“A Balm In Gilead”

The chapter grapples with the oft-cited interrelation of characteristically Black preaching and gospel music, using what has been called “the musicality of Black preaching” to understand the centrality of vamps to gospel singing. This cumulative turn toward musicality is more than just a homiletical strategy: rather, it functions as the formal logic, the organizing principle, for the network of belief, performance, and reception that we have come to know as the Gospel Imagination. Tuning up catalyzes movement between “material” and “spiritual” worlds, manifesting gospel’s belief that sound is a vehicle for interworldly exchange. The chapter begins with the live recorded performance of Richard Smallwood’s song “Healing” (1998), which shows how this piece stages its own transcendence, musically performing, within the context of song, what is performed in sermons by the shift from speech to song. After using discourses drawn from homiletics, ritual theory, and phenomenology to shape an understanding of tuning up, the chapter offers a fuller sense of this constitutive practice by attending to vignettes from four sermons, and four songs: Walter Hawkins’s “Marvelous,” Judith McAllister’s “High Praise,” Myrna Summers’s “Oh, How Precious,” and Glenn Burleigh’s “Order My Steps.”

„The Gospel Singing (Good People)“

ZusammenfassungUnter den Stichworten Gesundheit, Kunst und Spiritualität skizziert der Artikel eine Entwicklung in den modernen Gesellschaften, die in den letzten Jahrzehnten eine Kultur der individuellen Gesundheitspflege und Selbstoptimierung hervorgebracht hat, die begleitet wurde von einer Spiritualisierung, Sakralisierung und Ideologisierung therapeutischer Praktiken. Sie verstand sich als Gegenbewegung zur naturwissenschaftlich orientierten Medizin und fand ihre Verwirklichung in holistischen Entwürfen von Gesundheit und alternativen Formen therapeutischer Praxis. Die Kreativität wurde dabei zum Leitmotiv und dem schöpferischen Menschen die Aufgabe zugewiesen, seine Persönlichkeit zu entfalten und ein unverwechselbares Individuum zu werden. Ästhetische Praktiken wurden als ein Übersteigen der sinnlichen Wirklichkeit konzeptualisiert und als Grundbedingung von Erkenntnis und Selbstverwirklichung in der Therapie geltend gemacht.Der Beitrag kommentiert diese Entwicklung kritisch und entwirft dagegen ein Therapieverständnis, das die Therapie als einen Ort auffasst, an dem unterschiedliche Lebenskonzepte oder -entwürfe thematisch werden können. Künstlerische Praktiken sind dabei eine Möglichkeit unter anderen, durch die das geschehen kann. Sinn verwirklicht sich dann in der Art und Weise, wie die Beteiligten sich selber und andere sehen, wie sie sich zu anderen und zu anderem in eine Beziehung bringen und in dem Umfang, wie sie einen (kritischen) Blick auf ihre und andere Einstellungen und Vorstellungen gewinnen.

Using My Bible for a Roadmap

Musicians, ministers, evangelical churches, music promoters, recording studios, and radio made southwestern Ohio an epicenter for sacred bluegrass. Worship services, revivals, homecomings, church concerts, WPFB’s Hymns from the Hills and WYSO’s Rise When the Rooster Crows played sacred bluegrass music. The Brown’s Ferry Four and King’s Sacred Quartet recorded at King. Shannon Grayson, Flatt and Scruggs, Jim and Jesse, Reno and Smiley, Sonny Osborne, Red Allen, the Stanley Brothers, Moore and Napier, and J.D. Jarvis also recorded in Cincinnati. Lillimae Haney Whitaker headed the Dixie Gospel-Aires. The Boys from Indiana, Joe Isaacs, and Larry Sparks had gospel releases. Pastors Kash Amburgy, Norm Livingston, and Lawrence Bishop promoted gospel singing. The Southwestern Ohio Bluegrass Music Heritage Project lists thirty-one other regional gospel artists at swohiobluegrass.com.

