Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age. By Jerma A. Jackson. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. [xii, 193 p. ISBN 0-8078-2860-2. $18.95.] Illustrations, index, bibliography. Since original publication of Anthony Heilbut's The Gospel Sound in 1971, there have been not more than a handful of well-researched histories of twentieth-century African American religious music, nor have there been many good biographies of major figures in gospel music. Jerma A. Jackson's Singing in My Soul is somewhat disappointing, because it has makings of either a groundbreaking study of role of women as musical missionaries in African American churches, or a thoughtful biography of controversial gospel singer-guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but is instead an uneasy combination of two. That said, Singing in My Soul is an important, if unfocused, analysis of tradition of female solo singer in African American religious music, a line that goes through Tharpe to Sallie Martin, Mahalia Jackson, Bessie Griffin, Shirley Caesar, and countless others. Jackson, an assistant professor of at University of North Carolina, states the thought of writing a dissertation about music seemed daunting when knowledge of subject was virtually nonexistent. She received a fellowship from Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, where she met folklorist-performer Bernice Johnson Reagon, who introduced me to world of early gospel and put a tape recorder in my hand and insisted that this project hinged on history (p. ix). Jackson's inexperience with both early gospel recordings and collection and analysis of are evident in writing, where these elements are less than cohesive. Jackson has conflated oral history with interview material; rather than allowing narratives, primarily taken from members of black churches in 1940s and 1950s, to tell their own particular story, they are used more as color to confirm information already gathered from secondary sources. And while her analysis of early gospel recordings is revealing, Jackson makes conclusions about these records outside context in which these recordings were made. Chapter 1, Exuberance or Restraint, examines role of religious music in black life after Reconstruction, especially as African Americans began establishing national church organizations. The National Baptist Convention, led by members of black middle class, denounced emotional religion of slave culture and promoted education and restraint (p. 12). Rather than following in call-and-response lining-out tradition of slave hymns, they used hymnbooks and choirs that severely limited spontaneous singing. A new denomination, Church of God in Christ (COGIC), arose at turn of last century, which tied early Christian practices with ecstatic worship of slave-era African Americans. It should not be surprising, then, that first stars of gospel music came out of this denomination, also known as Holiness Church or (derogatorily) as Holy Rollers. Chapter 2, I Just Do What Lord Say, looks at role of women in Holiness Church, in particular as musical missionaries. While leadership of Church of God in Christ was almost entirely men, women made up majority in pews. …
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