Braxton Shelley’s analysis of gospel choir songs in Healing for the Soul is a welcome and highly anticipated addition to a growing body of scholarly literature on Black gospel music. Throughout the book, Shelley engages subject matter and analytical methodologies yet to be explored in gospel scholarship. Given the prominence of seminal texts that focus primarily on the trajectory of gospel music’s historical lineage or the biography of individual gospel artists—consider Robert Darden’s People Get Ready!, Jerma Jackson’s Singing in My Soul, and Michael Harris’s The Rise of Gospel Blues1—Shelley’s methodology, one that focuses extensively on musical analysis, offers a fresh and nuanced conceptual approach to gospel scholarship. Healing for the Soul elucidates the relationship between sound and belief—how particular musical-structural devices and techniques in gospel choir songs facilitate religious ecstasy and function as a musical intermediary conjoining the immaterial and material worlds.The introduction lays the historical and theoretical groundwork for the discussions found in subsequent chapters. Shelley centers his analysis primarily on the gospel vamp, arguing that it enables the transformation of a worship gathering into a transcendent event. Using the vamp as the musical-structural point of departure, he coins the term “Gospel Imagination” to describe “the role that sound plays in religious experience” (p. 13) and to elucidate the process by which music “turn[s] spiritual power into a physical reality” (p. 23). Put another way, the Gospel Imagination is the belief that sound, as experienced through the vamp, precipitates ecstatic worship that believers experience in their bodies, thereby revealing the relationship between “belief, performance, and reception” (p. 29). In illuminating the import of the vamp in Black worship, Shelley situates the music of the legendary gospel artist Richard Smallwood at the center of his analysis. Despite Smallwood’s extensive résumé and his indisputable impact on the worship soundscape of Black churches, having penned iconic gospel anthems such as “The Center of My Joy” and “Total Praise,” Shelley is the first scholar to fully examine the musical and experiential efficacy of Smallwood’s oeuvre. Given the indelible imprint that Smallwood has made on gospel music and worship liturgies in and beyond Black congregations, Shelley’s analytical focus on Smallwood is a necessary and long-overdue intervention.In chapter 1, Shelley theorizes the homiletical practice of “tuning up”—an ecstatic, climactic moment in Black worship services where the preacher transitions from speech to song—to elucidate the ways in which it functions as the organizing logic of the vamp and the Gospel Imagination. Throughout the chapter, he juxtaposes particular gospel songs and sermons in order to explore the similarities between gospel music and Black preaching traditions. The chapter begins with an analysis of Richard Smallwood’s popular song “Healing” to demonstrate the transition from spoken introduction to the song’s primary melody, passing through the invocation of various rhetorical and vocal devices, before culminating in the emotional zenith of the song—the vamp. This same structural logic, Shelley argues, is evident in the formulaic structures of sermons within the Black sacred tradition, many of which begin with spoken words, which then transition into the preacher “tuning up,” signaling the arrival of a more emotive and embodied worship expression. Shelley thus unearths the musical, structural, and experiential commonalities of Black preaching and gospel song and the ways in which these commonalities are experienced by the worship participants.Chapter 2 delves into even deeper theoretical realms, analyzing the relationship between “tuning up” and several other concepts and practices including temporality, incarnation, and “shouting,” or holy dancing. Shelley considers how the vamp facilitates a reorientation of temporality both metrically and lyrically. As they manipulate time, vamps often sonically reflect and foster a reenactment of the incarnation of Christ, retelling the story of his embodiment of human flesh, crucifixion, and resurrection. The intersection of temporal alteration and Christ’s incarnation during the vamp induces an ecstatic experience in which spiritual power becomes tangible, thus enacting the escalatory experience of “tuning up.” The chapter then transitions into a theorization of the quintessential expression of embodied worship in the Black church: “shouting.” “Shouting,” Shelley argues, intersects with incarnation and temporality—it represents an embodied manifestation of divine presence and often creates a reorganization of temporality as evinced through “30 seconds of praise,” also called the “praise break” (pp. 137–38), which is an unplanned, interruptive moment of spiritual ecstasy commonly induced by the vamp. Such moments of physical ecstasy are embodied expressions of “tuning up,” as they represent a bodily manifestation of emotional escalation in Black worship. In discussing embodied worship, Shelley rightly critiques the employment of the often used but inaccurately applied term “spirit possession” to describe “shouting,” arguing that the former denies the worshipper’s spiritual agency.Chapter 3 addresses the centrality of words, or musical text, in constructing transcendence in gospel music. The primary question fueling this chapter’s narrative concerns the role that words play in producing the transformative power of gospel song. Shelley argues that transformative power is generated by an interplay between the vamp and the text: as the words are reiterated and subsequently intensified in the vamp during the process of “tuning up,” they become “the living word of God” (p. 163), inspiring a tangible transformation of the worshippers’ material conditions. One of the strengths of this chapter is Shelley’s attention to the centrality of the name “Jesus” in constructing moments of transformative ecstasy, his contention being that the emphasis on words derives from a preoccupation with that name. The written lyrics together with the improvisational text interpolated by the soloist during vamps, he argues, commonly underscore the name’s supernatural healing power. Shelley thus proves the import of words in gospel song in connecting visible and invisible worlds and producing a transcendent worship encounter for believers. He also undertakes the important work of elucidating the theoretical and cultural significance of lyrical reiteration in gospel song, countering the historical tendency among observers to portray it as mere “redundancy.”The final chapter describes the musical syntax of the vamp and its relationship to spiritual experience. Shelley emphasizes the vamp’s primary structural components and retheorizes it in ways that supplement and critique the existing literature. The chapter