Healing for the Soul

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Braxton D. Shelley
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Music ◽  
Spiritual Power ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Musical Activity ◽  
Worship Services ◽  
Physical Transformation ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
Expressive Activity ◽  
Contemporary Gospel

Between the first and last words of a Black gospel song, musical sound acquires spiritual power. During this unfolding, a variety of techniques facilitate musical and physical transformation. The most important of these is a repetitive musical cycle known by names including the run, the drive, the special, and the vamp. Through its combination of reiteration and intensification, the vamp turns song lyrics into something more potent. While many musical traditions use vamps to fill space, or occupy time in preparation for another, more important event, in gospel, vamps are the main event. Why is the vamp so central to the Black gospel tradition? What work—musical, cultural, and spiritual—does the gospel vamp do? And what does the vamp reveal about the transformative power of Black gospel more broadly? This book explores the vamp’s essential place in Black gospel song, arguing that these climactic musical cycles turn worship services into transcendent events. In the following pages, the words and music of Richard Smallwood, a paradigmatic contemporary gospel composer, anchor the book’s investigation of the convergence of sound and belief in the Gospel Imagination. Smallwood’s expansive oeuvre is especially illustrative of the eclecticism and homiletic intention that characterize gospel music. Along the way, this study brings Smallwood’s songs and the ideas that frame them into conversation with many of the tradition’s exemplars: Edwin and Walter Hawkins, Twinkie Clark, Kurt Carr, Margaret Douroux, V. Michael McKay, and Judith McAllister, among others. Focusing on choral forms of gospel song, this book shows how the gospel vamp organizes expressive activity around a moment of transcendence, an instant when the song shifts to a heightened space of musical activity. This sonic escalation fuels traffic between the seen world and another, bringing believers into contact with a host of scenes from scripture, and with the divine, too.

Creative Music Strategies Based upon Poetry and the Language

1978 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-37
Author(s):  
Michael E. Cleveland
Keyword(s):  
Verbal Stimuli ◽  
Free Exploration ◽  
Musical Activity ◽  
Creative Music ◽  
Song Lyrics

Formal composition should not be a beginning creative musical activity, but should be preceded by freer, more divergent experiences with sound. Also, the concept of “composition” should be put aside in favor of that “organization of sounds.” Free exploration of sounds, using poetry or other means, may ultimately lead to the convergent skills required for formal composition. Five ways of using poetry and the language for creative experiences in music are discussed: 1. Inventing words for familiar songs 2. Writing song lyrics to a familiar melodic pattern 3. Adding sounds to an existing poem 4. Creating an original sound-piece from a poem 5. Improvising upon verbal stimuli

“The Evidence of Things Not Seen”

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-222
Author(s):  
Braxton D. Shelley
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Dimension ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Spiritual Power ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Presence Of God

This chapter argues that the gospel tradition is animated by an incarnational approach to text: a pervasive belief that sacred words hold together visible and invisible realms, occasioning traffic between the two. The chapter begins with analyses of Smallwood’s “Hebrews 11” (2014) and “His Mercy Endureth Forever” (1992), two songs whose striking relationship with their scriptural source reveals the agency that believers attribute to hallowed verse. These songs epitomize gospel’s conviction about the transformative power of holy words, read, spoken, and sung, a transcendent principle that motivates the practice of tuning up. As it incarnates time, tuning up activates the otherworldly intensity of these interworldly texts. As they are iterated and intensified the gospel song’s lyrics become something more—the living word of God. The second section of this develops a fuller picture of the textual sources that gospel regards as sacred, formulations that mediate between worlds, offering believers specific windows through which to experience the eternal. The chapter demonstrates that gospel’s views about the efficacy of words ultimately derive from a preoccupation with the name of Jesus—an enduring belief that spiritual power is unleashed when that name is spoken. Gospel vamps use this pivotal utterance to re-incarnate Jesus, proclaiming—again and again—that Jesus is the living word of God. But this incarnation has two trajectories: as gospel texts commingle live performances and a host of other scriptural scenes, they also draw believers into the presence of God, through the spiritual realm—the spatial dimension of kairos.

