Reviewed by: “Let the Church Sing!”: Music and Worship in a Black Mississippi Community Ericka Patillo “Let the Church Sing!”: Music and Worship in a Black Mississippi Community. By Thérèse Smith. Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2004. [xxi, 293 p. ISBN 1-58046-157-3. $45.00.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. As a black American born and raised in the Southeast and brought up in a Pentecostal church, I was immediately interested in Let the Church Sing!, an ethnographic study of a rural black Mississippi community, their styles of worship and music, and how their worldview influenced these styles. More than an academic interest, I wanted to know the similarities between that experience and mine. Just as Thérèse Smith, an Irish ethnomusicologist with a Brown University pedigree, acknowledges that this study is "inevitably coloured by [her] interpretations" (p. 207), so too are my impressions and judgments of her work informed by my experiences growing up in a black church in the South. Smith has more than an academic interest too—she developed an admiration and intimacy with the congregation that shines through in her writing. Despite this intimacy, Smith's research and methodology are unimpeachable, and she has maintained her external objectivity, while at the [End Page 142] same time she perfectly describes some of the internal cultural structures that at times defy explanation. Updating and expanding her Ph.D. dissertation, "Moving in the Spirit: Music of Worship in Clear Creek, Mississippi, as an Expression of Worldview," (Brown University, 1998), Let the Church Sing! is a well-written, readable, and engaging piece about the "intersection of belief system, expressive culture, and worldview of a single, more-or-less self-contained African American Baptist community in the Deep South," (p. 1), and this is part of what makes it unique. Other studies have contributed greatly to the literature, but none take the approach she does, nor do they examine these three aspects as they affect one small community. Several studies have historical perspective (Ingrid Overacker, The African American Church Community in Rochester, New York, 1900–1940 [Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1998]; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 [Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1993]), or focus on a specific genre (Ray Allen, Singing in the Spirit: African-American Sacred Quartets in New York City [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991]). Most do not include extended musical transcriptions and/or recordings (Guthrie Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop [Berkeley: University of California Press and Center for Black Music Research, 2003]; Gerald Davis, I Got the Word in Me and I Can Sing It, You Know: A Study of the Performed African-American Sermon [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985]). Smith deliberately excludes African retention in this study. The phrase "Let the church sing!" is taken from benedictory remarks of the pastor of the Clear Creek Missionary Baptist Church (M.B.C.), located in rural northern Mississippi. The fieldwork, which includes interviews with church members and recordings of songs, sermons, and prayers, was done in the early-to-mid-1980s. Smith also did fieldwork at black churches in Kentucky and Rhode Island, and often uses her experiences there to compare and contrast to those at Clear Creek. Smith presents the components of her main thesis—the articulation of facets of Clear Creek's worldview—in chapters that explore identity, time, belief-system, and tradition, and the inherent oppositions and ambiguities within these four areas. The rest of the book is dedicated to explications and melodic and rhythmic transcriptions of prayers and sermons. The community's story unfolds via the words and meanings of the church members, extensive prescriptive and descriptive transcriptions of several songs, sermons and prayers, analysis of the same, and recorded excerpts. There are two separate books here. The author presents and develops a cohesive thesis and argument about worldview and opposing poles, but about halfway through the book the reader gets to the "good stuff"—the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and how it influences the singing, the praying, and the preaching. Once Smith gets to the prayers and sermons...