Black music research foreparent Samuel A. Floyd Jr.’s The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhyt... more Black music research foreparent Samuel A. Floyd Jr.’s The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhythms, the Songs, and the Ships of The African Diaspora, coauthored with Melanie L. Zeck and Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., demonstrates the transformative dynamics of intellectual transmission and transition in the life of the Black mind. This study is informed by Floyd's prolific contribution to the institutionalization of Black music research as the founder of the Center for Black Music Research, a writer of book-length projects, editor of journals and volumes, collaborator, and mentor. The Transformation of Black Music is an end-of-career response to the call sounded in his seminal The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (1995), inspired by the aesthetics and performance theory proposed in Sterling Stuckey's conceptualization of the ring shout and the musical semiotics that complement Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s construction of signifyin(g) in the West African folklore symbolism of the signifying monkey. This review illuminates the instructive significance of The Transformation of Black Music in its context, contributors, structure, and intervention...
Black love and hip-hop brought Calvin Taylor Skinner and me together in 2018 as we nurtured a com... more Black love and hip-hop brought Calvin Taylor Skinner and me together in 2018 as we nurtured a commuter relationship between Knoxville and Bloomington, Indiana. During our five-to six-hour drives, I talked about my research on musical masculinity, while my theologian-activist guy shared provocative YouTube videos and podcasts facilitated by hip-hop sages to stir conversation.1 The sages self-identify variously as Pan- African, American descendants of slaves (ADOS) or Foundational Black Americans (FBA), among other Black-centered/African-centered terms. The ADOS/FBA experts probed a constellation of obscure discourses: extraterrestrial encounters, Dr. Sebi, erased ancient African histories, reparations, Black love, and “conscious” hip-hop.2 Discussing these topics with Calvin afforded me familiarity with Black men’s curation of complex creative-intellectual space irrespective of dominant culture’s understanding of their discourses. Central to this enigmatic genre of orality is speculation, inspecting structural barriers in an idiom their people recognize. From Tidal.com to BlackMagikUniversity.com to 4BiddenKnowledge.com, controlling one’s virtual presence is an essential facet of agency in the hip-hop tradition. Our conversations inspired me to return to a juxtaposition I offered my students of esotericism performed in Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Meet Me at the Crossroads” (1995) with global esoteric traditions and folklore surrounding Western classical musicians. “In what ways might you imagine your guru as a Black man from Cleveland, Ohio?” Since then, I have been analyzing the sociocultural listening biases that are exposed when we encounter portrayals of the long-winded, spitfire “Hotep” figure in pop culture, for example.3 To “speak to the myth” (rather than the patronizing Western notion of suspending disbelief) and resist sociocultural silencing, A. A. Rashid reminds us, I engage a joint venture urban legend relayed by Krayzie Bone and consult Black sages’ observations ascertaining whether music industrial complex owners/ executives are colluding with privatized prison owners.
As we celebrate spiritual and biological mother figures of our choosing, Rev. Dr. Alisha Lola Jon... more As we celebrate spiritual and biological mother figures of our choosing, Rev. Dr. Alisha Lola Jones encourages us to reflect on the intimate gift of listening to our matriarchs’ life stories.
In African-derived thought, there is no distinction between sacred and secular, religious and non... more In African-derived thought, there is no distinction between sacred and secular, religious and non-religious, belief and unbelief. And to adopt that binary is an inadequate and partial doing of Black music research pedagogy.
Over the years, I have observed scholars who are situated in dominant cultural approaches—i.e., Western/European/“American,” Christian, “respectable,” heterosexual, “elite,” male-identified/phallogocentric, “able-bodied,” monograph-centered written traditions—and wrestling with whether their methods should embrace their thick positionality identification as an instructive moment. To be a “believer” researching believers usually involves not disclosing the scholar’s own shared beliefs. Conversely, I noticed disciplinary anxiety about identifying oneself as non-religious for fear of having to deal with the ineffable. I experienced scholars’ willful obliviousness as hubris as they disregarded powerful realms of meaning in their analysis, which turned their cultural conversation partners off and caused their projects to fall short in an accurate hearing and amplification of the people they sought to represent. https://www.semsn.com/17-1-dear-sem
As Christians celebrate Easter and reflect on the resurrection, Revs. Alisha Lola Jones and Calvi... more As Christians celebrate Easter and reflect on the resurrection, Revs. Alisha Lola Jones and Calvin Taylor Skinner encourage us all to look forward and enthusiastically say, “Time travel? Yes!!”
Popularized by gospel musician and educator Donald Lawrence, the phrase “enlarge my territory” is... more Popularized by gospel musician and educator Donald Lawrence, the phrase “enlarge my territory” is the antithesis of me-centered thinking, demanding we share the wealth.
As we assess what allyship should look like, we must prioritize decolonizing our faith to ensure ... more As we assess what allyship should look like, we must prioritize decolonizing our faith to ensure our documented history and stories are told.
Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century, by religio... more Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century, by religion and African American studies scholar Vaughn A. Booker, incisively challenges assumptions about African American jazz musicians' performance of race, personal belief, and socio-cultural hardwiring toward or against Afro-Protestantism in the popular imagination. Encapsulated within its title is a signification boulder of African American aesthetics and jazz music socio-cultural values. This titular pun is leading a tide of publications within the last decade, launched from various disciplines looking closely at anthems, with Shana Redmond's Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (2013), and specifically the Negro national anthem entitled "Lift Every Voice and Sing" by J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson, and with Imani Perry's May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018). Further, Lift Every Voice and Swing hearkens to the primacy of vocality and swing as prized organizing components and commoditized principles in religio-cultural performance practice that set apart popular African American musicians in the twentieth-century mediascape. After all, as famous Washingtonian composer Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington put it in his signature composition, "It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't Got That Swing" (1931).
"I want all my people around me, everybody feeling good, everybody eating good, everybody chillin... more "I want all my people around me, everybody feeling good, everybody eating good, everybody chilling. I want for my brother what I want for myself.” – Kindred the Family Soul
Seamlessly at one with this groove, I close my eyes and nod my head, mouthing these feel-good lyrics, riding a wave of sounded Black flourishing. I am transported, floating on the harmonies in the air of our family reunion.
The spring breeze lightly caresses my skin, lacing my nose with the aroma of Mom’s macaroni and cheese that only makes an appearance for 10 seconds before news spreads that it is served. I smell the smoke from a charcoal grill stacked with that good vinegary Carolina BBQ. In the distance, I hear the click-clack of the jump rope and my cousin’s interlocking rhythmic footsteps as he finally gets his turn to jump double Dutch. And we laugh loudly, checking out folks’ coordination in their matching family reunion outfits. My grandaunt calls us to prayer and as we assemble, my “uncle-cousin” (what I call a cousin old enough to be my uncle) sings what the Spirit has laid on his heart to sing. We join in. We are reunited in this reverie from years ago and it feels so good to remember this pre-Covid soundscape of Black love brought to me by listening to the radio.
Drawing on a case study of African American countertenor Patrick Dailey and an ethnography of his... more Drawing on a case study of African American countertenor Patrick Dailey and an ethnography of his live performance, this chapter is an ethnomusicological assessment of his social and theological navigation of gendered vocal sound. African American gospel singing challenges the binary gender framework that the American public expects, with men singing low and women singing high. As a man who sings high, Dailey has to demonstrate performance competence in African American worship. Dailey deftly negotiates the tensions and intersections between these dual processes of musical performance. He does so with an aspiration to deliver a presentation that is what he refers to as “anointed”: music that is from and for God. Dailey’s performance also engages African American audiences’ various types of cultural familiarity to portray competency as a worship leader and trained artist. Thus, while making a mark in sacred music history, more generally, Patrick Dailey’s performance reveals the subtle ways Western art music conventions of classifying vocalists are utilized and revised in the interpretation of cross-cultural performance in African American churches.
…only the BLACK WOMAN can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my woma... more …only the BLACK WOMAN can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.
Anna Julia Cooper from A Voice from the South (1882)
“When will we listen to black women?” was the rallying cry echoed throughout the streets, in journalistic think pieces, and on social media in 2017. These reactions followed the polling results revealing black women’s collective voting power in arguably the most contentious elections in the twenty first century, thus far. In an era of black women-founded movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #SayHerName, some use messianic language to characterize them as “saving the day,” despite being marginalized in various predominantly white women’s movements. Thought-leaders are noticing the socio-political inaudibility of black women liberators highlighting the bias woven into the fabric of the U.S. popular imagination.
However, this socio-political observation does not account for black women’s agency and ingenuity in creating spaces for themselves in musical performance and quotidian life throughout history. Prompted by activist Anna Julia Cooper’s famous quote as a womanist ethnomusicological framework of utterance (say/sing), time (when), space (where) and access (enter), this presentation constructs a genealogy of black women’s audibility strategies by answering the question: In what ways have black women empowered themselves to sound the (un)quieted, undisputed dignity of womanhood on the world’s stage?
Despite black women’s persistent socio-political inaudibility, especially in U.S. women’s suffrage movements, contralto Marian Anderson’s narrative reveals a longstanding legacy of black women embodying and amplifying black women composed works as evidenced by her 1939 recital at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Although she was refused concert space at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall in DC, Anderson accepted first lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s invitation to sing at the Lincoln memorial. During that recital, Anderson displayed Black sisterhood and challenged the parameters of women’s suffrage when she closed the concert with an arranged-composition of the Negro Spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” by black woman composer Florence B. Price. As Anderson envoiced Price’s composition as the “final say” on the moment, she provided a musical rebuttal through which both Anderson and Price entered into the concert domains predominantly comprised of white male decision makers, an exclusionist industry bolstered by unsisterly white women patrons.