analyzes three escalatory techniques that regularly provide the structure of the gospel vamp: textural accumulation, inversion, and modulation. In explicating each technique, Shelley becomes the first scholar to thoroughly dissect the gospel vamp’s structural components and reveal their centrality in the creation of intensification and embodied exuberance. Further, he clarifies the meaning of the gospel vamp by conceptualizing it as teleological, or as having a goal-directed trajectory, thereby critiquing previous scholarship that has labeled repetitive grooves in African American music as nonteleological. To buttress his argument, Shelley discusses the extent to which “goal direction” and “directedness” (p. 266) inform the rhetoric heard in Black churches, a rhetoric that also appears with regularity in gospel songs. Here, he demonstrates not only his breadth of knowledge of the vamp’s function, but also his fluid proficiency in the broader theological and institutional contexts in which such vamps are often experienced.The contributions made by this text to the study of gospel music cannot be overstated. The extent to which Shelley uses musical analysis to illuminate the experience of gospel music is what sets his writing apart from other scholarship. Only a few scholars have engaged in extensive musical analysis as a methodology to examine gospel music culture. Such scholars include Guthrie Ramsey, who in his Race Music discusses the import of particular expressive gospel music practices and techniques to elucidate broader cultural meanings; and Andrew Legg, who proposes a new analytical system for notating Black gospel solo techniques in order to clarify their definitions in scholarship.2 Shelley, however, is the first to provide extensive musical analysis of the structural and experiential implications of gospel choir songs, many of which remain staples in Black church liturgies and gospel music culture. His analyses engage in the much-needed work of illuminating why and how moments of ecstatic worship occur in the Black worship tradition. The embodied exuberance of Black worship traditions has historically been disparaged as “mindless,” “barbaric,” and “primitive,” but Shelley’s analysis contradicts and dismantles such derogatory and stereotypical commentary by revealing the broad swath of musical-structural complexities that inform and produce moments of transcendence. His theoretical contributions, which help us to understand the relationship between gospel song and experience through the coinage of terms like “Gospel Imagination” and “the gospel stance” (p. 37), offer an invaluable hermeneutical lens through which to analyze and translate gospel music and the ecstasy to which it often gives rise.There are points at which readers might have benefitted from more succinct definitions of the theoretical concepts presented. The meanings of theoretically rich terms and concepts such as “Gospel Imagination,” “tuning up,” “the vamp,” “incarnation,” “the gospel stance,” and “kairos” (p. 35)—all terms invoked by Shelley to interpret his subject matter—tend to overlap and bleed into one another in ways that risk obscuring the distinctions between them. A potential remedy for this might have been to create a greater number of shorter chapters, allowing each theoretical concept more space in which to breathe on its own descriptively. This could have been particularly helpful in the case of chapter 2, which contains an abundance of complex theoretical concepts, each of which could stand alone as a chapter. Additional chapters elaborating specific concepts would have also obviated the need to reiterate definitions of theoretical terms, while offering opportunities for concise explication.The drafting of shorter chapters could have been facilitated by the inclusion of fewer transcriptions in each one. While Shelley’s attention to analytical detail is laudable and undoubtedly makes a necessary intervention in gospel scholarship, there are a few places where the analyses do not seem to be germane to the theoretical arc of the chapter. His extensive analysis of “Healing” and “Calvary” at the beginning of chapters 1 and 2 respectively are cases in point. Before making his ultimate argument that each of these songs enacts “tuning up,” Shelley appears to use extensive analytical detail at the beginning of these chapters as a kind of analytical introduction. But an assessment of each chapter’s structure leads one to ask to what extent these moments of in-depth musical analysis serve that chapter’s larger theoretical objectives. One might also be compelled to question the utility of the number of musical examples Shelley uses in making his arguments—what is unique about each example and how does it show us something that the previous example did not?Demonstration of the uniqueness, and therefore the utility, of each musical example might have been assisted by the inclusion of composition and/or performance dates. In chapter 1, for example, Shelley analyzes multiple gospel songs—including Walter Hawkins’s “Marvelous” and Judith McAllister’s “High Praise”—to illustrate the practice of “tuning up” in gospel performance. Many of these analyses, however, do not include specific dates or reveal the broader historical and cultural contexts in which the songs were composed and performed. A careful periodization and historical contextualization could have provided insight into the nuanced ways in which each gospel composer/performer approached the vamp. Additionally, in the third chapter’s discussion of the centrality of words in creating transcendence in gospel music, consideration of the broader theological context of the Word of Faith movement—a theological movement that places heavy emphasis on the spiritual primacy of words—would undoubtedly have bolstered Shelley’s argument. Sociologist Milmon Harrison’s seminal text on the Word of Faith movement, Righteous Riches, would have proved a valuable resource in articulating the extent to which this popular theological movement has influenced the way Black churchgoers understand the power of words.3These considerations aside, Healing for the Soul is a watershed, game-changing text. Shelley consistently demonstrates a masterful command of musical analysis and an astute knowledge of multiple fields of study. His work reaches across a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and will undoubtedly be of use to scholars working in the areas of musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, homiletics, liturgical studies, phenomenology, and ritual studies, among others. The accuracy of his musical analyses and transcriptions, the depth of his theoretical constructions and the new interpretive paradigms they offer, combined with Shelley’s emic position as one reared in the Black sacred tradition, make this work a must-read for anyone seeking to understand Black church and gospel music culture.