Anthony Johnson Showalter: A Pioneer in Southern Gospel Music Education

Anthony Johnson Showalter (c. 1853–1924) was a music educator, gospel composer, publisher, and considered a pioneer in gospel music and education in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Showalter is notably mentioned in numerous texts and studies related to gospel music; however, little data has been collected regarding the tools he used in singing schools—namely, the rudiment books he wrote and the schools where he used the curriculum. The purpose of this study is to discover Showalter’s possible motivation to begin his career, his determination in writing music education curriculum, organizing singing schools, his reasonings for focusing on seven-shape note style, and his influence into the twenty-first century. Materials analyzed included Showalter’s rudiment books, extant copies of his periodical, “The Music Teacher and Home Magazine,” and interviews at present-day gospel singing schools. Extant research related to four-shape and seven-shape hymnody and education was also reviewed. Findings indicate that Showalter was a progressive student-centered educator who utilized alternate tools in helping many with literacy by organizing the Southern Normal Musical Institute. Showalter created materials and opportunities which were accessible to the advanced and the beginner, hence providing a future for gospel singing schools well into the twenty-first century.

“Men Don’t Sing Soprano”

Male soprano sound in gospel choral participation has come to be a locus for scrutiny, representing a site for the vocalized performance of identity. Drawing on a case study of African-American countertenor Patrick Dailey and an ethnography of his live performance, chapter 2 observes a black countertenor’s embodiment of gendered sound and the peculiar vocal qualities that are socioculturally perceived to signify a man’s queer potential. African-American gospel singing challenges the gender binary framework that the American public expects of men as singing low and women as singing high. Dailey’s performance engages African-American audiences through various types of cultural familiarity to portray competency as a worship leader and trained artist.

Gospel Singing as Black Popular Culture

Gospel music was integral to the culture of many black churches, but gospel singing offered pleasures to its practitioners and fans that extended beyond musical worship. In the late 1940s, Jackson’s career was interwoven with two phenomena that nudged black gospel singing toward the realm of popular culture: the “song battle” and the high-profile programs of religious music presented at Harlem’s Golden Gate Auditorium by promoter Johnny Myers. Pitting Jackson against such rivals as Roberta Martin and Ernestine Washington, the battle of song offered gospel singers alternate forms of prestige and extended to gospel audiences opportunities for active and engaged participation. Myers made instrumental use of the song battle format, deploying a roster of local talent and national stars and connections with New York–based independent record labels. It was through this Myers “syndicate” that Jackson was introduced to Apollo Records, launching her career as a recording artist.

Introduction

The book opens by unpacking Mahalia Jackson’s January 20, 1952, appearance on the nationally televised CBS variety show Toast of the Town, hosted by Ed Sullivan. Jackson’s performance of the W. Herbert Brewster gospel song “These Are They” raises a host of issues that situates her and contemporary performers within the black gospel field. The Sullivan appearance carried considerable significance for African Americans, introducing both Jackson and black gospel singing to a national television audience. The latter half of the chapter assesses the attribution of exceptionalism to black vernacular culture and the literature on Jackson and on gospel music, and closes by delineating a field analysis approach that helps identify forms of prestige that gave meaning to the practice of gospel singing after World War II.

Mahalia Jackson’s Apollo Recordings

For many, Jackson’s output for Apollo during her eight years with the label remain the most admired recordings of her career and prime exemplars of post-war gospel singing. This chapter, the first in-depth analysis of this body of work, begins with a discussion of trajectories of production, instrumental backing, and sources of Jackson’s sacred repertory at her Apollo sessions. Musically, the majority of Jackson’s gospel recordings for Apollo can been sorted according to three recurring “feels”—a “swing” feel, a “gospel” feel, and a “free” feel employed in her performance of hymns—and hybrids of these. Analysis of these recordings reveals illuminating details pertaining to Jackson’s voice and gospel performance practice.

North American Indigenous song, the sacred and the senses

How does music shape the experience of the sacred? This chapter looks at two genres of North American Indigenous singing – drum song performed at powwows and gospel singing associated with funerary wakes – and it explores music’s capacity for mediating sacred presences and processes.