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/06/748757267/lift-every-voice-marian-anderson-florence-b-price-and-the-sound-of-black-sisterh?live=1
In this moment, we, the daughters of the African diaspora, Chamurro African American, Hawaiian Af... more In this moment, we, the daughters of the African diaspora, Chamurro African American, Hawaiian African American, African American Samoan, African American Kiribati and African American move from being peoples characterized by loss and dispersion to people defined by convening our own reunions.
Through multi-media, harmful and imprecise depictions of women of African descent are rapidly crisscrossing the planet, shaping popular perceptions of their intellectual capacity in their absence. These stereotypes are simply imprecise. You see, for quite some time women of African descent have been frequently misrepresented in music and culture as being irrational, shallow, and unkind, especially when we are challenged by each other in heated debates. In fact, one of the most insidious circulated and internalized stereotypes is that women of African descent are given to same sex rivalry along the lines of hue, color, mixed race parentage, socio-economic status and education status, mental and personality disorders. Yet, here we are in the US territory of Guam to affirm that Black Lives Matter around the globe.
We submit our lives to explore the complexity of our myriad identities and connections as practitioner-scholars, whose lives have been inscribed and are read for the tensions surrounding post-colonialism. Therefore, it is a transgressive, political, and pedagogical act for women of the African diaspora to be visible as we invite each other to sharpen, to borrow from Anna Julia Cooper, “in the quiet, undisputed dignity of our womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage” in intellectual spaces and conference settings such as the joint Pacific History Association (PHA) conference and International Council of Traditional Music (ICTM) symposium.
In the ethnomusicology of Africana music and sound, the discourse has been conceptually organized around diaspora or the forced migration of people of African descent, with a focus on their routes across one body of water, commonly referred to in the African diaspora literature as the Black Atlantic. This Black Atlantic emphasis further isolates our already scattered communities of African descent that have extended beyond the Atlantic into the Pacific through both voluntary and forced dispersions. This imagined isolation and distance works to disjoint the body politic of Africana people who are catching hell around the globe along gender, sexuality, and hued lines. And thus, these fragmented communities are less likely to implicate the hegemonic powers that be, which oppress women as well...
Gospel musicians have recorded several food-related songs about southern and soul foods such as T... more Gospel musicians have recorded several food-related songs about southern and soul foods such as Tye Tribbett’s live performances of “There Will Be Chicken After Church” and Here II Praise’s “Chicken Song” (1998). Through Tribbett, Here II Praise and others' performances about church and food consumption, we find illustrations of the ways in which traditional food metaphors in gospel repertoire symbolize the formation of Christian community. However, in the Truthettes’ gospel performance of “Peanut Butter and Jelly,” I explore the ways in which the humble, portable food metaphor is another aspect of African American Christian community building and sustenance. The Truthettes perform spiritual transformation by using the meanings generated by a food metaphor -- a symbol from which a Christian believer may fast or more specifically, for which they involuntarily lose their appetite, demonstrating belonging and entry into African American church families.
Based on the Song of Solomon, Bishop T.D. Jakes released the Sacred Love Songs (1999) album, mark... more Based on the Song of Solomon, Bishop T.D. Jakes released the Sacred Love Songs (1999) album, marketing the charismatic Christian mood music as “gospel” songs with the most “romantic and poetic texts ever written.” Unlike R&B and soul baritone-bass “mood music” high priests Teddy Pendergrass and Barry White, Jakes is a preacher who narrates intermittently throughout the album in a manner resembling a Divine blessing on the marital bed. He embodies the iconic voice of God cuing the act of co-creation. By doing so, Jakes establishes bass timbres as the conventional sound for facilitation of sexual healing for Christian believers. Jakes collaborated with popular R&B and gospel soprano, alto, and tenor singers such as Tamar Braxton, Shirley Murdock, Jesse Powell, and Marvin Sapp. According to one iTunes reviewer, the music was “as healing as it is entertaining, Sacred Love Songs encourages men and women to love each other in God’s way with heartfelt musical messages.” Even though this album was promoted as pressing boundaries by addressing the intersection of love and spiritual issues, it re-asserts the permissible arrangements for specific Christian’s sexual and sensual exploration using gospel music: heterosexual and partnered within marriage. Sacred Love Songs is one of several recordings by gospel artists that seek to provide (non-) Christian couples with sexual healing through listening to music, while simultaneously excluding a large Christian population that is negotiating sexual desire outside of permissible arrangements for sex. As I researched the genre’s reception, there is no exploration of a virgin, celibate, queer, or sensual listening to and feeling of gospel music to deepen love and spirituality. Furthermore, there is no consideration of the pleasure vocalists may derive while providing forms of musical sexual healing.
Within the twenty-first century historically Black Pentecostal settings where gospel music is performed, there is a longstanding tradition of presenting songs and delivering sermons that promote sexual abstinence among unmarried individuals, encouraging them to wait to have sex until they get married. Essential prescriptions for maintaining chastity in the “Worth the Wait” movement extend into this sphere, including teachings that Christian believers should guard their hearts, minds, and “gates” (i.e. ear and eyes) from sexually suggestive or erotic contemplation, pornographic entertainment, and self-pleasure through masturbation. And thus, single people are technically banned from consuming the Sacred Love Song album. Yet, undoubtedly, Pentecostals are using music to have sex outside of marriage. As such, the question is induced: are there ways in which believers explore sexual healing through gospel music in a non-heterosexual, single manner? Moreover, what might we learn about the pleasure derived from the combination of the sonic and somatic dimensions of gospel music making?
Following Black men’s narratives about singing gospel, I contend that sexual abstinence discourses obscure the alternative forms of sensual and sexual exploration occurring in gospel music participation. Noticing the religio-cultural fixation on sexual abstinence rhetorics, many religious scholars have focused on the ways in which such teachings foster anxieties about the meanings and implications generated from the use of the body for pleasure and arousal. However, in my research on Black men’s performance of sexuality in gospel music, I have found a music-centered contradiction to these sexual abstinence teachings. In the vocal pedagogical language and imagery that voice teachers and directors deploy to teach “good singing,” mentors make references to sensations perceived in the genitalia and other erogenous zones so that the vocalist can achieve “supported” breathing and ideal “placement” in the production of vibrant sound, also known as resonance. Black male performers are encouraged to draw from their sexual experience and/or imagination to simulate sensed and sung sexual climax while simultaneously using sonic iconicity and resonance to evoke transcendence in listeners during the facilitation of public worship. Further, outside of Black church music academies, these male musicians have encountered non-Black instructors’ use of similar sexually suggestive and vulgar pedagogical imagery that is problematically derived from essentialist perceptions of Black men, emphasizing their physical attributes and sexual prowess over physical sensations and spiritual vitality.
While examining ethnography in Washington, D.C., of Charles Anthony Bryant’s performance of “I Give You Praise” as a musical tribute to Richard Smallwood, and interviews with male gospel vocalists and preachers, I consider gospel music as an embodied sexual activity in which vocalists simultaneously experience and surrogate pleasure as an essential, unspoken feature of worship leadership. In this ethnomusicological research, I expand on ethnomusicology, vocal pedagogy, phonology, religious studies, and musicological research on gender and sexuality in other genres pioneered by scholars such as Susan McClary, Suzanne Cusick, and Philip Brett in order to analyze gospel music making and Christian worship participation as sex.
With attention to the ways in which men speak about music making while in the predominantly male gospel music networks, singing gospel is a multi-sensory, sexual activity engaging the listener with musical semiotics, memory, iconicity, and embodied resonance inscriptions. Inspired by the climactic phrase of the refrain in “I Give You Praise,” the following questions are examined in this research: In what ways do Black male gospel musicians perceive their vocal sound and embodiment as a dwelling place, a construction of habitation, and a safe space that facilitates spiritual, physical, or even sexual transcendence through worship in ways that resemble an orgasmic experience? To what extent do Black male musicians tap into modes of eroticism to inform their facilitation of worship? More to the point, how might virgin, celibate, queer, or sensual believers feel pleasure through gospel music participation?
To analyze the sonic-somatic pleasure derived from gospel music making, I consider vocalists’ musical production, hearing, and feeling the music as performers and audience. I begin by describing the premise of the musical event and its context honoring consummate gospel composer Richard Smallwood. I explain the composer’s significance among gospel musicians, focusing on the two male vocalists B.Slade and Charles Anthony Bryant, who honored Smallwood and embody two performances of popular masculinity. For them and many other musicians, Smallwood is a muse who exemplifies the weaving of gospel and European art music traditions. B.Slade embodies the complexities surrounding the reception of self-identified gay musicians in gospel music by presenting the sonic and gestural domains that have been attributed to queerness. In contrast, Charles Anthony Bryant’s persona challenges gospel audiences’ assumptions about what queer potential or identity looks and sounds like with regard to vocal classification and comportment. Since Bryant performs against the gospel vocalist stereotype, I analyze the ways in which he intentionally uses his body to produce sound. As a result of this close analysis, I uncovered the ways in which musicians’ bodily experiences of pleasure are triggered strategically to produce consistent and balanced sound for many vocalists. With attention to the assumptions stemming from heteropatriarchal constructs of gender and sexuality expression in historically Black Protestant congregations and gospel music spheres, I summarize the constellation of symbolic meaning derived from the male musical functions, space, vocal range, bodily experience, and in setting the mood for the worship experience. I conclude by returning to the initial ethnographic sketch to demonstrate the dimensions of vocal production and how the activity moves the singer and participants, supporting the long held sense that there are both latent and intentional meanings and intimacies that are cultivated in vocal performance.
