices associated with rhythm and lyric treatment in African American gospel music, as well as common structures in gospel music improvisation and accompaniment. Through analysis of selected recordings, this research proposes a codified frame of reference for the definition and discussion of terminologies and performance practice techniques inherent within African American gospel music.

Gospel Music in Japan: Transplantation and Localization of African American Religious Singing

Gospel music is a type of Protestant Christian music in both white and black American traditions. White gospel or European American gospel music dates back to the late-nineteenth-century revival movement and has developed within three identifiable traditions: northern urban gospel, southern gospel, and country and bluegrass gospel. Black gospel or African American gospel music emerged in the 1930s in northern industrial cities, drawing on spirituals, jubilee singing, the blues, and hymnody from various traditions, then developed and flourished throughout North America. Today the influence of gospel music, particularly from the African American and northern urban white traditions, extends across many cultures (Shearon et al. 2012). In Japan, African American gospel music has become very popular since the early 1990s, and its popularity continues to the present day. This paper examines the way that African American gospel music took root and was localized in Japan in its social, cultural, and historical contexts.

Paradise and Politics in the Music of Blind Willie Johnson

I investigate the politics of paradises in the 1920s African-American gospel blues of Blind Willie Johnson. His recordings are apocalyptic vignettes which juxtapose and conflate paradises, using many different voices. I describe the theological and political paradises in Johnson’s songs: the Old Testament journey to Canaan; the post-death heaven in the New Testament; Christ’s kingdom on earth in Revelation; freedom in Northern cities or Canada; and a utopian dream of political emancipation of African-Americans and transformation of society in the South. I outline the various voices present in Johnson’s recordings: vocal styles; accompanying singers; the guitar; grammatical, textual and lexical voices; and the silent voices of technology and time. I suggest traces of a subtle political activism in these voices and paradises, and explore uses of these voices in linking paradises, arguing that the complex transitions enhance the force of signification and frustrate attempts to finalise meanings. Many interpretations of Johnson’s recordings, however, seek to determine final meaning, and I discuss the limitations of such attempts, limitations which not only underestimate the richness of the recordings but deny Johnson any political awareness or agency. In cautioning against this kind of project, I call for a hearing open to plural interpretations, and suggest political potential not only in coded messages, but in radical indeterminacy itself.

A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music

AbstractAfrican American gospel music seems without obvious parallel as a musical and social phenomenon of the twentieth century. It is a powerful musical and ‘spiritual’ expression that is to a larger extent defined by the musical style, vocal techniques and performance practices of one of its central figures: the gospel singer. Although these originally African American gospel vocal techniques and practices have now also significantly influenced the development of contemporary popular music and the broader gospel vocal style, the specific terminology used to describe them lacks precise definition, and also highlights the failure of conventional notation in successfully capturing or representing them.This article seeks then to firstly define and annotate some of the key descriptive terms commonly applied to African American gospel singing techniques in order that greater consistency and clarity can be achieved in relation to their usage within contemporary popular music research. Secondly, it will also introduce an analytical notational system, accompanied by a series of annotated musical transcriptions, that forms the basis of the author's taxonomy of musical gesture for African American gospel music, and which may provide a framework for comparative analytical research within the field of gospel-inspired contemporary popular music.

Calls and responses: the American novel of slavery since Gone with the wind

In this comprehensive, groundbreaking study, Tim A. Ryan explores how American novelists since World War I have imagined the institution of slavery and the experience of those involved in it. Complicating the common assumption that authentic black-authored fiction about slavery is starkly opposed to the traditional, racist fiction (and history) created by whites, Ryan suggests that discourses about American slavery are - and have always been - defined by connections rather than disjunctions. Ryan contends that African American writers didn't merely reject and move beyond traditional portrayals of the black past but rather actively engaged in a dynamic dialogue with white-authored versions of slavery and existing historiographical debates. The result is an ongoing cultural conversation that transcends both racial and disciplinary boundaries and is akin to the call-and-response style of African American gospel music. Ryan addresses in detail more than a dozen major American novels of slavery, from the first significant modern fiction about the institution - Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (both published in 1936) - to recent noteworthy novels on the topic - Edward P. Jones's The Known World and Valerie Martin's Property (both published in 2003). His insistence upon the necessity of interpreting novels about the past directly in relation to specific historical scholarship makes Calls and Responses especially compelling. He reads Toni Morrison's Beloved not in opposition to a monolithic orthodoxy about slavery but in relation to specific arguments of controversial historian Stanley Elkins. Similarly, he analyses William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner in terms of its rhetorical echoes of Frederick Douglass's famous autobiographical narrative. Ryan shows throughout Calls and Responses how a variety of novelists - including Alex Haley, Octavia Butler, Ishmael Reed, Margaret Walker, and Frances Gaither - engage in a dynamic debate with each other and with such historians as Herbert Aptheker, Charles Joyner, Eugene and Elizabeth Genovese, and many others. A substantially new account of the development of American slavery fiction in the last century, Calls and Responses goes beyond merely exalting the expression of black voices and experiences and actually reconfigures the existing view of the American novel of slavery.

‘Wrapped up’: ideological setting and figurative meaning in African-American gospel rap

In this article I shall attempt to demonstrate the application of an ideology-critical framework designed to give a comprehensive and differentiated account of textual ‘contradictions’ and ‘tensions’ in symbolic forms. Based on Johann Visagie's figurative semiotics of ideological discourse, this theoretical schema is demonstrated via an extensive analysis of the gospel rap video wrapped up by the African-American group Dawkins & Dawkins. As a metaphorically mediated enactment of contemporary-religious meaning, this instance of gospel rap is analysed as a forthright yet complex example of structural ambiguity. Allowing for a detailed reading of the semiotic layering surrounding and infiltrating all dimensions of this text, my interpretation problematises its reading as an uncomplicated, commercialised excursion into the pleasures of an embodied, danced religion. In both ‘highlighting’ and ‘hiding’ the layers of cultural meaning built into the metaphor of danced religion, wrapped up celebrates black religious identity without distancing it from underlying ideological formations associated with collective suffering and social injustice.

Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel:Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel.

American AnthropologistVolume 103, Issue 4 p. 1205-1205 Book Reviews First published: December 2001 https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2001.103.4.1205.1AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Abstract Book reviewed in this article: Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel. Glenn Hinson.. Volume103, Issue4December 2001Pages 1205-1205 RelatedInformation

Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel

Glenn Hinson focuses on a single gospel program and offers a major contribution to our understanding not just of gospel but of the nature of religious experience. A key feature of African American performance is the layering of performative voices and the constant shifting of performative focus. To capture this layering, Hinson demonstrates how all the parts of the gospel program work together to shape a single whole, joining speech and song, performer and audience, testimony, prayer, preaching, and singing into a seamless and multifaceted service of worship. Personal stories ground the discussion at every turn, while experiential testimony fuels the unfolding arguments. Fire in My Bones is an original exploration of experience and belief in a community of African American Christians, but it is also an exploration of African American aesthetics, the study of belief, and the ethnographic enterprise.

Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel (review)

Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel (review)

Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel

Journal Article Fire in my Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel, by Glenn Hinson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, 395 pp., $45.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paper) Get access Timothy J. Nelson Timothy J. Nelson Northwestern University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 62, Issue 3, Fall 2001, Pages 408–409, https://doi.org/10.2307/3712361 Published: 01 October 2001

Glenn Hinson, Fire in my Bones. Transcendance and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel

Glenn Hinson, Fire in my Bones. Transcendance and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel

Fire in my bones: transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American gospel

Fire in my bones: transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American gospel