Black Church Rumor

In 1992, Jet published “James Cleveland Infected L.A. Youth with HIV, $9 Mil. Lawsuit Claims,” which detailed how the Chicago-born gospel musician had not only allegedly sexually abused his foster son, Christopher B. Harris, but had also “[given] him the AIDS virus.” This article takes this incident of rumor or accusation as a critical opportunity to think about the archival reality of Black queer sexuality, on one hand, and sexual violence in Black gospel music history on the other. Using the legal documents from Christopher B. Harris v. Irwin Goldring as Special Administrator of the Estate of James Cleveland and commentary from Cleveland's contemporaries, it exhumes Cleveland from dusty church closets for consideration in the history of HIV and AIDS in African American Protestant church and gospel communities and in Black queer studies, ethnomusicology, and gender and sexuality studies. Further, it theorizes “Black church rumor” as a lens for Black queer religious studies and argues that Cleveland's perceived queer sexuality distracted from Harris's allegations of sexual abuse. Thus, it situates Cleveland—the person, the preacher, and the gospel legend—in the literature on “down low” sexuality and explicates the implications of Cleveland's legacy and role in Black gospel music production.

“All I See Is Your Booty and Cleavage”: Sex and the Contemporary Gospel Song (1988–2017)

Gospel songs traditionally feature lyrics that glorify God. However, there is music by contemporary gospel artists that addresses pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and pornography. The fact that these topics are being lyrically confronted by some of the genre's most recognized performers invites exploration into the content, purpose, and impact of the songs.This article places these lyrics into categories: those that are testimonial narratives about the spiritual deliverance the singer has received after transgressing sexual mores of the Black Church and those that encourage the avoidance of specific sexual practices. These songs contribute to gospel music on several levels, providing a platform through which the artists can testify of their sexual journeys while giving listeners a format through which they can find direction regarding sexual steps, missteps, and spiritual realignment.The article delineates the changes within US culture that led to less silence about sex and support for the LGBTQIA+ community from some within the Black Church. The major analysis involves the lyrics, the differences in what men and women tend to address, and the fact that despite breaking new ground, in virtually every instance, they reflect traditional Biblical interpretations.

AN EVALUATION OF NIGERIAN CHORISTERS’ LEVERAGE ON TECHNOLOGY IN THE FACE OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC

For some church choristers, whose means of livelihood were attached to church performance, the COVID-19 pandemic became challenging. How did these choristers fare during the COVID-19? 69% of the respondents claimed the church they performed in, used live online music that is being streamed live featuring just two or three members of the choir. In comparison, 14% used recorded music, either those performed by the church choristers themselves prior to the lockdown or other forms of gospel music already recorded. However, about 17% of the choristers claimed no music was used in their various churches during the online church services during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. This gave room for concern; this study identified problems associated with the low-performance level of church choristers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through questionnaires purposely distributed to over a hundred and thirty (134) choristers on the researcher's WhatsApp platforms, these respondents were equally asked to send the same to their friends or family who sing in the choir residing predominantly within the Lagos metropolis in Nigeria.Responses were, therefore, collated via the Google forms. Descriptive analyses were made. The chi-square test/cross-tabulation and the Kendal tau were used to find the correlation between online performance and social media use. The study finds that the use of social media does not have a relationship with online performance. The study's implication reveals that, if the COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacts the choristers, then other aspects of the economy are not in saved hands from the havoc the pandemic has wrecked. Hence, singers and teachers of music should ensure they are technologically inclined. The teaching of music in school should also include computer music and how to perform online, which may lead to the school reforming her curriculum.

Gospel Music in Africa

This chapter outlines the development of gospel music in Africa, highlighting particularly its interrelationship with the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s. Carried by the proliferation of Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity, gospel has become the most pervasive popular music genre in Africa. Authors have noted a strong convergence between neo-Pentecostalism and neoliberalism, both worshipping prosperity, wealth accumulation, and capitalist consumerism as (quasi-)religious devotional acts. The first part of this chapter provides the conceptual background and gives a broader overview of the existing literature on gospel music in Africa. The second part, then, presents a case study of Christian popular music in Ghana, examining more in depth how gospel music features and promotes ideologies of prosperity and consumption, and how it contributes to the making of neoliberal subjectivity and the constitution of neoliberal bodies.

Falling Up

This article investigates melodic figures and harmonic sequences that miraculously only step up to illuminate an aesthetic lineage that connects gospel to electronic dance music. It argues that the synth-risers and ever-opening filters of contemporary euphoric rave music like happy-hardcore and uplifting-trance find precedence in compositional devices that made their way into funk/soul and disco/garage from Black gospel music, and that these gospel inventions were derived from the Afro-diasporic ring-shout. Cognitive linguistic and psychoacoustic theories premise an analytical framework for musical representations of endless ascent. Through close readings of representative recordings—a 1927 Pentecostal sermon by Reverend Sister Mary Nelson, James Cleveland’s “Peace Be Still,” Chic’s “Le Freak,” Trussel’s “Love Injection,” and DJ Hixxy’s remix of Paradise's “I See the Light”—the article examines various historical intersections with parlour music, European art music, and modal jazz, and suggests that musical ascent has a non-causal but, nevertheless, objective relationship with a type of spiritual transcendence.

“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.”

Healing for the Soul

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.

The Pursuit of Intensity

This chapter offers a phenomenological approach to the vamp’s form, arguing that gospel vamps emerge as repetition and intensification become musical conduits of belief. Beginning with an analytical essay on the live recording of Smallwood’s “Anthem of Praise,” the chapter elucidates the interpenetration of compositional strategy and religious expectation in the gospel tradition. Its second section interrogates the phenomenological implications of gospel’s participatory character and analyzes a performance of Brenda Joyce Moore’s “Perfect Praise” by Lecresia Campbell and the Houston Chapter of the Gospel Music Workshop of America in order to clarify the relationship between musical syntax and musical experience—“the gospel stance.” The third part of this chapter weaves together analytical vignettes and theories of repetition, groove, and teleology, theorizing the vamp’s “affective trajectory.” In so doing, this section pays special attention to tonal modulation, “inversion,” and textural accumulation, three techniques that pervade the gospel choral repertory. The chapter’s fourth move reflects on the practice of music analysis, using Kurt Carr’s “For Every Mountain” and Thomas Whitfield’s “Soon as I Get Home” to assert that the chapter’s concern with the way sound is organized provides a deeper understanding of the way musical sound structures believers’ traffic between the seen world and another. This interchange motivates the gospel song’s relentless pursuit of intensity, a quest that comes into particularly clear relief in the chapter’s concluding analysis of Smallwood’s “I Will Sing Praises.”