Informed by womanist and feminist modes of analysis, I conduct this research through the lens of what Black feminist bell hooks calls an oppositional gaze of Black male musicians (Black Looks 1992), as a formally trained, cisgender woman preacher, musician, and researcher who is sexually and non-sexually attracted to men. I must admit that whenever I present my research on Black men’s worship, I do so with critical affirmation of a tradition that I respect and critique. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/705623/pdf
Black music research foreparent Samuel A. Floyd Jr.’s The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhyt... more Black music research foreparent Samuel A. Floyd Jr.’s The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhythms, the Songs, and the Ships of The African Diaspora, coauthored with Melanie L. Zeck and Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., demonstrates the transformative dynamics of intellectual transmission and transition in the life of the Black mind. This study is informed by Floyd's prolific contribution to the institutionalization of Black music research as the founder of the Center for Black Music Research, a writer of book-length projects, editor of journals and volumes, collaborator, and mentor. The Transformation of Black Music is an end-of-career response to the call sounded in his seminal The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (1995), inspired by the aesthetics and performance theory proposed in Sterling Stuckey's conceptualization of the ring shout and the musical semiotics that complement Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s construction of signifyin(g) in the West African folklore symbolism of the signifying monkey. This review illuminates the instructive significance of The Transformation of Black Music in its context, contributors, structure, and intervention...
Black love and hip-hop brought Calvin Taylor Skinner and me together in 2018 as we nurtured a com... more Black love and hip-hop brought Calvin Taylor Skinner and me together in 2018 as we nurtured a commuter relationship between Knoxville and Bloomington, Indiana. During our five-to six-hour drives, I talked about my research on musical masculinity, while my theologian-activist guy shared provocative YouTube videos and podcasts facilitated by hip-hop sages to stir conversation.1 The sages self-identify variously as Pan- African, American descendants of slaves (ADOS) or Foundational Black Americans (FBA), among other Black-centered/African-centered terms. The ADOS/FBA experts probed a constellation of obscure discourses: extraterrestrial encounters, Dr. Sebi, erased ancient African histories, reparations, Black love, and “conscious” hip-hop.2 Discussing these topics with Calvin afforded me familiarity with Black men’s curation of complex creative-intellectual space irrespective of dominant culture’s understanding of their discourses. Central to this enigmatic genre of orality is speculation, inspecting structural barriers in an idiom their people recognize. From Tidal.com to BlackMagikUniversity.com to 4BiddenKnowledge.com, controlling one’s virtual presence is an essential facet of agency in the hip-hop tradition. Our conversations inspired me to return to a juxtaposition I offered my students of esotericism performed in Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Meet Me at the Crossroads” (1995) with global esoteric traditions and folklore surrounding Western classical musicians. “In what ways might you imagine your guru as a Black man from Cleveland, Ohio?” Since then, I have been analyzing the sociocultural listening biases that are exposed when we encounter portrayals of the long-winded, spitfire “Hotep” figure in pop culture, for example.3 To “speak to the myth” (rather than the patronizing Western notion of suspending disbelief) and resist sociocultural silencing, A. A. Rashid reminds us, I engage a joint venture urban legend relayed by Krayzie Bone and consult Black sages’ observations ascertaining whether music industrial complex owners/ executives are colluding with privatized prison owners.
As we celebrate spiritual and biological mother figures of our choosing, Rev. Dr. Alisha Lola Jon... more As we celebrate spiritual and biological mother figures of our choosing, Rev. Dr. Alisha Lola Jones encourages us to reflect on the intimate gift of listening to our matriarchs’ life stories.
In African-derived thought, there is no distinction between sacred and secular, religious and non... more In African-derived thought, there is no distinction between sacred and secular, religious and non-religious, belief and unbelief. And to adopt that binary is an inadequate and partial doing of Black music research pedagogy.
Over the years, I have observed scholars who are situated in dominant cultural approaches—i.e., Western/European/“American,” Christian, “respectable,” heterosexual, “elite,” male-identified/phallogocentric, “able-bodied,” monograph-centered written traditions—and wrestling with whether their methods should embrace their thick positionality identification as an instructive moment. To be a “believer” researching believers usually involves not disclosing the scholar’s own shared beliefs. Conversely, I noticed disciplinary anxiety about identifying oneself as non-religious for fear of having to deal with the ineffable. I experienced scholars’ willful obliviousness as hubris as they disregarded powerful realms of meaning in their analysis, which turned their cultural conversation partners off and caused their projects to fall short in an accurate hearing and amplification of the people they sought to represent. https://www.semsn.com/17-1-dear-sem
As Christians celebrate Easter and reflect on the resurrection, Revs. Alisha Lola Jones and Calvi... more As Christians celebrate Easter and reflect on the resurrection, Revs. Alisha Lola Jones and Calvin Taylor Skinner encourage us all to look forward and enthusiastically say, “Time travel? Yes!!”
Popularized by gospel musician and educator Donald Lawrence, the phrase “enlarge my territory” is... more Popularized by gospel musician and educator Donald Lawrence, the phrase “enlarge my territory” is the antithesis of me-centered thinking, demanding we share the wealth.
As we assess what allyship should look like, we must prioritize decolonizing our faith to ensure ... more As we assess what allyship should look like, we must prioritize decolonizing our faith to ensure our documented history and stories are told.
Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century, by religio... more Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century, by religion and African American studies scholar Vaughn A. Booker, incisively challenges assumptions about African American jazz musicians' performance of race, personal belief, and socio-cultural hardwiring toward or against Afro-Protestantism in the popular imagination. Encapsulated within its title is a signification boulder of African American aesthetics and jazz music socio-cultural values. This titular pun is leading a tide of publications within the last decade, launched from various disciplines looking closely at anthems, with Shana Redmond's Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (2013), and specifically the Negro national anthem entitled "Lift Every Voice and Sing" by J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson, and with Imani Perry's May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018). Further, Lift Every Voice and Swing hearkens to the primacy of vocality and swing as prized organizing components and commoditized principles in religio-cultural performance practice that set apart popular African American musicians in the twentieth-century mediascape. After all, as famous Washingtonian composer Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington put it in his signature composition, "It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't Got That Swing" (1931).
"I want all my people around me, everybody feeling good, everybody eating good, everybody chillin... more "I want all my people around me, everybody feeling good, everybody eating good, everybody chilling. I want for my brother what I want for myself.” – Kindred the Family Soul
Seamlessly at one with this groove, I close my eyes and nod my head, mouthing these feel-good lyrics, riding a wave of sounded Black flourishing. I am transported, floating on the harmonies in the air of our family reunion.
The spring breeze lightly caresses my skin, lacing my nose with the aroma of Mom’s macaroni and cheese that only makes an appearance for 10 seconds before news spreads that it is served. I smell the smoke from a charcoal grill stacked with that good vinegary Carolina BBQ. In the distance, I hear the click-clack of the jump rope and my cousin’s interlocking rhythmic footsteps as he finally gets his turn to jump double Dutch. And we laugh loudly, checking out folks’ coordination in their matching family reunion outfits. My grandaunt calls us to prayer and as we assemble, my “uncle-cousin” (what I call a cousin old enough to be my uncle) sings what the Spirit has laid on his heart to sing. We join in. We are reunited in this reverie from years ago and it feels so good to remember this pre-Covid soundscape of Black love brought to me by listening to the radio.
Drawing on a case study of African American countertenor Patrick Dailey and an ethnography of his... more Drawing on a case study of African American countertenor Patrick Dailey and an ethnography of his live performance, this chapter is an ethnomusicological assessment of his social and theological navigation of gendered vocal sound. African American gospel singing challenges the binary gender framework that the American public expects, with men singing low and women singing high. As a man who sings high, Dailey has to demonstrate performance competence in African American worship. Dailey deftly negotiates the tensions and intersections between these dual processes of musical performance. He does so with an aspiration to deliver a presentation that is what he refers to as “anointed”: music that is from and for God. Dailey’s performance also engages African American audiences’ various types of cultural familiarity to portray competency as a worship leader and trained artist. Thus, while making a mark in sacred music history, more generally, Patrick Dailey’s performance reveals the subtle ways Western art music conventions of classifying vocalists are utilized and revised in the interpretation of cross-cultural performance in African American churches.
…only the BLACK WOMAN can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my woma... more …only the BLACK WOMAN can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.
Anna Julia Cooper from A Voice from the South (1882)
“When will we listen to black women?” was the rallying cry echoed throughout the streets, in journalistic think pieces, and on social media in 2017. These reactions followed the polling results revealing black women’s collective voting power in arguably the most contentious elections in the twenty first century, thus far. In an era of black women-founded movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #SayHerName, some use messianic language to characterize them as “saving the day,” despite being marginalized in various predominantly white women’s movements. Thought-leaders are noticing the socio-political inaudibility of black women liberators highlighting the bias woven into the fabric of the U.S. popular imagination.
However, this socio-political observation does not account for black women’s agency and ingenuity in creating spaces for themselves in musical performance and quotidian life throughout history. Prompted by activist Anna Julia Cooper’s famous quote as a womanist ethnomusicological framework of utterance (say/sing), time (when), space (where) and access (enter), this presentation constructs a genealogy of black women’s audibility strategies by answering the question: In what ways have black women empowered themselves to sound the (un)quieted, undisputed dignity of womanhood on the world’s stage?
Despite black women’s persistent socio-political inaudibility, especially in U.S. women’s suffrage movements, contralto Marian Anderson’s narrative reveals a longstanding legacy of black women embodying and amplifying black women composed works as evidenced by her 1939 recital at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Although she was refused concert space at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall in DC, Anderson accepted first lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s invitation to sing at the Lincoln memorial. During that recital, Anderson displayed Black sisterhood and challenged the parameters of women’s suffrage when she closed the concert with an arranged-composition of the Negro Spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” by black woman composer Florence B. Price. As Anderson envoiced Price’s composition as the “final say” on the moment, she provided a musical rebuttal through which both Anderson and Price entered into the concert domains predominantly comprised of white male decision makers, an exclusionist industry bolstered by unsisterly white women patrons.
