“The Evidence of Things Not Seen”

This chapter argues that the gospel tradition is animated by an incarnational approach to text: a pervasive belief that sacred words hold together visible and invisible realms, occasioning traffic between the two. The chapter begins with analyses of Smallwood’s “Hebrews 11” (2014) and “His Mercy Endureth Forever” (1992), two songs whose striking relationship with their scriptural source reveals the agency that believers attribute to hallowed verse. These songs epitomize gospel’s conviction about the transformative power of holy words, read, spoken, and sung, a transcendent principle that motivates the practice of tuning up. As it incarnates time, tuning up activates the otherworldly intensity of these interworldly texts. As they are iterated and intensified the gospel song’s lyrics become something more—the living word of God. The second section of this develops a fuller picture of the textual sources that gospel regards as sacred, formulations that mediate between worlds, offering believers specific windows through which to experience the eternal. The chapter demonstrates that gospel’s views about the efficacy of words ultimately derive from a preoccupation with the name of Jesus—an enduring belief that spiritual power is unleashed when that name is spoken. Gospel vamps use this pivotal utterance to re-incarnate Jesus, proclaiming—again and again—that Jesus is the living word of God. But this incarnation has two trajectories: as gospel texts commingle live performances and a host of other scriptural scenes, they also draw believers into the presence of God, through the spiritual realm—the spatial dimension of kairos.

Coda

This coda turns to “Total Praise,” the song for which Smallwood is best known, mining the first and the most recent recordings of this song in order to think about the category of song itself. Since its recording, “Total Praise” has acquired a vamp where there was not one before. The vamp that emerges during the first two lines of the song’s B section crystallizes both the sense of ecstatic possibility already present between this song’s chimerical conclusion and its well-known reprise, and the convention of the vamp itself. While on the night of its recording in 1996, the night with which the book begins, “Total Praise” was a musical extension of the choral prelude and the only song recorded without an extensive vamp, its current place at the end of most Smallwood concert sets, and of many more gospel services, makes its musical transformation an ideal site from which to reflect on the relationship between song and liturgy, and to theorize the ontological nexus of song, performance, and recording.

“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.”

The Moment That Changed Everything

This chapter argues that tuning up reorganizes the experience of time, enacting a transcendent interruption of musical temporality. In so doing, this irruptive practice reproduces the incarnation of Christ, sonifying the divine’s appearance in the material world. Smallwood’s paraphrase of the spiritual “Calvary” anchors this chapter, doing for its argument what the crucifixion does for the Gospel Imagination. The chapter’s first section examines the song’s 2001 live recording, a performance whose particularly urgent interpenetration of musical, liturgical, and historical temporalities summons one of tuning up’s most common manifestations—a trope colloquially referred to as “the Baptist close.” Then the chapter turns to three of the gospel tradition’s most canonical renderings of Christ’s Passion, Margaret Douroux’s “He Decided to Die,” David Allen’s “No Greater Love,” and Andraé Crouch’s “The Blood.” These performances reveal an incarnational approach to time: a belief that Jesus’s interruption of human history can be rearticulated through song. As these songs move back and forth between their site of contemporary performance and various scriptural narratives, between conception and crucifixion, and between crucifixion and resurrection, what they offer is no mere retelling: they assert a critique of linear temporality, producing kairos, a transcendent instant that links time and eternity. Kairos is especially evident in the holy dance, a performance of physical ecstasy that is formalized in the gospel vamp. As they tune up, vamps pursue kairos through concurrent movements away from linear time, toward the collective, into the body.

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.

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.”