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HEALING FOR THE SOUL
AMS Studies in Music
W. Anthony Sheppard, Series Editor
Editorial Board
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Theo Cateforis Nicholas Mathew
Drew Edward Davies Inna Naroditskaya
Scott DeVeaux Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Claire Fontijn Laurie Stras
Steven Huebner Susan Thomas
Jeongwon Joe David Yearsley
Kevin E. Korsyn
Conceptualizing Music:
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Lawrence Zbikowski
Inventing the Business of Opera:
The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice
Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan Glixon
Lateness and Brahms:
Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism
Margaret Notley
Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History:
Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna
Kevin C. Karnes
Jewish Music and Modernity
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The Critical Nexus:
Tone-System, Mode, and Notation in Early Medieval Music
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Changing the Score:
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Rasa:
Affect and Intuition in Javanese Musical Aesthetics
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Beethoven 1806
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Taken by the Devil:
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Songs of Sacrifice:
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Rebecca Maloy
Representing Russia’s Orient:
From Ethnography to Art Song
Adalyat Issiyeva
Healing for the Soul:
Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination
Braxton D. Shelley
HEALING FOR THE SOUL
Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and
the Gospel Imagination
Braxton D. Shelley
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shelley, Braxton D., author.
Title: Healing for the soul : Richard Smallwood, the vamp, and the
gospel imagination / Braxton D. Shelley.
Description: [1.] | New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Series: AMS studies in music |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020050214 (print) | LCCN 2020050215 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197566466 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197566480 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Gospel music—History and criticism. |
Church music—African American churches. | Gospel music—Analysis, appreciation. |
Smallwood, Richard.
Classification: LCC ML3187 .S44 2021 (print) | LCC ML3187 (ebook) |
DDC 782.25/4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050214
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050215
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566466.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Preface
Between the first and last words of a Black gospel song, musical sound acquires
spiritual power. During this unfolding, a variety of techniques facilitate musi-
cal and physical transformation. The most important of these techniques is a
repetitive musical cycle known by names including the run, the drive, the spe-
cial, and the vamp. Through its combination of reiteration and intensification,
the vamp turns song lyrics into something more potent. While many musical
traditions use vamps to fill space, or occupy time in preparation for another,
more important event, in gospel, vamps are the main event. Why is the vamp
so central to the Black gospel tradition? What work—musical, cultural, and
spiritual—does the gospel vamp do? And what does the vamp reveal about the
transformative power of Black gospel more broadly?
This book explores the vamp’s essential place in Black gospel song, argu-
ing that these climactic musical cycles turn worship services into transcendent
events. A defining feature of contemporary gospel, the vamp links individual
performances to their generic contexts. An exemplar of African American
musical practice, the vamp connects gospel songs to a venerable lineage of Black
sacred expression. As it generates emotive and physical intensity, the vamp
helps believers access an embodied experience of the invisible, moving between
this world and another in their musical practice of faith. The vamp, then, is a
musical, cultural, and religious interface, which gives vent to a system of belief,
performance, and reception that I call the Gospel Imagination. In the Gospel
Imagination, the vamp offers proof that musical sound can turn spiritual power
into a physical reality—a divine presence in human bodies.
In the following pages, the words and music of Richard Smallwood, a para-
digmatic contemporary gospel composer, anchor my investigation of the con-
vergence of sound and belief in the Gospel Imagination. Smallwood’s expansive
oeuvre is especially illustrative of the eclecticism and homiletic intention that
characterize gospel music. Along the way, I bring Smallwood’s songs and the
ideas that frame them into conversation with many of the tradition’s exem-
plars: Edwin and Walter Hawkins,Twinkie Clark, Kurt Carr, Margaret Douroux,
V. Michael McKay, and Judith McAllister, among others. Focusing on choral
forms of gospel song, I show how the gospel vamp organizes expressive activity
vii
viii Preface
around a moment of transcendence, an instant when the song shifts to a height-

ened space of musical activity. This sonic escalation fuels traffic between the
seen world and another, bringing believers into contact with a host of scenes
from scripture, and with the divine, too.