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/06/748757267/lift-every-voice-marian-anderson-florence-b-price-and-the-sound-of-black-sisterh?live=1
In this moment, we, the daughters of the African diaspora, Chamurro African American, Hawaiian Af... more In this moment, we, the daughters of the African diaspora, Chamurro African American, Hawaiian African American, African American Samoan, African American Kiribati and African American move from being peoples characterized by loss and dispersion to people defined by convening our own reunions.
Through multi-media, harmful and imprecise depictions of women of African descent are rapidly crisscrossing the planet, shaping popular perceptions of their intellectual capacity in their absence. These stereotypes are simply imprecise. You see, for quite some time women of African descent have been frequently misrepresented in music and culture as being irrational, shallow, and unkind, especially when we are challenged by each other in heated debates. In fact, one of the most insidious circulated and internalized stereotypes is that women of African descent are given to same sex rivalry along the lines of hue, color, mixed race parentage, socio-economic status and education status, mental and personality disorders. Yet, here we are in the US territory of Guam to affirm that Black Lives Matter around the globe.
We submit our lives to explore the complexity of our myriad identities and connections as practitioner-scholars, whose lives have been inscribed and are read for the tensions surrounding post-colonialism. Therefore, it is a transgressive, political, and pedagogical act for women of the African diaspora to be visible as we invite each other to sharpen, to borrow from Anna Julia Cooper, “in the quiet, undisputed dignity of our womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage” in intellectual spaces and conference settings such as the joint Pacific History Association (PHA) conference and International Council of Traditional Music (ICTM) symposium.
In the ethnomusicology of Africana music and sound, the discourse has been conceptually organized around diaspora or the forced migration of people of African descent, with a focus on their routes across one body of water, commonly referred to in the African diaspora literature as the Black Atlantic. This Black Atlantic emphasis further isolates our already scattered communities of African descent that have extended beyond the Atlantic into the Pacific through both voluntary and forced dispersions. This imagined isolation and distance works to disjoint the body politic of Africana people who are catching hell around the globe along gender, sexuality, and hued lines. And thus, these fragmented communities are less likely to implicate the hegemonic powers that be, which oppress women as well...
Gospel musicians have recorded several food-related songs about southern and soul foods such as T... more Gospel musicians have recorded several food-related songs about southern and soul foods such as Tye Tribbett’s live performances of “There Will Be Chicken After Church” and Here II Praise’s “Chicken Song” (1998). Through Tribbett, Here II Praise and others' performances about church and food consumption, we find illustrations of the ways in which traditional food metaphors in gospel repertoire symbolize the formation of Christian community. However, in the Truthettes’ gospel performance of “Peanut Butter and Jelly,” I explore the ways in which the humble, portable food metaphor is another aspect of African American Christian community building and sustenance. The Truthettes perform spiritual transformation by using the meanings generated by a food metaphor -- a symbol from which a Christian believer may fast or more specifically, for which they involuntarily lose their appetite, demonstrating belonging and entry into African American church families.
Based on the Song of Solomon, Bishop T.D. Jakes released the Sacred Love Songs (1999) album, mark... more Based on the Song of Solomon, Bishop T.D. Jakes released the Sacred Love Songs (1999) album, marketing the charismatic Christian mood music as “gospel” songs with the most “romantic and poetic texts ever written.” Unlike R&B and soul baritone-bass “mood music” high priests Teddy Pendergrass and Barry White, Jakes is a preacher who narrates intermittently throughout the album in a manner resembling a Divine blessing on the marital bed. He embodies the iconic voice of God cuing the act of co-creation. By doing so, Jakes establishes bass timbres as the conventional sound for facilitation of sexual healing for Christian believers. Jakes collaborated with popular R&B and gospel soprano, alto, and tenor singers such as Tamar Braxton, Shirley Murdock, Jesse Powell, and Marvin Sapp. According to one iTunes reviewer, the music was “as healing as it is entertaining, Sacred Love Songs encourages men and women to love each other in God’s way with heartfelt musical messages.” Even though this album was promoted as pressing boundaries by addressing the intersection of love and spiritual issues, it re-asserts the permissible arrangements for specific Christian’s sexual and sensual exploration using gospel music: heterosexual and partnered within marriage. Sacred Love Songs is one of several recordings by gospel artists that seek to provide (non-) Christian couples with sexual healing through listening to music, while simultaneously excluding a large Christian population that is negotiating sexual desire outside of permissible arrangements for sex. As I researched the genre’s reception, there is no exploration of a virgin, celibate, queer, or sensual listening to and feeling of gospel music to deepen love and spirituality. Furthermore, there is no consideration of the pleasure vocalists may derive while providing forms of musical sexual healing.
Within the twenty-first century historically Black Pentecostal settings where gospel music is performed, there is a longstanding tradition of presenting songs and delivering sermons that promote sexual abstinence among unmarried individuals, encouraging them to wait to have sex until they get married. Essential prescriptions for maintaining chastity in the “Worth the Wait” movement extend into this sphere, including teachings that Christian believers should guard their hearts, minds, and “gates” (i.e. ear and eyes) from sexually suggestive or erotic contemplation, pornographic entertainment, and self-pleasure through masturbation. And thus, single people are technically banned from consuming the Sacred Love Song album. Yet, undoubtedly, Pentecostals are using music to have sex outside of marriage. As such, the question is induced: are there ways in which believers explore sexual healing through gospel music in a non-heterosexual, single manner? Moreover, what might we learn about the pleasure derived from the combination of the sonic and somatic dimensions of gospel music making?
Following Black men’s narratives about singing gospel, I contend that sexual abstinence discourses obscure the alternative forms of sensual and sexual exploration occurring in gospel music participation. Noticing the religio-cultural fixation on sexual abstinence rhetorics, many religious scholars have focused on the ways in which such teachings foster anxieties about the meanings and implications generated from the use of the body for pleasure and arousal. However, in my research on Black men’s performance of sexuality in gospel music, I have found a music-centered contradiction to these sexual abstinence teachings. In the vocal pedagogical language and imagery that voice teachers and directors deploy to teach “good singing,” mentors make references to sensations perceived in the genitalia and other erogenous zones so that the vocalist can achieve “supported” breathing and ideal “placement” in the production of vibrant sound, also known as resonance. Black male performers are encouraged to draw from their sexual experience and/or imagination to simulate sensed and sung sexual climax while simultaneously using sonic iconicity and resonance to evoke transcendence in listeners during the facilitation of public worship. Further, outside of Black church music academies, these male musicians have encountered non-Black instructors’ use of similar sexually suggestive and vulgar pedagogical imagery that is problematically derived from essentialist perceptions of Black men, emphasizing their physical attributes and sexual prowess over physical sensations and spiritual vitality.
While examining ethnography in Washington, D.C., of Charles Anthony Bryant’s performance of “I Give You Praise” as a musical tribute to Richard Smallwood, and interviews with male gospel vocalists and preachers, I consider gospel music as an embodied sexual activity in which vocalists simultaneously experience and surrogate pleasure as an essential, unspoken feature of worship leadership. In this ethnomusicological research, I expand on ethnomusicology, vocal pedagogy, phonology, religious studies, and musicological research on gender and sexuality in other genres pioneered by scholars such as Susan McClary, Suzanne Cusick, and Philip Brett in order to analyze gospel music making and Christian worship participation as sex.
With attention to the ways in which men speak about music making while in the predominantly male gospel music networks, singing gospel is a multi-sensory, sexual activity engaging the listener with musical semiotics, memory, iconicity, and embodied resonance inscriptions. Inspired by the climactic phrase of the refrain in “I Give You Praise,” the following questions are examined in this research: In what ways do Black male gospel musicians perceive their vocal sound and embodiment as a dwelling place, a construction of habitation, and a safe space that facilitates spiritual, physical, or even sexual transcendence through worship in ways that resemble an orgasmic experience? To what extent do Black male musicians tap into modes of eroticism to inform their facilitation of worship? More to the point, how might virgin, celibate, queer, or sensual believers feel pleasure through gospel music participation?
To analyze the sonic-somatic pleasure derived from gospel music making, I consider vocalists’ musical production, hearing, and feeling the music as performers and audience. I begin by describing the premise of the musical event and its context honoring consummate gospel composer Richard Smallwood. I explain the composer’s significance among gospel musicians, focusing on the two male vocalists B.Slade and Charles Anthony Bryant, who honored Smallwood and embody two performances of popular masculinity. For them and many other musicians, Smallwood is a muse who exemplifies the weaving of gospel and European art music traditions. B.Slade embodies the complexities surrounding the reception of self-identified gay musicians in gospel music by presenting the sonic and gestural domains that have been attributed to queerness. In contrast, Charles Anthony Bryant’s persona challenges gospel audiences’ assumptions about what queer potential or identity looks and sounds like with regard to vocal classification and comportment. Since Bryant performs against the gospel vocalist stereotype, I analyze the ways in which he intentionally uses his body to produce sound. As a result of this close analysis, I uncovered the ways in which musicians’ bodily experiences of pleasure are triggered strategically to produce consistent and balanced sound for many vocalists. With attention to the assumptions stemming from heteropatriarchal constructs of gender and sexuality expression in historically Black Protestant congregations and gospel music spheres, I summarize the constellation of symbolic meaning derived from the male musical functions, space, vocal range, bodily experience, and in setting the mood for the worship experience. I conclude by returning to the initial ethnographic sketch to demonstrate the dimensions of vocal production and how the activity moves the singer and participants, supporting the long held sense that there are both latent and intentional meanings and intimacies that are cultivated in vocal performance.
