Singing Truth, Fidelity, and Play in Czech Bluegrass Gospel

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Bidgood
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Music ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Gospel Singing

The Czech bluegrass band Reliéf has made U.S. gospel bluegrass songs a cornerstone of their performances, despite the fact that its members are not strong Christian believers. Interviews with mandolinist Tomáš Dvořák and with luthier Ondřej Holoubek(brother of the band's guitarist Jiří) reveal tensions between genre expectations of bluegrass and the desire to present performances that are locally relevant and true to the performers' worldview. Analysis of Czech cultural contexts, the work of Richard Schechner, and the author's experiences as a participant in gospel singing shows that these tensions are part of the blurred boundaries between sacred and secular, work and play, and self and other.Keywords: fidelity, play, gospel music, craft, boundaries, work

“Move On Up a Little Higher”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Marovich
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Music ◽  
Church Of God ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
Henry Ford ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Gospel Singing ◽  
Music Recording ◽  
Religious Festival

This chapter focuses on the explosion of gospel music recording in Chicago during the 1940s. One of the first Chicago gospel singers to record for an indie label in the immediate postwar period was Brother John Sellers. Meanwhile, his mentor, Mahalia Jackson, recorded the song “Move on Up a Little Higher,” for Apollo Records. This chapter examines some of the recordings made by Chicago gospel artists for Apollo Records, including the Roberta Martin Singers' “Old Ship of Zion,” as well as those by independent Chicago-based record companies like Hy-Tone Records. It also discusses the recordings of Rev. John Branham and the St. Paul Echoes of Eden Choir, Sallie Martin, and Louis Henry Ford and the St. Paul Church of God in Christ Choir. Finally, it considers the broadcasts of the Greater Harvest Baptist Church and the Forty-Fourth Street Baptist Church; the 1948 National Baptist Music Convention held in Houston, Texas; the Argo Singers; and gospel singing during the Religious Festival of Song, part of Chicago's annual Bud Billiken Parade.

Gospel Singing as Black Popular Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Burford
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
Religious Music ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Black Popular Culture ◽  
Recording Artist ◽  
Alternate Forms ◽  
Gospel Singing

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.

“A Balm In Gilead”

2021 ◽  
pp. 38-91
Author(s):  
Braxton D. Shelley
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Music ◽  
Formal Logic ◽  
Black Preaching ◽  
Ritual Theory ◽  
Gospel Singing ◽  
Recorded Performance

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.”

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Burford
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Field Analysis ◽  
World War ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
Vernacular Culture ◽  
Gospel Singing ◽  
Variety Show ◽  
Television Audience ◽  
The Town

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.

Anthony Johnson Showalter: A Pioneer in Southern Gospel Music Education

2020 ◽  
pp. 153660062097551
Author(s):  
Alicia Canterbury
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Music Teacher ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Student Centered ◽  
Shape Note ◽  
Gospel Singing ◽  
Singing Schools ◽  
Twenty First Century

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.

Relation Shapes: Intimate Constructions of Self and Other

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 53 (17) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jefferson A. Singer
Keyword(s):  
Self And Other
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