While this book focuses on the choral expressions of Black gospel song, it
intervenes in many broader scholarly discourses. Its combination of historical,
analytic, and ethnographic approaches produces fresh insights concerning the
interrelation of music and text, music and philosophy, music and the sacred,
and the relationship between musical temporality and other scales of temporal
organization and perception. Accordingly, this book is in dialogue with scholars
in musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, popular music studies, Black
studies, religious studies, and liturgical studies. Each theoretical thread origi-
nates in the gospel song’s most important moment, the instant when the song
undoes and outdoes itself, creating a sonic portal that connects the plane of its
performance with a world that cannot be seen. “Tuning up,” the multifaceted
activity at the heart of this project, names this point of inflection; its form and
function is the story this book seeks to tell.
As it seeks to understand how gospel songs work, this book brings tools of
music analysis to bear on this extremely understudied repertoire. Close atten-
tion to details of sound organization demonstrates the strategies by which
gospel songs structure the pursuit of religious ecstasy. While I often use spe-
cialized language to detail the musical transformations that animate gospel per-
formances, I strive to make the interpretive value of these insights fully legible
to a broad interdisciplinary audience. In Chapter 1, for example, I show how
the vamp of Smallwood’s “Healing” repeatedly promises and denies musical
closure, creating an elevated space of experience—a meeting place that makes
an ancient balm available to contemporary audiences. As my analyses develop a
vocabulary with which to explain the effects of this music, the gospel tradition
talks back, showing what music analysis can do.
My personal relationship to gospel informs this book’s multifaceted approach.
All three parts of my professional identity as a musicologist, an ordained minis-
ter, and a gospel musician guide this study. In these pages, music analysis, music
history, and ethnography are allied with homiletics, theology, and philosophy
to elucidate the musical, cultural, and religious significance of the gospel vamp.
Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination is an
invitation to listen to the sound of belief.
Acknowledgments
The first time I saw the image that is prominently featured on this book’s cover,
I was gripped by Richard Smallwood’s visible immersion in a sea of musicians,
a musical community whose collective abilities would give his compositions
an audible reality. While it might have been easier to select a photo with a
singular focus—a depiction of Smallwood playing, singing, or, for that matter,
preaching—the group shot best displays what Richard Smallwood’s art is all
about: the cultivation of community within the material world and beyond it.
I have a similar feeling about the final line of this book’s cover; although my
name is the one emblazoned in gold, like Smallwood, I have been surrounded
by a cloud of witnesses—colleagues, mentors, musicians, friends, and family—
without whom Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel
Imagination would not exist. I pause now to give thanks.
Steve Rings, the chair of my dissertation committee, has been an unflagging
supporter of this project from its inception to this moment of culmination,
offering invaluable advice on everything from the central arguments to the best
way to annotate a musical example. Lawrence Zbikowski has also played a criti-
cal role in this project; it was in a final paper for one of his graduate seminars
that I first proposed a theory of the gospel vamp. Philip Bohlman’s wide-ranging
expertise in a host of sacred musical traditions provided crucial early guidance
to this project: his was the first encouragement to theorize “tuning up.” Travis
Jackson’s distinctive contribution of an endless list of books to read and Melvin
Butler’s scholarship on music in Pentecostal worship have both been formative
influences for this study. I have also benefited greatly from extended conversa-
tions with Martha Feldman, Robert Kendrick, Seth Brodsky and the other
members of the University of Chicago’s Department of Music faculty.
During my years in Chicago, I also earned a Master of Divinity from
the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. As the degree prepared me for
ordained ministry, it also enriched my research agenda in many profound ways.
Coursework in ritual, theology, and ethnography, and supervised fieldwork at
Chicago’s Martin Temple AME Zion Church, ensure that I am equally adept
at discussing both sound and belief, the interconnected categories with which
the book is preoccupied.
ix
x Acknowledgments
The work that comes to fruition in this book began while I was still an
undergraduate at Duke. I am appreciative to my undergraduate theory and
musicology professors, Bryan Gilliam, Stephen Jaffe, Anthony Kelley, Robert
Parkins, and Philip Rupprecht, for their early investment in this project’s devel-
opment. I owe a similar debt to the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research
Fellowship, directed by Kerry Haynie and Deborah Wahl, and the Social Science
Research Council’s Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives, led by Cally Waite. One
of the most important figures in my own intellectual development passed away
well before the true fruits of his labors came into view; I learned most of
what I know about writing from the late Raymond Gavins, a trailblazing his-
tory professor whose influence on the professoriate transcends disciplines and
generations.
My colleagues in the Music Department at Harvard University have been
enduring in their support—for this project, and for my overall research agenda.