Informed by womanist and feminist modes of analysis, I conduct this research through the lens of what Black feminist bell hooks calls an oppositional gaze of Black male musicians (Black Looks 1992), as a formally trained, cisgender woman preacher, musician, and researcher who is sexually and non-sexually attracted to men. I must admit that whenever I present my research on Black men’s worship, I do so with critical affirmation of a tradition that I respect and critique. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/705623/pdf
One may assume that Mahalia Jackson research is a well-worn path of inquiry, but Mark Burford’s l... more One may assume that Mahalia Jackson research is a well-worn path of inquiry, but Mark Burford’s latest contribution to the body of literature disregards limitations that have been placed on gospel music research. Released on the heels of Burford’s masterfully written Mahalia Jackson and the Gospel Music Field (2019), his volume The Mahalia Jackson Reader (2020), is illustrative of a sankofa approach to gospel music research that adequately pays homage to the one Harry Belafonte lauded as “the single most powerful black woman in the United States” (1) upon her passing at 60 years of age. Shrugging off the antiquated “great composer” emphasis that is pervasive in music research on significant figures, Burford’s analysis of Mahalia Jackson’s life embraces multivocality, a constellation of creative connections and ventures that illuminate Jackson’s multivalent industriousness as a conscious musician, creative activist, versatile lifestyle brand, and astute businesswoman.
Music scholars have wrestled with gauging the extent to which they use reflexivity in research wi... more Music scholars have wrestled with gauging the extent to which they use reflexivity in research without diluting rigorous theoretical analysis, especially in an affect oriented and sensory-based field of inquiry as music. Researchers agonize over how and when to use their personal experience of music's power, their feeling of the music as a form of data more than just vibrations. Sounding good in theoretical script and rhetoric are rewarded regardless of the level of personal neglect and social disfigurement one undergoes to attain academic achievement: self-consciousness, isolation, inacces-sibility, irritability, inhospitality, and awkwardness. Musicologist William Cheng takes on this strong theory paranoia about sounding good as intellectuals in his book Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good, by crafting a rich resource that challenges the widely distributed and long contested notion that music is universally pleasurable, a creative vehicle through which humanity is always soothed. He evaluates music, an art created from what some esteem as "just vibrations," through a prism of sonic injustices that have been socioculturally imperceptible until this groundbreaking work. By using his experience, along with affect, care, and queer theoretical frameworks, Cheng demonstrates that one's positionality can be incorporated into investigations in a manner that enlightens how scholars flourish while doing the work in the field and relating to each other in everyday life. Engaging Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's term paranoid reading to describe mainstream strategies of modern critical scholarship, Cheng critiques "strong theory writing," by unraveling what is at stake for dissembling the precautionary stance in academic writing. To prime the purists for his dismantlement of critical scholarship practices, Cheng begins by orienting the reader with the strong theory content through a writing style that is far more self-aware in its pacing than is typical in musicological literature. While the book is not geared toward a religious studies audience, and Cheng does not claim to cultivate deeper social listening practices, he does manage to amplify the reader's perceptiveness: "the goal is not to peddle inspiration, but to proffer insights that may come to us on the brink of expiration when we feel curtains closing on lyrics left unsung" (p. 15). He redefines "sounding good" in academic literature by writing with what he calls a "reparative" approach, embracing the heuristics that are concealed in scholarly canons. Drawing from a series of case studies, Cheng challenges the innocuous properties of music making perceived as just vibrations, revealing the dearth of information on the production of sound as forms of acoustic offense and violence. He starts by exegeting his own embodied knowledge, having lived with a chronic illness that impeded his ability to research, perform, and experience music as he did prior to developing the illness. Due to the involuntary nature of his condition, Cheng examined the effect of illness on the quality of intellectual output, despite the ostensible enjoyment derived from music as the object of analysis and listening to or performing music as the research activity. Then Cheng addresses the pressure of sounding good in scholarly settings and what peer care might be like, dismantling toxic work environments that exacerbate the pressure of pursuing promotion and acclaim. Using queer theory to analyze his human subjects, he moves on to consider shame as one of the consequences for failure to sound good and how it merely compounds the paranoia and resultant inaccessibility of the scholarship. To draw the research to a close, he moves beyond the bodily and intellectual experiences of musical knowledge that reinstall academics into silos by prompting a call to action through a current social justice case study. Cheng stretches readers to examine the macro implications of acoustic offenses that are performed through military musical torture of prisoners and police enacted acoustic brutality toward protesters. Just Vibrations is useful for researching strategies of doing reparative work, disability policy advocacy, and the distant yet colorful horizons of cultivating interpersonal hospitality among intellectuals. For religious scholars who need a new take on trauma and grace discourses in theology and emerging considerations surrounding theologies of liberation, this book offers a fresh perspective. The ideal audience for Just Vibrations includes music researchers, performers, and people dealing with chronic illness and their loved ones. This book is also a great resource for pastoral counselors sifting through relevant care strategies for scholars, especially artist-scholars, where performing a connection among head, heart, and hands is essential to their
Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, 2020
Male-centered theology, a dearth of men in the pews, and an overrepresentation of queer males in ... more Male-centered theology, a dearth of men in the pews, and an overrepresentation of queer males in music ministry: these elements coexist within the spaces of historically black Protestant churches, creating an atmosphere where simultaneous heteropatriarchy and "real" masculinity anxieties, archetypes of the "alpha-male preacher", the "effeminate choir director" and homo-antagonism, are all in play. The "flamboyant" male vocalists formed in the black Pentecostal music ministry tradition, through their vocal styles, gestures, and attire in church services, display a spectrum of gender performances - from "hyper-masculine" to feminine masculine - to their fellow worshippers, subtly protesting and critiquing the otherwise heteronormative theology in which the service is entrenched. And while the performativity of these men is characterized by cynics as "flaming," a similar musicalized "fire" - that of the Holy Spirit - moves through the bodies of Pentecostal worshippers, endowing them religio-culturally, physically, and spiritually like "fire shut up in their bones".
Using the lenses of ethnomusicology, musicology, anthropology, men's studies, queer studies, and theology, Flaming?: The Peculiar Theo-Politics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance observes how male vocalists traverse their tightly-knit social networks and negotiate their identities through and beyond the worship experience. Author Alisha Jones ultimately addresses the ways in which gospel music and performance can afford African American men not only greater visibility, but also an affirmation of their fitness to minister through speech and song.
Black love and hip-hop brought Calvin Taylor Skinner and me together in 2018 as we nurtured a com... more Black love and hip-hop brought Calvin Taylor Skinner and me together in 2018 as we nurtured a commuter relationship between Knoxville and Bloomington, Indiana. During our five-to six-hour drives, I talked about my research on musical masculinity, while my theologian-activist guy shared provocative YouTube videos and podcasts facilitated by hip-hop sages to stir conversation.1 The sages self-identify variously as Pan- African, American descendants of slaves (ADOS) or Foundational Black Americans (FBA), among other Black-centered/African-centered terms. The ADOS/FBA experts probed a constellation of obscure discourses: extraterrestrial encounters, Dr. Sebi, erased ancient African histories, reparations, Black love, and “conscious” hip-hop.2 Discussing these topics with Calvin afforded me familiarity with Black men’s curation of complex creative-intellectual space irrespective of dominant culture’s understanding of their discourses. Central to this enigmatic genre of orality is speculation, inspecting structural barriers in an idiom their people recognize. From Tidal.com to BlackMagikUniversity.com to 4BiddenKnowledge.com, controlling one’s virtual presence is an essential facet of agency in the hip-hop tradition. Our conversations inspired me to return to a juxtaposition I offered my students of esotericism performed in Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Meet Me at the Crossroads” (1995) with global esoteric traditions and folklore surrounding Western classical musicians. “In what ways might you imagine your guru as a Black man from Cleveland, Ohio?” Since then, I have been analyzing the sociocultural listening biases that are exposed when we encounter portrayals of the long-winded, spitfire “Hotep” figure in pop culture, for example.3 To “speak to the myth” (rather than the patronizing Western notion of suspending disbelief) and resist sociocultural silencing, A. A. Rashid reminds us, I engage a joint venture urban legend relayed by Krayzie Bone and consult Black sages’ observations ascertaining whether music industrial complex owners/ executives are colluding with privatized prison owners.
More than the coupling of women with gay men in vocal music participation is the impenetrable wor... more More than the coupling of women with gay men in vocal music participation is the impenetrable work spouse relationships that occur between the preacher and the chief musician. Protected by compensation arrangements and confidentiality expectations that favor the pastor as boss, that coupling is the dominant relationship in African American Christian religiosity. With this in mind, I wonder what are the ways in which men’s collective participation in vocal music ministry has come to function as a form of eunuchoidism to handle women in churches, while granting access to men who are phallogocentrically oriented, at the very least via their servile affinity for phallomusicocentrism or multivalent male-centered music-making. Undoubtedly, there is a pervasive investment in men’s cocreation after their own kind, a creative enterprise that reasserts dominance and pre-eminence. The unspoken connections and privileges afforded through this system are beguiling to the very best of men.
Graham, Sandra Jean. Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry . Urbana: Univers... more Graham, Sandra Jean. Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. 330 pages. Even though Negro spirituals are one of the most popular black sacred music genres, they have not been extensively considered as a commoditized cultural product
This forum was convened by Teresia Teaiwa to examine Afro-Diasporic art in Pacific. The contribut... more This forum was convened by Teresia Teaiwa to examine Afro-Diasporic art in Pacific. The contributions address film/video, visual arts, poetry, dance, memoir, and music. The section also includes brief remembrances by the contributors that commemorate the passing of Teresia Teaiwa.
Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance examines ... more Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance examines the rituals and social interactions of African American men who use gospel music-making as a means of worshiping God and performing gendered identities. Prompted by the popular term “flaming” that is used to identify over-the-top or peculiar performance of identity, Flaming? argues that these men wield and interweave a variety of multivalent aural-visual cues, including vocal style, gesture, attire, and homiletics, to position themselves along a spectrum of gender identities. These multisensory enactments empower artists (i.e., “peculiar people”) to demonstrate modes of “competence” that affirm their fitness to minister through speech and song. Through a progression of transcongregational case studies, Flaming? observes the ways in which African American men traverse tightly knit social networks to negotiate their identities through and beyond the worship experience. Coded and “read” as ...