The influence of African musical traditions on gospel music

1999 ◽  
Vol 106 (4) ◽  
pp. 2170-2170
Author(s):  
Jan McCrary ◽  
Raymond Wise
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Music ◽  
Musical Traditions

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Marovich
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Tipping Points ◽  
Radio Broadcast ◽  
Contemporary Gospel

This book examines the development of gospel music in Chicago during its first five decades, from pioneers such as Thomas A. Dorsey and Sallie Martin to the start of the contemporary gospel era of the 1970s. It chronicles some of the historic tipping points that helped establish what is known today as gospel music, all of them occurring in Chicago, including Arizona Dranes's 1926 recording of “My Soul Is a Witness for My Lord”; the debut of the First Church of Deliverance radio broadcast in 1935; the founding of Martin and Morris Music Studio in 1939; and the 1947 release of Mahalia Jackson's best-selling record “Move on Up a Little Higher.” The book also shows how the gospel music industry grew out of the necessity for entrepreneurship among African American migrants. Finally, it considers how gospel music as developed in Chicago transcended denominational boundaries, along with the contributions of various church denominations to the development of gospel.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Claudrena N. Harold
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Music History ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Contemporary Gospel

The introduction combines autobiographical reflection with cultural criticism to outline the book’s unique contribution to gospel music history. It recounts the major debates that consumed gospel music insiders as the genre assumed a larger place within mainstream popular culture: Were contemporary gospel artists who experimented with the rhythms of R&B and hip-hop more concerned with selling records than saving souls, and if so, was gospel music on the same path of decline as its secular sibling R&B, which some critics insisted had lost its soul? Did acts like Andraé Crouch, the Winans, and Kirk Franklin really depart from the gospel tradition? Or were they simply following in the steps of their predecessors who had also employed new sounds and technologies to fulfill their evangelical mission?

Lip-synch Gospel: Christian Music and the Ethnopoetics of Identity in Kenya

Africa ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Lamont
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Christian Music ◽  
The Public ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Singer Groups ◽  
The Church

In recent years there has been an outpouring of Kenyan scholarship on the ways popular musicians engage with politics in the public sphere. With respect to the rise in the 1990s and 2000s of gospel music – whose politics are more pietistic than activist – this article challenges how to ‘understand’ the politics of gospel music taken from a small speech community, in this case the Meru. In observing street performances of a new style of preaching, ‘lip-synch’ gospel, I offer ethnographic readings of song lyrics to show that Meru's gospel singers can address moral debates not readily aired in mainline and Pentecostal-Charismatic churches. Critical of hypocrisy in the church and engaging with a wider politics of belonging and identity, Meru gospel singers weave localized ethnopoetics into their Christian music, with the effect that their politics effectively remain concealed within Meru and invisible to the national public sphere. While contesting the perceived corruption, sin and hypocrisy in everyday sociality, such Meru gospel singer groups cannot rightly be considered a local ‘counter-public’ because they still work their politics in the shadows of the churches.

Contemporary Gospel Music

1979 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horace Clarence Boyer
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Music ◽  
Contemporary Gospel

A Special Kind of Witness

2020 ◽  
pp. 42-64
Author(s):  
Claudrena N. Harold
Keyword(s):  
Special Kind ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Christian Music ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Jesus Movement ◽  
Major Player ◽  
Contemporary Christian ◽  
Liberal Approach ◽  
Contemporary Gospel

Through a close examination of Andraé Crouch’s musical contributions, as well as his central role in opening the industry’s doors to other black artists, this chapter details how Crouch altered the sonic landscape of contemporary Christian music during the 1970s and 1980s. It also documents his unique relationship with Ralph Carmichael’s Light Records, his underappreciated role in the company’s emergence as a major player in urban contemporary gospel music, and his vital contributions to the praise and worship genre. In accounting for Crouch’s crossover success, the chapter highlights his musical genius, his liberal approach to spiritual practice and religious expression, his unique partnership with Light and Warner Brothers, and his popularity among whites affiliated with the Jesus movement.

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