In Carolyn Abbate, Andy Clark, Suzannah Clark, Chaya Czernowin, Chris Hasty,
Vijay Iyer, Yvette Jackson, Carol Oja, Alex Rehding, Kay Shelemay, Anne
Shreffler, Yosvany Terry, Hans Tutschku, Kate van Orden, and Richard Wolf, I
have found a wonderful group of interlocutors always ready to contribute to
an emerging idea, whether over coffee, during a meal, across Zoom, or stand-
ing in the hallway. I have benefited from the efficiency, skill, and wisdom of the
department’s staff, especially Brid Coogan, Eva Kim, Karen Rynne, and Nancy
Shafman. Outside the music department, I have been enriched by conversations
with Peter Blair, Marla Frederick, Jarvis Givens, Nicholas Harkness, Anthony
Jack, Stephanie Paulsell, Todne Thomas, and Cornel West.
During my time at Harvard, I have worked with three research assistants,
Alexander Cowan, Laurie Lee, and Jacob Sunshine; two have been tasked with
this book. The precision with which Jacob attended to copy edits, managed
references, and compiled, arranged, and formatted dozens of media files for the
companion website has been truly remarkable. All those who use this online
resource to experience the assembled pieces of the Black gospel tradition will
have Jacob to thank. I cannot say enough about Alex’s indefatigable work with
the nearly one hundred examples that are contained in these pages. Alex and
I began this work soon after I arrived at Harvard. Over the past three years,
I have been impressed by the musicality and drive that he possesses in equal
measure. An indispensable part of this project, these musical examples combine
Alex’s transcriptions, my transcriptions, and references to published sources.
Notwithstanding this collaborative effort, every note that is printed in this
book passed through one or more of Alex’s computers.
Three anonymous readers for Oxford University Press asked stimulating
questions of this manuscript’s first draft, helping me to bring this book to its
final form. Over the past two years others have given me enormously help-
ful feedback on drafts of this book—or sections thereof: Daniel Callahan,
Acknowledgments xi
Emily Dolan, Ingrid Monson, Carol Oja, Alex Rehding, Kay Shelemay, and
Lindsay Wright.The ideas contained in these pages were further honed through
conversations with workshop and colloquium participations at the follow-
ing institutions: Amherst College, Brandeis University, Columbia University,
Duke University, Northeastern University, Tufts University, the University of
California, Los Angeles, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Wheaton
College, and Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music. I am deeply grateful
for the interest these invitations represent, and for the ways these events sharp-
ened my research.
I finished this manuscript during a fellowship year funded by the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study’s Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant
Professorship. I am grateful to the administration, staff, and my fellowship
cohort for the rich environment that fostered this book’s completion. Finishing
this book during a pandemic, bereft of access to my office and any of my
favorite coffee shops, posed a special challenge. The book you now hold is a
testament to the inspiration I gleaned from several virtual writing partners:
Jonathan Howard, Daniel Callahan, Will Pruitt, Jarvis Givens, and Todne
Thomas. I feel so fortunate to have been surrounded by an exceptional edito-
rial staff at Oxford University Press: series editor, W. Anthony Sheppard; man-
aging editor, Norman Hirschy; copy editor, Leslie Safford; and project manager,
Gopinath Anbalagan.Their expertise has made the publication of my first book
as painless as possible.
The summer before I entered began my doctoral studies, I formed
TESTIMONY, a vocal ensemble with whom I have been privileged to cre-
ate, perform, and record original music. Many of this book’s seminal insights
occurred to me in the middle of a performance with these talented musi-
cians. My thanks to all those who have played any part in this effort: Michael
Alexander, Thomacine Butler, Rev. Geraldine Clay, Derensky Cooper, Kimberly
Fletcher, Mary Flounoy, Rodney Gooch, Rev. Avis Graves,Trinitia Green, Sandra
Harper, Rylan Harris, Karol Harshaw-Ellis, Charletta Hines, Gregory Holliday,
Alma Jones, Janina Jones, Teeshawn Jones, Thea Jones, Felicia Lane-Carter,
Cathy Lyons, Shaunielle McDonald, Joyce O’Rourke, Cicely Perry, Mary Scott,
Rev. Miriam Phillips-Stephens, Ninitia Pollard, Rev. Angela Taylor, Kimberly
Thevenin, Jerome Waller, Tashana Waller, Terri Waller, Rev. Dewey Williams,
Lynne Williams, Ronald Williams, G. Preston Wilson, Jr., and Debra Wyatt.