Chapter 7 examines ethnography of formerly gay gospel recording artist and pastor Donnie McClurki... more Chapter 7 examines ethnography of formerly gay gospel recording artist and pastor Donnie McClurkin’s sermonizing as a performance of the heteropatriarchal scripts that manage gospel enthusiasts concerns about queer(ed) musicians’ spiritual fitness and protect the social order of church leadership. Since the early 2000s, McClurkin has been regarded as the architect of the deliverance from homosexuality testimony format of communicating queer sexual history in Pentecostal worship. Men’s performance of church realness in historically black Pentecostal churches is the deployment of sung and spoken heteropresentation and gender conformity. The objective of the performance is both to blend in and to assert dominance in gospel music heteropatriarchal forums in a manner that has been socioculturally required of them.
Male soprano sound in gospel choral participation has come to be a locus for scrutiny, representi... more Male soprano sound in gospel choral participation has come to be a locus for scrutiny, representing a site for the vocalized performance of identity. Drawing on a case study of African-American countertenor Patrick Dailey and an ethnography of his live performance, chapter 2 observes a black countertenor’s embodiment of gendered sound and the peculiar vocal qualities that are socioculturally perceived to signify a man’s queer potential. African-American gospel singing challenges the gender binary framework that the American public expects of men as singing low and women as singing high. Dailey’s performance engages African-American audiences through various types of cultural familiarity to portray competency as a worship leader and trained artist.
Focusing on Washington, DC’s gospel go-go music scene in the early 2000s, chapter 4 highlights th... more Focusing on Washington, DC’s gospel go-go music scene in the early 2000s, chapter 4 highlights the role of an understudied popular music in performances of socioculturally preferred black male homosociality. This chapter examines men’s performances against the stereotype of the softer, woman-like, flamboyant male vocalist through research on a percussion-heavy music from Washington, DC called gospel go-go. In essence, the go-go music band is a symbolic composite of perspectives associated with the unmarked male-dominant categories of the musicians’ pit and absentee men, who are talking back, providing musical contestation of the duplicitous preacher and choir director stereotypes. Chapter 4 aims to shed light on the musical and performative properties of male homomusicoenrapture and homosonoenrapture, the same-gender musical and sonic textures and visual dynamics that stimulate intense enjoyment while enveloping and propelling gospel go-go participants.
Recent scholarship in Black studies has interrogated how communities of color are created, sustai... more Recent scholarship in Black studies has interrogated how communities of color are created, sustained, and made legible. Especially within queer of color critique, there has emerged a growing archive and, subsequentially, a robust scholarship that questions mainstream queer studies. In divulging queer forms of knowledge production, scholars have produced works that counter many Black epistemological and ontological assumptions. E. Patrick Johnson, in particular, has done much to frame queer of color studies around the concept of communities, especially in Sweet Tea, No Tea, No Shade, and Black. Queer. Southern. Women and now in Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women. Recently, Alisha Lola Jones built on his scholarship, establishing the importance of ethnographic engagement in queer communities of color. Following Johnson’s lead, Jones’ Flaming explores Black male sexuality within Black Pentecostalism. Here, she uncovers a complex network of signifying across various sexualize...
Expanding upon previous research about the perceptions of black male vocal participation as queer... more Expanding upon previous research about the perceptions of black male vocal participation as queer, chapter 1 explores the sonic qualities of black men’s public renouncement of their gay identity through deliverance testimonies. In a culture where queer people are often regulated to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” social agreement, the testimonies of men delivered from homosexuality conform to what feminist writer Adrienne Rich referred to as compulsory heterosexuality. While deploying ethnomusicological, phonological, linguistic, critical race, and gender studies analysis, chapter 1 examines these delivered believers’ coded and textured performances of orality in Pentecostal worship: virtuosic singing, speaking in other tongues, preaching, and preaching-singing. Their accounts prompt (non-)verbal communication among spectators about what constitutes legitimate and sustained deliverance.
Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance intervene... more Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance intervenes into the crisis narrative of black male participation in historically black Pentecostal churches by examining the striking aural-visual performances of gender expression and sexuality as the Spirit moves upon vocalists’ bodies. By following the discourse surrounding the “flaming” choir director stereotype, I investigate the extent to which men’s unique approaches to music-making are met with spectators’ derision and queries about the extent to which their worship generates queer connotations. Participants are essentially guided by what constitutes a practice of the adage “where there is smoke, there is fire.” If there are rumors about a man’s sexual behavior or if he demonstrates queer potential, than it must be so. This perception is tied to the biblical notion that believers are to stay away from the appearance of activity and affiliations that are regarded as evil.
Chapter 3 dissects the sociocultural sensitivity about the extent to which men’s dance or gesture... more Chapter 3 dissects the sociocultural sensitivity about the extent to which men’s dance or gesture in worship registers as queer by analyzing a case study of a man who worships God through pole fitness. Derived from ethnographic research of widely circulated Jungle Cat’s amateur “pole dancing for Jesus” performance footage, chapter 3 teases out innumerable creative processes through which men’s situating of identity takes place. Jungle Cat worships God to recorded gospel music with ritual components of private dancing and contemplation that absolve him from ecclesial, denominational, and organizational restrictions and surveillance. While anxieties about black male identity also apply to more conventional forms of men’s praise dance such as mime and step, pole dancing cultivates especially passionate responses from gospel music observers.
Drawing on a case study of African American countertenor Patrick Dailey and an ethnography of his... more Drawing on a case study of African American countertenor Patrick Dailey and an ethnography of his live performance, this chapter is an ethnomusicological assessment of his social and theological navigation of gendered vocal sound. African American gospel singing challenges the binary gender framework that the American public expects, with men singing low and women singing high. As a man who sings high, Dailey has to demonstrate performance competence in African American worship. Dailey deftly negotiates the tensions and intersections between these dual processes of musical performance. He does so with an aspiration to deliver a presentation that is what he refers to as “anointed”: music that is from and for God. Dailey’s performance also engages African American audiences’ various types of cultural familiarity to portray competency as a worship leader and trained artist. Thus, while making a mark in sacred music history, more generally, Patrick Dailey’s performance reveals the subtl...
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Articles by Alisha Lola Jones
Our conversations inspired me to return to a juxtaposition I offered my students of esotericism performed in Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Meet Me at the Crossroads” (1995) with global esoteric traditions and folklore surrounding Western classical musicians. “In what ways might you imagine your guru as a Black man from Cleveland, Ohio?” Since then, I have been analyzing the sociocultural listening biases that are exposed when we encounter portrayals of the long-winded, spitfire “Hotep” figure in pop culture, for example.3 To “speak to the myth” (rather than the patronizing Western notion of suspending disbelief) and resist sociocultural silencing, A. A. Rashid reminds us, I engage a joint venture urban legend relayed by Krayzie Bone and consult Black sages’ observations ascertaining whether music industrial complex owners/ executives are colluding with privatized prison owners.
Over the years, I have observed scholars who are situated in dominant cultural approaches—i.e., Western/European/“American,” Christian, “respectable,” heterosexual, “elite,” male-identified/phallogocentric, “able-bodied,” monograph-centered written traditions—and wrestling with whether their methods should embrace their thick positionality identification as an instructive moment. To be a “believer” researching believers usually involves not disclosing the scholar’s own shared beliefs. Conversely, I noticed disciplinary anxiety about identifying oneself as non-religious for fear of having to deal with the ineffable. I experienced scholars’ willful obliviousness as hubris as they disregarded powerful realms of meaning in their analysis, which turned their cultural conversation partners off and caused their projects to fall short in an accurate hearing and amplification of the people they sought to represent.
https://www.semsn.com/17-1-dear-sem
– Kindred the Family Soul
Seamlessly at one with this groove, I close my eyes and nod my head, mouthing these feel-good lyrics, riding a wave of sounded Black flourishing. I am transported, floating on the harmonies in the air of our family reunion.
The spring breeze lightly caresses my skin, lacing my nose with the aroma of Mom’s macaroni and cheese that only makes an appearance for 10 seconds before news spreads that it is served. I smell the smoke from a charcoal grill stacked with that good vinegary Carolina BBQ. In the distance, I hear the click-clack of the jump rope and my cousin’s interlocking rhythmic footsteps as he finally gets his turn to jump double Dutch. And we laugh loudly, checking out folks’ coordination in their matching family reunion outfits. My grandaunt calls us to prayer and as we assemble, my “uncle-cousin” (what I call a cousin old enough to be my uncle) sings what the Spirit has laid on his heart to sing. We join in. We are reunited in this reverie from years ago and it feels so good to remember this pre-Covid soundscape of Black love brought to me by listening to the radio.
Anna Julia Cooper from A Voice from the South (1882)
“When will we listen to black women?” was the rallying cry echoed throughout the streets, in journalistic think pieces, and on social media in 2017. These reactions followed the polling results revealing black women’s collective voting power in arguably the most contentious elections in the twenty first century, thus far. In an era of black women-founded movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #SayHerName, some use messianic language to characterize them as “saving the day,” despite being marginalized in various predominantly white women’s movements. Thought-leaders are noticing the socio-political inaudibility of black women liberators highlighting the bias woven into the fabric of the U.S. popular imagination.
However, this socio-political observation does not account for black women’s agency and ingenuity in creating spaces for themselves in musical performance and quotidian life throughout history. Prompted by activist Anna Julia Cooper’s famous quote as a womanist ethnomusicological framework of utterance (say/sing), time (when), space (where) and access (enter), this presentation constructs a genealogy of black women’s audibility strategies by answering the question: In what ways have black women empowered themselves to sound the (un)quieted, undisputed dignity of womanhood on the world’s stage?
