“Precious Lord”: Black Mother-Loss and the Roots of Modern Gospel

Thomas Dorsey’s 1932 gospel song Take My Hand, Precious Lord is one of modern gospel music’s most canonical works. Although its composition by Dorsey in the wake of his wife’s sudden death in childbirth is a widely known oral history, the cultural implications of a wider history of health care disparities in the US leading to higher rates of black maternal and infant mortality have not been seriously considered. This article studies the history of black maternal and infant mortality in Chicago during the Great Migration as it bears on the mournful sounds of the gospel blues and its gender-inflected beginnings. The history of early gospel, I argue, was profoundly influenced by black women’s sympathetic identification with the experiences of migration and mother-loss Nettie Dorsey’s death represents. While Thomas Dorsey is distinguished as “the father of gospel music,” Nettie Dorsey might be fruitfully imagined as the spectral “mother” of gospel in its mournful expressions of black women’s spiritual consciousness. As such, she stands in for an alternate history of modern gospel musicality, one helping African American religious and musical history see and hear better what Emily Lordi calls “black feminist resonance” in black musical production in the golden age of gospel.

“O Canada!”: The Spectral Lesbian Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop

A general reluctance to engage the issue of lesbian identity in Elizabeth Bishop's work has understandably been conditioned by her own longstanding reticence. An approach that theorizes about the nonreferential, hence inarticulable, contours of Bishop's project, however, discloses a more eroticized aesthetic practice—one conceivably enabling the vital exploration of transgressive sexuality that perhaps goes without saying. What arguably forges the link between theory and practice is Bishop's experience of loss. The unspeakableness of mother loss due to insanity, mediated poignantly by the curtailment of Bishop's Canadian childhood, formerly provided the invitation to enclose Bishop's writing explicitly within a lifelong travail of itinerant displacement. Recent psychoanalytic theory, by contrast, foregrounds a more challenging loss that divides her writing between reality and the real and thus implicitly opens it up to a spectral lesbian poetics beyond what her canonical “American” identity readily permits readers to see and to say.