I must separately appreciate Joyce O’Rourke for the administrative support
that has made it possible for me to fuse scholarship and practice in this most
satisfying way.
I have been lifted by the consistent encouragement of my network of friends,
mentors, and intercessors, including James Abbington, Yvette Boatwright,
Deborah Boston, Ernest Brooks, Jonathan Cahill, Nadan Cho, Margaret and
Richard Crandall, Leo Davis, Perrianne Davis, Jason Evans, Cheryl Townsend
xii Acknowledgments
Gilkes, David Heid, Dexter Hinson, Shane Hunt, Beverly and Johnny Johnson,
Benita and Charles Johnson, Maureen Jones, DeShaun King, Annie Lawson,
Eric and Jean Leake, Colton Lott, Licia and Navarro McDonald, Genna Rae
McNeil, Tony McNeil, Patrice Michaels, Margaret Morrison, Gaston and
Lucille Patterson, Emmett Price, Matthew Russell, Dorothy and Nesbitt Spruill,
Lucy Taylor, Jason Thompson, William Turner, Maurice and Pam Wallace,
Raymond Wise, George Woodruff, and Steven Yarmoska.
I must acknowledge the generous support and availability that Richard
Smallwood has extended to me since my days as an undergraduate, without
which this project would be far less rich. I am also grateful to Kurt Carr,
Dr. Margaret Douroux, Donald Lawrence, and V. Michael McKay, for spending
time in conversation with me. And Stephen Key, a dear friend, is one of the
most knowledgeable transcribers of gospel song; his expertise proved invaluable
on several musical examples, especially the Smallwood piano solo with which
Chapter 3 begins.
While doing the lonely work of writing, I have been sustained by a host of
meaningful relationships with dear friends in music studies, including Jessica
Baker, Chelsea Burns, Jonathan De Souza, Lauren Eldridge, Margot Fassler,
Patrick Fitzgibbon, Michael Gallope, Sumanth Gopinath, Bonnie Gordon,
Wendy Heller, Alisha Jones, Loren Kajikawa, Marcus Pyle, Pete Smucker,
Gavin Steingo, Michael Uy, Christi Jay Wells, and Christopher William White.
Although most of my friends are musicians, there are those to whom I’m cer-
tain I’d be close, even if we didn’t share this passion: Mycal Brickhouse, Pierce
Gradone, Joshua Lazard, Clay Mettens, and G. Preston Wilson, Jr. For years,
Lindsay Wright has been my most cherished interlocutor; she has seen virtu-
ally every draft of every paper I have ever written. My work and life have been
made so much richer by her presence.
Finally, to my family, immediate and extended: thanks for instilling in me
the belief that I can do anything I can imagine. Through many difficult tasks,
it has been easy to move ahead knowing that Dorothy Shelley Hilton, Jessie
Hilton, Brianna Shelley, and Lula Ricks will always have my back. And they
have help—I give highest credit to the one “who is able to do exceeding abun-
dantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us”
(Ephesians 3:20). To God be glory!
Reimagining Gospel
An Introduction
B efore the beginning of Richard Smallwood’s 1996 recording, Adoration: Live

in Atlanta, before the first notes were played, and before the first words
were sung, backstage in a long hallway of the megachurch then known as The
Cathedral of The Holy Spirit, a team of musicians joined hands to partake in
a prayer of preparation. Their customary invocation of divine presence and
petition for the gift of “the anointing” was performed with bowed heads and
closed eyes; these physical signs of spiritual movement toward this prayer’s invis-
ible addressee call attention to the beliefs shared by this composer, these per-
formers, and their expectant audience—a faith that takes sonic form in the
tradition called gospel.
For the thousands who filled that cavernous sanctuary, the moments
before Smallwood, choir, and band took the stage must have been filled with
anticipation—suspense without the expectation of surprise. After all, Adoration
had been billed as a live recording of new gospel music, so that, while these
congregants could not have predicted all that would transpire during that
session, they could imagine. Familiarity with Smallwood’s catalog and with
gospel’s essentials would surely have led the assembled worshipers to envis-
age choruses of praise, words of encouragement, and expressions of ecstasy, for
these are the fundamental elements of gospel’s musical practice. On that rainy
January evening in Atlanta, Georgia, the city of Smallwood’s birth, this award-
winning gospel musician was reborn, premiering both new music and a new
vocal aggregation—a choir named Vision. But the original compositions that
were debuted by this nascent ensemble gave voice to enduring texts, sacred
materials that had long been the substance of gospel faith. As such, this moment
marked the convergence of anticipation and imagination, tradition and inven-
tion, temporality and transcendence, sound and belief.