Despite black women’s persistent socio-political inaudibility, especially in U.S. women’s suffrage movements, contralto Marian Anderson’s narrative reveals a longstanding legacy of black women embodying and amplifying black women composed works as evidenced by her 1939 recital at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Although she was refused concert space at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall in DC, Anderson accepted first lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s invitation to sing at the Lincoln memorial. During that recital, Anderson displayed Black sisterhood and challenged the parameters of women’s suffrage when she closed the concert with an arranged-composition of the Negro Spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” by black woman composer Florence B. Price. As Anderson envoiced Price’s composition as the “final say” on the moment, she provided a musical rebuttal through which both Anderson and Price entered into the concert domains predominantly comprised of white male decision makers, an exclusionist industry bolstered by unsisterly white women patrons.
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/06/748757267/lift-every-voice-marian-anderson-florence-b-price-and-the-sound-of-black-sisterh?live=1
Through multi-media, harmful and imprecise depictions of women of African descent are rapidly crisscrossing the planet, shaping popular perceptions of their intellectual capacity in their absence. These stereotypes are simply imprecise. You see, for quite some time women of African descent have been frequently misrepresented in music and culture as being irrational, shallow, and unkind, especially when we are challenged by each other in heated debates. In fact, one of the most insidious circulated and internalized stereotypes is that women of African descent are given to same sex rivalry along the lines of hue, color, mixed race parentage, socio-economic status and education status, mental and personality disorders. Yet, here we are in the US territory of Guam to affirm that Black Lives Matter around the globe.
We submit our lives to explore the complexity of our myriad identities and connections as practitioner-scholars, whose lives have been inscribed and are read for the tensions surrounding post-colonialism. Therefore, it is a transgressive, political, and pedagogical act for women of the African diaspora to be visible as we invite each other to sharpen, to borrow from Anna Julia Cooper, “in the quiet, undisputed dignity of our womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage” in intellectual spaces and conference settings such as the joint Pacific History Association (PHA) conference and International Council of Traditional Music (ICTM) symposium.
In the ethnomusicology of Africana music and sound, the discourse has been conceptually organized around diaspora or the forced migration of people of African descent, with a focus on their routes across one body of water, commonly referred to in the African diaspora literature as the Black Atlantic. This Black Atlantic emphasis further isolates our already scattered communities of African descent that have extended beyond the Atlantic into the Pacific through both voluntary and forced dispersions. This imagined isolation and distance works to disjoint the body politic of Africana people who are catching hell around the globe along gender, sexuality, and hued lines. And thus, these fragmented communities are less likely to implicate the hegemonic powers that be, which oppress women as well...
Within the twenty-first century historically Black Pentecostal settings where gospel music is performed, there is a longstanding tradition of presenting songs and delivering sermons that promote sexual abstinence among unmarried individuals, encouraging them to wait to have sex until they get married. Essential prescriptions for maintaining chastity in the “Worth the Wait” movement extend into this sphere, including teachings that Christian believers should guard their hearts, minds, and “gates” (i.e. ear and eyes) from sexually suggestive or erotic contemplation, pornographic entertainment, and self-pleasure through masturbation. And thus, single people are technically banned from consuming the Sacred Love Song album. Yet, undoubtedly, Pentecostals are using music to have sex outside of marriage. As such, the question is induced: are there ways in which believers explore sexual healing through gospel music in a non-heterosexual, single manner? Moreover, what might we learn about the pleasure derived from the combination of the sonic and somatic dimensions of gospel music making?
Following Black men’s narratives about singing gospel, I contend that sexual abstinence discourses obscure the alternative forms of sensual and sexual exploration occurring in gospel music participation. Noticing the religio-cultural fixation on sexual abstinence rhetorics, many religious scholars have focused on the ways in which such teachings foster anxieties about the meanings and implications generated from the use of the body for pleasure and arousal. However, in my research on Black men’s performance of sexuality in gospel music, I have found a music-centered contradiction to these sexual abstinence teachings. In the vocal pedagogical language and imagery that voice teachers and directors deploy to teach “good singing,” mentors make references to sensations perceived in the genitalia and other erogenous zones so that the vocalist can achieve “supported” breathing and ideal “placement” in the production of vibrant sound, also known as resonance. Black male performers are encouraged to draw from their sexual experience and/or imagination to simulate sensed and sung sexual climax while simultaneously using sonic iconicity and resonance to evoke transcendence in listeners during the facilitation of public worship. Further, outside of Black church music academies, these male musicians have encountered non-Black instructors’ use of similar sexually suggestive and vulgar pedagogical imagery that is problematically derived from essentialist perceptions of Black men, emphasizing their physical attributes and sexual prowess over physical sensations and spiritual vitality.
While examining ethnography in Washington, D.C., of Charles Anthony Bryant’s performance of “I Give You Praise” as a musical tribute to Richard Smallwood, and interviews with male gospel vocalists and preachers, I consider gospel music as an embodied sexual activity in which vocalists simultaneously experience and surrogate pleasure as an essential, unspoken feature of worship leadership. In this ethnomusicological research, I expand on ethnomusicology, vocal pedagogy, phonology, religious studies, and musicological research on gender and sexuality in other genres pioneered by scholars such as Susan McClary, Suzanne Cusick, and Philip Brett in order to analyze gospel music making and Christian worship participation as sex.
With attention to the ways in which men speak about music making while in the predominantly male gospel music networks, singing gospel is a multi-sensory, sexual activity engaging the listener with musical semiotics, memory, iconicity, and embodied resonance inscriptions. Inspired by the climactic phrase of the refrain in “I Give You Praise,” the following questions are examined in this research: In what ways do Black male gospel musicians perceive their vocal sound and embodiment as a dwelling place, a construction of habitation, and a safe space that facilitates spiritual, physical, or even sexual transcendence through worship in ways that resemble an orgasmic experience? To what extent do Black male musicians tap into modes of eroticism to inform their facilitation of worship? More to the point, how might virgin, celibate, queer, or sensual believers feel pleasure through gospel music participation?
To analyze the sonic-somatic pleasure derived from gospel music making, I consider vocalists’ musical production, hearing, and feeling the music as performers and audience. I begin by describing the premise of the musical event and its context honoring consummate gospel composer Richard Smallwood. I explain the composer’s significance among gospel musicians, focusing on the two male vocalists B.Slade and Charles Anthony Bryant, who honored Smallwood and embody two performances of popular masculinity. For them and many other musicians, Smallwood is a muse who exemplifies the weaving of gospel and European art music traditions. B.Slade embodies the complexities surrounding the reception of self-identified gay musicians in gospel music by presenting the sonic and gestural domains that have been attributed to queerness. In contrast, Charles Anthony Bryant’s persona challenges gospel audiences’ assumptions about what queer potential or identity looks and sounds like with regard to vocal classification and comportment. Since Bryant performs against the gospel vocalist stereotype, I analyze the ways in which he intentionally uses his body to produce sound. As a result of this close analysis, I uncovered the ways in which musicians’ bodily experiences of pleasure are triggered strategically to produce consistent and balanced sound for many vocalists. With attention to the assumptions stemming from heteropatriarchal constructs of gender and sexuality expression in historically Black Protestant congregations and gospel music spheres, I summarize the constellation of symbolic meaning derived from the male musical functions, space, vocal range, bodily experience, and in setting the mood for the worship experience. I conclude by returning to the initial ethnographic sketch to demonstrate the dimensions of vocal production and how the activity moves the singer and participants, supporting the long held sense that there are both latent and intentional meanings and intimacies that are cultivated in vocal performance.
Informed by womanist and feminist modes of analysis, I conduct this research through the lens of what Black feminist bell hooks calls an oppositional gaze of Black male musicians (Black Looks 1992), as a formally trained, cisgender woman preacher, musician, and researcher who is sexually and non-sexually attracted to men. I must admit that whenever I present my research on Black men’s worship, I do so with critical affirmation of a tradition that I respect and critique. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/705623/pdf
Our conversations inspired me to return to a juxtaposition I offered my students of esotericism performed in Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Meet Me at the Crossroads” (1995) with global esoteric traditions and folklore surrounding Western classical musicians. “In what ways might you imagine your guru as a Black man from Cleveland, Ohio?” Since then, I have been analyzing the sociocultural listening biases that are exposed when we encounter portrayals of the long-winded, spitfire “Hotep” figure in pop culture, for example.3 To “speak to the myth” (rather than the patronizing Western notion of suspending disbelief) and resist sociocultural silencing, A. A. Rashid reminds us, I engage a joint venture urban legend relayed by Krayzie Bone and consult Black sages’ observations ascertaining whether music industrial complex owners/ executives are colluding with privatized prison owners.
Over the years, I have observed scholars who are situated in dominant cultural approaches—i.e., Western/European/“American,” Christian, “respectable,” heterosexual, “elite,” male-identified/phallogocentric, “able-bodied,” monograph-centered written traditions—and wrestling with whether their methods should embrace their thick positionality identification as an instructive moment. To be a “believer” researching believers usually involves not disclosing the scholar’s own shared beliefs. Conversely, I noticed disciplinary anxiety about identifying oneself as non-religious for fear of having to deal with the ineffable. I experienced scholars’ willful obliviousness as hubris as they disregarded powerful realms of meaning in their analysis, which turned their cultural conversation partners off and caused their projects to fall short in an accurate hearing and amplification of the people they sought to represent.
https://www.semsn.com/17-1-dear-sem
– Kindred the Family Soul
Seamlessly at one with this groove, I close my eyes and nod my head, mouthing these feel-good lyrics, riding a wave of sounded Black flourishing. I am transported, floating on the harmonies in the air of our family reunion.
