Accounting for the Vulnerable

This chapter discusses Mary Lou Williams’s work to establish the Bel Canto Foundation in the late 1950s and 1960s, primarily through her Bel Canto Thrift Shop. Williams worked tirelessly to manage her shop, to account for her finances, and to aspire to realize a support system for musicians in need. She strove to forge a new sense of community between jazz artists and the broader society. Previous analyses of the foundation effort and management of the thrift shop have not included the musicians who were recipients of Williams’s charity. Ever the meticulous recordkeeper, Williams extensively documented her foundation efforts. Her business papers add to the Bel Canto story a record of several musicians who experienced Williams’s charity, regardless of the foundation’s ultimate fate. Confident in her ability to manage a substantial project like this foundation because she had secured revenue for herself through the ongoing retrieval and management of her composition copyrights, Williams strove to become more than a regular parishioner in her new Catholic community. Williams’s daily labor comes to light as the outworking of her conception of a divine call—during the period that she and her Catholic friends contested the specific nature of this call.

God’s Messenger Boy

This chapter provides an overview of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concert tours in the United States and Western Europe to showcase the promise of ecumenical and interracial fellowship. These occasions served to affirm belief in God in the late 1960s, a time when the public questioning of God’s existence animated the anxieties of many white mainline and liberal religious communities. Duke Ellington’s three Sacred Concerts were interfaith projects in which his musical professions of faith lived and came to acquire religious authority due to his prominent celebrity status. His personal religious reflection ultimately resulted in the production of religious music for public consumption. Ellington’s theological explorations marinated in a world saturated with popular religious literature that he studied to compose his Sacred Concerts. Moreover, the presence of Ellington in houses of worship across theological and racial lines also revealed differences in the ways that black and white religious audiences were receptive to his musical work.

“Jazzing Religion”

This chapter discusses the Afro-Protestant mainline in the era when jazz emerged as a distinct profession. In the 1920s and 1930s, religious race professionals provided editorial commentary on African American entertainment and social gatherings through their denominational newspapers and the black press. Jazz competed with middle-class African American religious leaders for the minds, time, and even finances of African American youth. At the same time, these churches and clergy were already facing the criticisms of African American intellectuals who questioned the aims of their ministries as well as the moral and intellectual fitness of their ministers. As they faced various challenges to their authority as race representatives, religious race professionals articulated and constructed their Protestant ministries as credible professions for a modern era. Middle-class black Protestants operated as religious race professionals: cultural critics whose pursuit of modern religious identities resulted in their debates to determine the appropriateness of recreation, entertainment, and theatricality in both the daily lives and religious aesthetics of black Protestants. Though middle-class black ministers and intellectuals offered strong criticisms of jazz, the music ultimately emerged as an alternative arena for the practice of interracial community, beyond the interracial ecumenism and fellowships that middle-class black ministers were working to forge.

“Is God a Three-Letter Word for Love?”

This chapter charts the religious thought of the constantly touring Ellington as he made sense of God on the road without a regular church home. He theologized as he read the Christian Bible and engaged primarily liberal religious literature. Ellington embraced the authority to speak about God that listening audiences afforded him so that Protestants, Jews, and Catholics would accept his musical messages. His private lyrical writings expressed his belief in God, his frustrations with language to refer to God, and his appeal to the very act of believing. His undated hotel stationery writings, in conversation with his engagement of religious literature and ministerial friends, exist as the unexamined arena of his personal religious exploration, reflection, and contention in the process of crafting music to make public expressions of belief. Ultimately, the concepts of God and of love became synonymous for Ellington, and he articulated these most vocally in his final Sacred Concert. With Ellington’s private writings and public professions, his thoughts stand as prominent examples of theological wrestling. They complicate any conclusion that the profession of belief and performance of praise for the divine, within sacred spaces, serve to affirm wholesale the teachings about the divine within those theological communities.

“Royal Ancestry”

This chapter discusses the popular methods of African American scriptural interpretation that formed the early religious context that Duke Ellington represented through his jazz artistry. In these biblical interpretations, African American Protestants in the twentieth century’s early decades read the Hebrew and Christian scriptures in concert with constructing their own history as descendants of the African continent. Ellington brought into his musical profession a relationship to the Bible as a sacred African document that portrayed African and black people as the great founders of ancient civilizations and as contributors to the foundation of modern civilization. By publishing and promoting books on history and biblical interpretation, writing editorials, answering reader questions in regular black press columns, staging pageants, and even through long- and short-form jazz compositions, middle-class black Protestants, along with black academics who studied ancient North Africa, the Near East, and East Africa, invested their intellectual and artistic energy into racializing sacred Hebrew figures and sacralizing non-Hebrew peoples as venerable contributors to the development of religion. These Afro-Protestant racializations of sacred texts and ancient religions, alongside their sacralizations of African identity, involved their embrace of both monotheisms and polytheisms.