But how does this belief sound? “It’s Working,” one of the ten songs recorded
that night, offers an instructive window into this question; in so doing, it illu-
minates the theological and cultural work of gospel song. This song, whose full
Healing for the Soul. Braxton D. Shelley, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press (2021).
DOI: 10.1093/oso/ 9780197566466.003.0001
2 HEALING FOR THE SOUL
title is “It’s Working (Romans 8:28)” (Audio/Video Example I.1 ), reanimates

a promise first chronicled in one of the apostle Paul’s 1st-century letters: “All
things work together for good to them that love the Lord, who are the called
according to his purpose.”1 In Paul’s epistle to the Romans, the “all” that defines
“things” is itself defined by a litany of opposites—heights and depths, angels and
demons, things present and things to come. In “It’s Working (Romans 8:28),”
Smallwood describes these unlikely sources of a believer’s blessings as “that
situation you’re going through” and “that problem you’re dealing with.” Good,
both song and scripture contend, can emerge from improbable circumstances—
a bold claim that finds musical corroboration in Smallwood’s rendering of this
treasured text.
Unfolding in  at a stately 48 beats per minute, each emphatic pulse of “It’s
Working (Romans 8:28)” slows down a unit of time, using musical temporality
to construct a sonic environment fit for the experience of belief.The song’s first
words, a message of consolation, offer a personal introduction to the message’s
theme: Smallwood sings, “There are times when we are made to cry, and we
don’t understand. But be encouraged my sister and my brother, for there is one
who loves you like no other, he’s working it out. On his word we all can stand.”
This verse vents both the trouble that necessitates encouragement and a confi-
dent promise of resolution. Then, without taking a breath, Smallwood launches
into the second verse—a direct quotation of the epistolary text: he sings, “All
things work together for good to them that love the Lord, who are the called
according to his purpose, who are the called according to his purpose, working
together for them that love the Lord.” The elision of these two verses lever-
ages the Pauline quotation as justification for Smallwood’s exhortation, while
marshaling Smallwood’s preface as proof of the ancient text’s contemporary
relevance. This double move uses the musical present to transform both past
and future. And the conjunction of these two expressions in this one song is
amplified by their sonic form.The fact that these two lines, which were written
thousands of years apart, share rhythms, pitches, and harmonic accompaniment
identifies them as limbs of a strophic form. But the musical equivalence given
to Smallwood’s preface and Paul’s verse points past formal classification, high-
lighting the homiletic intention that both texts share—an interworldly motiva-
tion that shapes the entirety of “It’s Working (Romans 8:28).”
After the first two statements of the song’s A section, Vision, Smallwood’s
new choir enters, offering two declarations of the text from Romans. While,
in the strictest sense, their offering constitutes the third and fourth strophes of
the song’s A section, their entrance marks a new phase of musical activity: here,
sumptuous harmonies and expressive dynamics use the force of choral sound to
1. Romans 8:28, King James Version (KJV).

Reimagining Gospel 3
build a passage between Smallwood’s introduction and the song’s final formal
unit. In other words, the choir’s verses function as a kind of bridge. As these
words connect two stages of a musical performance, they also function as a
transcendent passage between two planes of existence. For Vision, Smallwood,
and the assembled congregation, singing this song meant traveling between the
material contexts of a live recording, the site of the text’s composition, and the
invisible locus of the transformation it describes. Like the gestures embodied in
the opening prayer, this selection’s heteroglossic dialogue provokes movement
well beyond the physical confines of its performance. The song’s musical traffic
between the last years of the 20th century and the middle decades of the 1st
century collapses the distance between a moment of present suffering and a
future time when all things will have been worked out. As such, “It’s Working
(Romans 8:28)” serves as a transcendent intersection, drawing divergent spaces
and times into a fleeting but palpable alignment.
