The importance of understanding and making sense of Zulu traditional hymns as a symbol of expressing worship: Cognitive hermeneutics and hermeneutics of hymnody theories

Singing and understanding Zulu traditional hymns among charismatic churches and gospel groups have become a fundamental worship tool. Zulu traditional hymns are at the centre of Christian lives in South Africa. Singing Zulu traditional hymns (iCilongo Levangeli) is predominant for many South African musicians and gospel groups using modern musical styles. However, contemporary churches, musicians and gospel groups tend not to understand the authenticity of these hymns. The issue of Zulu traditional hymns in the modern gospel industry is a matter of great concern. Therefore, this article addresses and discusses the importance of understanding and making sense of Zulu traditional hymns as a symbol of expressing worship. Data were collected for a research practice using a hermeneutic phenomenology paradigm to obtain a precise understanding and the original meaning of the prominent Zulu traditional hymns. The study reveals that there are Zulu traditional hymns that were misinterpreted and misunderstood. The misinterpretation of Zulu traditional hymns is partly attributable to the ignorance of the underlying true meaning, emotions, state and purpose of the original composer.Contribution: This study recommends that contemporary gospel musicians sing Zulu traditional hymns in the original text to ensure that they do not misinterpret the hymns.

“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.

Reimagining Gospel

After using Richard Smallwood’s “It’s Working (Romans 8:28)” to reconstruct the sound world of a single gospel performance, this introductory chapter defines the broader historical, theoretical, and music-analytic contexts of the book, taking up each of its principal foci—Richard Smallwood, the vamp, and the Gospel Imagination. The first section offers a critical biographical sketch that positions Richard Smallwood in the gospel tradition. The second section outlines the centrality of the gospel choir to this musical tradition, and the particular importance of the vamp to choral expressions of contemporary gospel. The third section defines the Gospel Imagination, showing how gospel’s central conviction—that sound affords intimacy with the divine—motivates the intensive grammar of gospel songs, sermons, and prayers.

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.

Vocal Virtuosity, Value Creation, and the Transformation of Contemporary Gospel Music

This chapter argues that virtuosic gospel vocal performance constitutes a medium of spiritual value creation that produces communal power and facilitates what can be described as a trade of musicality—of commercial exchange centered around sacred music. Dorinda Clark Cole is a renowned gospel vocalist. In this chapter, Clark Cole’s concert at the Samsung Experience showroom in the Time Warner Center at the Columbus Circle area of New York City provides a productive site from which to examine the commercialization of gospel music because it involves exchange relations between a musical community and a corporate sponsor. A closer focus on the relationship between gospel music and capitalism in this context challenges a dichotomized notion of how gospel music circulates in varied sacred and secular arenas that seemingly represent incommensurate, even contrasting, systems of value. Through a musical analysis and an exploration of corporate interests in the concert, value creation through musical performance in a commercial setting is shown to forge social relations and produce power that sustains the regenerative nature of gospel music.

Introduction

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?

The Only Thing Right Left in a Wrong World

This chapter explores the music of the Winans, the Clark Sisters, and Commissioned. These Detroit-born artists pushed the sonic, theological, and political boundaries of urban contemporary gospel more aggressively than any of their peers. Embracing the rhythms of the secular and sacred worlds of black music, they forged a captivating sound with strong emphasis on craft mastery and innovative production techniques. Their bold approach was not limited to the sonic realm. On their recordings, strong critiques of racism and economic inequality intermingled with Moral Majority–influenced narratives attributing society’s decline to the breakdown of the nuclear, heterosexual family. Their music reflected the energy of a generation in the throes of social change along with the coexistence of liberal and conservative viewpoints within the black church.

Outside the County Line

This chapter explores the music of John P. Kee, a North Carolina–born artist who deftly blended the sounds of R&B, funk, and traditional and contemporary gospel. It examines how Kee’s musical engagements with the South compared with other black writers/artists who sought to articulate what scholar Thadious Davis refers to as the “regionality of the black self.” A proud southerner, Kee frequently transported his listeners to the black South, where men and women cared for and loved each other, where elders shared their wisdom with young people, and where the church anchored the social and cultural lives of a striving people. Though attentive to Kee’s engagement with his southern past, this chapter also explores his tackling of social problems facing African Americans during the 1990s.

A Special Kind of Witness

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.