Introduction

The introduction defines the scope of the book, its position in existing literature on African American religious history, and its sources and subjects for studying religion and race through African American jazz musicians. It defines the concept of race representation as it operates throughout the book, offers an overview of the consumer challenge to cultivating Christian race representatives, and discusses popular black religious representation in various forms of entertainment in the twentieth century. The introduction discusses the organization of the book: part 1, “Representations of Religion and Race,” and part 2, “Missions and Legacies.” Part 1 presents thematic studies of African American religious history through jazz artistry. Part 2 includes close studies of individual religious expression through the work of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, and a consideration of the posthumous legacies of these musicians. The introduction also outlines the chapter structure of the book and previews key takeaways for understanding Afro-Protestantism through artistic expression and religious culture in the conclusion.

“Get Happy, All You Sinners”

This chapter discusses Cab Calloway’s articulation and portrait of irreverence as a distinctive mode of religious skepticism in African American religious history through his music and his 1976 autobiography, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me. His adolescent tensions with his respectable middle-class African American roots and religious upbringing shaped his early career, shedding light on the impactful presence of black men and women’s comedy that poked fun at African American religious life based on intimate familiarity with it. Comedic religious subjects generated a “knowing” laughter among African Americans with intimate knowledge of these irreverent caricatures because of their own experiences with religious life. Producing this laughter encouraged African Americans to embrace a kind of religious affiliation or participation that appreciated humor about matters that they had been instructed to treat with reverence. Through humor, irreverence oriented African Americans toward religious affiliation in ways that differed from radical humanist critiques of African American Protestant Christian theology and practice. In Cab Calloway’s early career, he made a concerted effort to produce humorous irreverence by replicating the sights, sounds, and behaviors of black Protestant church settings, characters, events, and experiences.

Virtuoso Ancestors

This chapter examines the reverence for departed jazz musicians and the practices of fellow musicians, creative artists, institutions, and the public to celebrate their memory. By heralding its prominent members who are now its ancestors, the jazz community proclaims the importance of memorializing these musicians, of continuing to perform their music, and of inheriting the improvisational spirit to interpret their works according to the religious and spiritual locations of the reverential performers themselves. African American religious practices of celebrating Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams chart the new lives—or afterlives—that these deceased musicians gain from those left to interpret their legacies anew. And among African American celebrants, the creative works of many African American women produce a significant record of religious and spiritual interpretations of jazz virtuosity.

Jazz Communion

This chapter charts Mary Lou Williams’s decision to become a Roman Catholic. As she made this religious journey, she engaged in several critical conversations with God, with close friends, with two jazz-loving white Catholic priests, and with several other jazz musicians. Williams also engaged in conversations with various publics: a black public, through African American print publications; and the professional jazz public, whose musicians she claimed had lost their creativity in the modern musical era. This first group of conversation partners compelled her return to performing and composing music. Aiding them were her new Catholic clergy friends, who urged her to reconsider the jazz profession as remaining worthy of her divine musical talents. Williams expressed the hope that her conversations with the professional jazz world would prompt meaningful conversions for them. She argued that the fruits of this labor would be the revival of black musical creativity. To safeguard what Williams defined as God’s gifts of creative African American music and musicians, she called for practices of care and accountability within the jazz community.

“Tears of Joy”

This chapter centers the jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald’s career as a racial crossover artist, whose early career was critical to securing jazz as a profession for race representation. After emerging as a popular vocalist for Chick Webb’s swing band, she became a symbol of a respectable African American woman to counter the negative characterizations of the jazz world as corrupting of youth. Her career in the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s became an effective vehicle for the desegregation of performance venues and the creation of integrated clubs, due to her popularity with black and white audiences. Fitzgerald’s race representation included her status as a wealthy African American woman who provided for her extended family and who made charitable investments in civil rights organizations, particularly the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Fitzgerald’s highly visible race representation entailed constant black and white press coverage and critical assessments that produced two major and recurring debates: whether Fitzgerald constituted a legitimate jazz singer, and whether her perceived lack of emotion in performance disqualified her as an authentic black jazz woman vocalist. Importantly, Fitzgerald showcased the jazz profession in several aspects as a non-religious vehicle for accomplishing the progressive, integrationist pursuits of religious race representatives.