But text alone does not accomplish this goal. Throughout this song,
Smallwood uses musical material to stage the activity of an invisible force—
much of this is bound up with a single sonority, the first chord of each verse.
As Musical Example I.1 illustrates, each iteration of this song’s A section
begins on shaky ground. Instead of the expected D♭-major chord, each verse
starts on a more complicated sonority. How to explain this moment’s arresting
quality? In music-analytic terms, lowering the bass note by one whole step,
from D♭ to C♭, turns the emblem of musical stability, the tonic (I), into a fount
of sonic instability, a secondary dominant ( V24 of IV). Instead of a sound that
signifies repose, the listener is treated to a chord whose of-ness causes it to ache
for another.This musical conversion creates a tonal tumult that, like “all things,”
must be worked out; its working out sets up the song’s most striking musical
event, a point of inflection that occurs about halfway through the performance.
As Musical Example I.2 shows, at the end of the A section’s fourth iteration,
multiple simultaneous musical transformations take this song’s drama to a new
level. First, the choir exchanges its previous recitation of Paul’s complete phrase
for the incessant iteration of the song’s title lyric; over and over again, they sing,
“It’s working! It’s working! It’s working for my good, I know!” These new lyr-
ics contain a subtle but significant shift toward emphatic first-person declara-
tion. Pauline verse is supplanted with personal testimony, declaring a fortified
conviction of the message’s veracity. The striking move evident in these new
lyrics is amplified by concomitant harmonic alterations. At the beginning of the
song’s final section, the harmonic progression that listeners have heard at the
beginning of every preceding section is reworked. First, instead of the expected
major subdominant (IV6), for the first time in this song, listeners are greeted
with its minor version (iv6), a harmonic twist whose expressive potential is
dialectical: minor iv, this most conventional musical device, speaks loudly only
because of its contrast with major IV. Second, the chord is now sustained for
Musical Example I.1. “It’s Working (Romans 8:28),” A section.
four slow beats instead of two. If, as I earlier proposed, the tempo of this song
slows time down, then this temporal expansion slackens it even more. Third,
the absence of root-position tonic sonorities in the song’s preceding minutes
is overturned in each iteration of this final formal unit—a musical detail that
would be utterly unremarkable were it not for the absence of this harmonic
Musical Example I.2. “It’s Working (Romans 8:28),” vamp.
fact in the preceding moments of the composition. Taken together, these musi-
cal transformations produce an unmistakable shift into an altogether different
frame of performance. Within this performance, an invisible but audible force
seems to be at work.
But this shift is only the beginning. As Musical Example I.2 illustrates, the
choir’s new, iterative declarations that “it’s working” are intensified, shifted
upward by using a technique that gospel practitioners call “inverting.” In
contrast to its meaning in common-practice tonal music, in gospel parlance
“inverting” refers to a gradual technique whereby, through successive itera-
tions of the same material, the choral arrangement is heightened by moving
materials among the voices: the sopranos assume the previous tenor part in
a higher octave, the altos assume the previous soprano part, and the tenors
adopt the previous alto part. At C3 (m. 43) the choir’s parts are inverted again,
and at C4 (m. 47) a modified inversion is applied. During this module, only
the first two measures are inverted, while the last two measures remain at the
C3 pitch level. This hybrid arrangement likely represents a practical reality
that voices can go only so high. Notwithstanding this fact, by this stage of the
performance the iterations of this section’s basic material, “it’s working,” have
been lifted a full octave. And these musical transformations have experien-
tial implications; through the intensifying reiteration of this song’s title lyric,
Smallwood’s band, choir, and participatory congregation are raised above even
the most painful present predicament, discovering that musical sound offers
an improbable kind of perspective. As its repetition moves believers beyond
their physical location, the phrase “it’s working” becomes something more
than a song lyric. By this moment in the performance, “it’s working” has
become a robustly embodied confession, an assertion that otherworldly force
is available for bodily experience. Clearly, something powerful is at work, but
what is that something?
The climactic section of Smallwood’s “It’s Working (Romans 8:28)” is a
paradigmatic example of the repetitive musical cycle known by names includ-
ing the run, the drive, the special, the press, and the vamp, among many others.