The spring breeze lightly caresses my skin, lacing my nose with the aroma of Mom’s macaroni and cheese that only makes an appearance for 10 seconds before news spreads that it is served. I smell the smoke from a charcoal grill stacked with that good vinegary Carolina BBQ. In the distance, I hear the click-clack of the jump rope and my cousin’s interlocking rhythmic footsteps as he finally gets his turn to jump double Dutch. And we laugh loudly, checking out folks’ coordination in their matching family reunion outfits. My grandaunt calls us to prayer and as we assemble, my “uncle-cousin” (what I call a cousin old enough to be my uncle) sings what the Spirit has laid on his heart to sing. We join in. We are reunited in this reverie from years ago and it feels so good to remember this pre-Covid soundscape of Black love brought to me by listening to the radio.
Anna Julia Cooper from A Voice from the South (1882)
“When will we listen to black women?” was the rallying cry echoed throughout the streets, in journalistic think pieces, and on social media in 2017. These reactions followed the polling results revealing black women’s collective voting power in arguably the most contentious elections in the twenty first century, thus far. In an era of black women-founded movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #SayHerName, some use messianic language to characterize them as “saving the day,” despite being marginalized in various predominantly white women’s movements. Thought-leaders are noticing the socio-political inaudibility of black women liberators highlighting the bias woven into the fabric of the U.S. popular imagination.
However, this socio-political observation does not account for black women’s agency and ingenuity in creating spaces for themselves in musical performance and quotidian life throughout history. Prompted by activist Anna Julia Cooper’s famous quote as a womanist ethnomusicological framework of utterance (say/sing), time (when), space (where) and access (enter), this presentation constructs a genealogy of black women’s audibility strategies by answering the question: In what ways have black women empowered themselves to sound the (un)quieted, undisputed dignity of womanhood on the world’s stage?
Despite black women’s persistent socio-political inaudibility, especially in U.S. women’s suffrage movements, contralto Marian Anderson’s narrative reveals a longstanding legacy of black women embodying and amplifying black women composed works as evidenced by her 1939 recital at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Although she was refused concert space at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall in DC, Anderson accepted first lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s invitation to sing at the Lincoln memorial. During that recital, Anderson displayed Black sisterhood and challenged the parameters of women’s suffrage when she closed the concert with an arranged-composition of the Negro Spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” by black woman composer Florence B. Price. As Anderson envoiced Price’s composition as the “final say” on the moment, she provided a musical rebuttal through which both Anderson and Price entered into the concert domains predominantly comprised of white male decision makers, an exclusionist industry bolstered by unsisterly white women patrons.
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/06/748757267/lift-every-voice-marian-anderson-florence-b-price-and-the-sound-of-black-sisterh?live=1
Through multi-media, harmful and imprecise depictions of women of African descent are rapidly crisscrossing the planet, shaping popular perceptions of their intellectual capacity in their absence. These stereotypes are simply imprecise. You see, for quite some time women of African descent have been frequently misrepresented in music and culture as being irrational, shallow, and unkind, especially when we are challenged by each other in heated debates. In fact, one of the most insidious circulated and internalized stereotypes is that women of African descent are given to same sex rivalry along the lines of hue, color, mixed race parentage, socio-economic status and education status, mental and personality disorders. Yet, here we are in the US territory of Guam to affirm that Black Lives Matter around the globe.
We submit our lives to explore the complexity of our myriad identities and connections as practitioner-scholars, whose lives have been inscribed and are read for the tensions surrounding post-colonialism. Therefore, it is a transgressive, political, and pedagogical act for women of the African diaspora to be visible as we invite each other to sharpen, to borrow from Anna Julia Cooper, “in the quiet, undisputed dignity of our womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage” in intellectual spaces and conference settings such as the joint Pacific History Association (PHA) conference and International Council of Traditional Music (ICTM) symposium.
In the ethnomusicology of Africana music and sound, the discourse has been conceptually organized around diaspora or the forced migration of people of African descent, with a focus on their routes across one body of water, commonly referred to in the African diaspora literature as the Black Atlantic. This Black Atlantic emphasis further isolates our already scattered communities of African descent that have extended beyond the Atlantic into the Pacific through both voluntary and forced dispersions. This imagined isolation and distance works to disjoint the body politic of Africana people who are catching hell around the globe along gender, sexuality, and hued lines. And thus, these fragmented communities are less likely to implicate the hegemonic powers that be, which oppress women as well...
Within the twenty-first century historically Black Pentecostal settings where gospel music is performed, there is a longstanding tradition of presenting songs and delivering sermons that promote sexual abstinence among unmarried individuals, encouraging them to wait to have sex until they get married. Essential prescriptions for maintaining chastity in the “Worth the Wait” movement extend into this sphere, including teachings that Christian believers should guard their hearts, minds, and “gates” (i.e. ear and eyes) from sexually suggestive or erotic contemplation, pornographic entertainment, and self-pleasure through masturbation. And thus, single people are technically banned from consuming the Sacred Love Song album. Yet, undoubtedly, Pentecostals are using music to have sex outside of marriage. As such, the question is induced: are there ways in which believers explore sexual healing through gospel music in a non-heterosexual, single manner? Moreover, what might we learn about the pleasure derived from the combination of the sonic and somatic dimensions of gospel music making?
Following Black men’s narratives about singing gospel, I contend that sexual abstinence discourses obscure the alternative forms of sensual and sexual exploration occurring in gospel music participation. Noticing the religio-cultural fixation on sexual abstinence rhetorics, many religious scholars have focused on the ways in which such teachings foster anxieties about the meanings and implications generated from the use of the body for pleasure and arousal. However, in my research on Black men’s performance of sexuality in gospel music, I have found a music-centered contradiction to these sexual abstinence teachings. In the vocal pedagogical language and imagery that voice teachers and directors deploy to teach “good singing,” mentors make references to sensations perceived in the genitalia and other erogenous zones so that the vocalist can achieve “supported” breathing and ideal “placement” in the production of vibrant sound, also known as resonance. Black male performers are encouraged to draw from their sexual experience and/or imagination to simulate sensed and sung sexual climax while simultaneously using sonic iconicity and resonance to evoke transcendence in listeners during the facilitation of public worship. Further, outside of Black church music academies, these male musicians have encountered non-Black instructors’ use of similar sexually suggestive and vulgar pedagogical imagery that is problematically derived from essentialist perceptions of Black men, emphasizing their physical attributes and sexual prowess over physical sensations and spiritual vitality.
While examining ethnography in Washington, D.C., of Charles Anthony Bryant’s performance of “I Give You Praise” as a musical tribute to Richard Smallwood, and interviews with male gospel vocalists and preachers, I consider gospel music as an embodied sexual activity in which vocalists simultaneously experience and surrogate pleasure as an essential, unspoken feature of worship leadership. In this ethnomusicological research, I expand on ethnomusicology, vocal pedagogy, phonology, religious studies, and musicological research on gender and sexuality in other genres pioneered by scholars such as Susan McClary, Suzanne Cusick, and Philip Brett in order to analyze gospel music making and Christian worship participation as sex.
With attention to the ways in which men speak about music making while in the predominantly male gospel music networks, singing gospel is a multi-sensory, sexual activity engaging the listener with musical semiotics, memory, iconicity, and embodied resonance inscriptions. Inspired by the climactic phrase of the refrain in “I Give You Praise,” the following questions are examined in this research: In what ways do Black male gospel musicians perceive their vocal sound and embodiment as a dwelling place, a construction of habitation, and a safe space that facilitates spiritual, physical, or even sexual transcendence through worship in ways that resemble an orgasmic experience? To what extent do Black male musicians tap into modes of eroticism to inform their facilitation of worship? More to the point, how might virgin, celibate, queer, or sensual believers feel pleasure through gospel music participation?
To analyze the sonic-somatic pleasure derived from gospel music making, I consider vocalists’ musical production, hearing, and feeling the music as performers and audience. I begin by describing the premise of the musical event and its context honoring consummate gospel composer Richard Smallwood. I explain the composer’s significance among gospel musicians, focusing on the two male vocalists B.Slade and Charles Anthony Bryant, who honored Smallwood and embody two performances of popular masculinity. For them and many other musicians, Smallwood is a muse who exemplifies the weaving of gospel and European art music traditions. B.Slade embodies the complexities surrounding the reception of self-identified gay musicians in gospel music by presenting the sonic and gestural domains that have been attributed to queerness. In contrast, Charles Anthony Bryant’s persona challenges gospel audiences’ assumptions about what queer potential or identity looks and sounds like with regard to vocal classification and comportment. Since Bryant performs against the gospel vocalist stereotype, I analyze the ways in which he intentionally uses his body to produce sound. As a result of this close analysis, I uncovered the ways in which musicians’ bodily experiences of pleasure are triggered strategically to produce consistent and balanced sound for many vocalists. With attention to the assumptions stemming from heteropatriarchal constructs of gender and sexuality expression in historically Black Protestant congregations and gospel music spheres, I summarize the constellation of symbolic meaning derived from the male musical functions, space, vocal range, bodily experience, and in setting the mood for the worship experience. I conclude by returning to the initial ethnographic sketch to demonstrate the dimensions of vocal production and how the activity moves the singer and participants, supporting the long held sense that there are both latent and intentional meanings and intimacies that are cultivated in vocal performance.
Informed by womanist and feminist modes of analysis, I conduct this research through the lens of what Black feminist bell hooks calls an oppositional gaze of Black male musicians (Black Looks 1992), as a formally trained, cisgender woman preacher, musician, and researcher who is sexually and non-sexually attracted to men. I must admit that whenever I present my research on Black men’s worship, I do so with critical affirmation of a tradition that I respect and critique. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/705623/pdf
Using the lenses of ethnomusicology, musicology, anthropology, men's studies, queer studies, and theology, Flaming?: The Peculiar Theo-Politics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance observes how male vocalists traverse their tightly-knit social networks and negotiate their identities through and beyond the worship experience. Author Alisha Jones ultimately addresses the ways in which gospel music and performance can afford African American men not only greater visibility, but also an affirmation of their fitness to minister through speech and song.