While I will refer to this heightened space of musical activity as the vamp, I want
to emphasize that the sheer number of referents used for this musical practice
demonstrates its centrality to gospel performance—a function that is particu-
larly evident in Smallwood’s “It’s Working (Romans 8:28).” Having built this
song around a Pauline quotation, Smallwood drives his point home by iterating
a different kind of text, the formal principles of the gospel vamp. Having been
drawn in by this scripture, Smallwood’s congregation uses the vamp to incar-
nate Paul’s promise. In this song, and throughout the Black gospel tradition, the
vamp reveals the power of sacred words. In the vamp, the materiality of musical
sound—its immediacy and malleability—turns religious belief into a physical
reality—a divine presence in human bodies.
As Smallwood’s song works, turning musical sound into spiritual power,

it invites a set of questions to which this book is devoted. How do gospel
songs shape religious experience? How does the vamp link gospel songs to the
other aesthetic practices that help to define the Black church, especially musical
preaching and ecstatic movement? What does the vamp reveal about the power
that gospel locates in sound? In other words, what do the sonic materials of the
vamp disclose about the Gospel Imagination?
Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination illu-
minates the convergence of sound and belief in African American gospel perfor-
mance. Neither a chronological survey of the gospel tradition nor a biographical
account of a single composer’s career, this book places the work of one paradig-
matic gospel musician in conversation with music written by more than twenty
others, a dialogic approach that yields both ethnographic detail and a systematic
analytical paradigm. In Smallwood’s oeuvre and throughout the tradition, the
repetitive cycle known as the vamp proves central to the musical practice of
faith. While the centrality of vamps to gospel performance has been well estab-
lished in scholarship about gospel music, this essential formal observation has yet
to yield a fuller consideration of the structure of gospel song—that is, a theory of
how this music works. Upon closer examination, the relationships between gos-
pel vamps, traditions of musical preaching, and the forms of ecstatic movement
characteristic of much Black Christian worship reveal a philosophy—one that
addresses the sonic links between visible and invisible realms, between the mate-
rial world and what is often called “the spiritual realm.” The theory of the Black
gospel tradition developed in these pages will braid close readings together with
musicians’ perspectives and a wide range of scholarly discourses, showing that
the gospel vamp is the moment in the gospel song that occasions the embodied
experience of a gospel message. More than merely representing the invisible
subjects of belief, the gospel song alchemizes the materiality of sound into the
substance of faith—a phenomenon that music analysis illuminates, while also
shedding light on untapped potentials of the practice of music analysis. This
commingling of musical sound and religious belief, from composition through
reception, across musicians, styles, and periods, is what this project terms “the
Gospel Imagination.” Thus, while this study is not a teleological narrative—such
an account would contradict this tradition’s preoccupation with transcendent
movement through space and time—it is a material account of musical sound,
one that finds in the structures of gospel song a story that needs to be told.
* * *
After focusing on the sound world of a single gospel performance, this introduc-
tory chapter defines the broader historical, theoretical, and music-analytic con-
texts of the book, taking up each of its principal foci—Richard Smallwood, the
vamp, and the Gospel Imagination.The first section offers a critical biographical
sketch that positions Richard Smallwood in the gospel tradition. The second
section outlines the centrality of the gospel choir to this musical tradition, and
the particular importance of the vamp to choral expressions of contemporary
gospel.The third section defines the Gospel Imagination, showing how gospel’s
central conviction—that sound affords intimacy with the divine—motivates
the intensive grammar of gospel songs, sermons, and prayers.
Richard Smallwood
Richard Smallwood was born in Atlanta, Georgia on November 30, 1948.
During the first years of Richard’s life, his stepfather, Rev. Chester Smallwood,
an itinerant pastor, repeatedly moved his family to different sites, where he
enjoyed successes and endured failures in planting Black Baptist churches.2
The family eventually settled in Washington, D.C. where Reverend Smallwood
became the founding pastor of Union Temple Baptist Church. As a child, the
younger Smallwood, already a skilled vocalist and pianist, became an active part
of the elder Smallwood’s ministry, frequently playing and singing before his
stepfather’s sermons. Richard Smallwood himself recalls playing piano by ear
at age five, beginning formal piano lessons at the age of seven, and starting his
first singing group while in elementary school. His mother recalled that, as an
infant, Smallwood would lie in his crib while he hummed the tunes from the
morning’s hymns; this image of Smallwood humming in his crib paints a still
more vivid image of the streams of musical tradition from which this com-
poser emerged. Although his stepfather’s pastoral vocation grounded Richard’s
musicianship in the liturgical life of the Black church, it was Richard’s mother,
Mabel Smallwood, who immersed her son in a broader array of musical forms.
When discussing his musical formation, Richard often recounts the moment
when his mother gave him an album of Rachmaninoff ’s Piano Concerto no. 1,
thereby “introducing him to classical music.” But this memory is a mere syn-
ecdoche of the succession of musical encounters that shaped his omnivorous
sonic palate:
My mother hooked me on classical music when I was 7 years old. I grew up listening
to classical music as well as gospel. So, when I began to write, that’s just what came
out. She also introduced me to Broadway music. So, I’m listening to Rodgers and
2. Richard Smallwood, Total Praise: The Autobiography of Richard Smallwood (Newark,

NJ: Godzchild Publications, 2019). Unless otherwise indicated, much of the biographical
information provided here comes from this book. The two other sources are an interview
I conducted with Smallwood in August 12, 2011, and a chapter in Bernice Johnson Reagon, If
You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Song Tradition (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2001).
Hammerstein and Rachmaninoff when I was seven years old and Tchaikovsky as well
as Roberta Martin and Clara Ward, and James Cleveland.3
Building on this eclectic collection of influences, Smallwood attended a

Washington, D.C. performing arts high school, McKinley Tech, where he stud-
ied with soul musician Roberta Flack. During this period, he also participated in
a Howard University program for musically talented young people. This was his
first interaction with Howard University’s Department of Music, the institution
where he would pursue his undergraduate studies. While at Howard, Richard
studied voice and piano with many instructors, including Anne Burwell and
Thomas Kerr. He graduated with a BA in 1971.
Smallwood completed his first recording in 1974 with the Young Adult Choir
of Union Temple Baptist Church. Since the 1980s, he has been a member and
artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Baptist Church, a prominent D.C.-area
megachurch. Since 1970, Smallwood has recorded sixteen albums with three
different ensembles. Look Up and Live (1974) and Give Us Peace (1976) were
recorded with the Young Adult Choir of Union Temple. After obtaining his
first recording contract, he recorded Richard Smallwood Singers (Onyx/Benson
Records, 1982), Psalms (Onyx/Benson Records, 1984), Textures (Word, 1987),
Vision (Word, 1988), Portrait (Word, 1990), Testimony (Sparrow, 1992), and Live at
Howard University (Sparrow, 1993) with the Richard Smallwood Singers. In the
mid-1990s he formed a larger choral vocal group,Vision, his primary ensemble
for the six albums recorded since Adoration, the CD captured on the January eve-
ning with which we began: Rejoice (Verity, 1997), Healing: Live in Detroit (Verity,
1999), Persuaded: Live in D.C. (Verity, 2001), Journey: Live in New York (Verity,
2006), Promises (Verity, 2011), and Anthology Live (RCA Inspirational, 2015).
The catalog amassed during Smallwood’s career weaves together vibrant
threads of musical and textual tradition. Collectively, these songs articulate the
gospel tradition’s “hybrid cultural logic,” which is Guthrie P. Ramsey’s term for
the expressive thread that runs from “Thomas Dorsey’s mix of blues and gospel
in the 1920s and 1930s” through “Kirk Franklin’s urban gospel of the 1990s.”4
In an attempt to describe the eclecticism of Smallwood’s music, Washington Post
Magazine writer Keith L. Alexander asserts that “after 40 years in the industry,
Smallwood has done what no other gospel artist arguably has done as success-
fully: blend gospel with classical music.”5 Similarly, the biography developed
3. Richard Smallwood, personal interview with the author, August 12, 2011.
4. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Race Music: Black Music Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 190.
5. Keith L. Alexander, “Millions of Gospel Fans Know Richard Smallwood’s Music. But
Not His Struggles,” Washington Post Magazine, July 23, 2015, accessed January 6, 2017, https://
www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/the-r ichard-smallwood-you-know-4-doves-
10-stellars-8-grammy-noms/2015/07/22/553d5cfc-0a28-11e5-9e39-0db921c47b93_story.html.
for a Smallwood performance at the Kennedy Center proposes that this musi-
cian “can impeccably blend classical movements with traditional gospel, and
arrive at a mix that is invariably Smallwood’s alone.”6 And in his Gospel Music
Encyclopedia, the music journalist Bill Carpenter calls Smallwood “gospel’s fin-
est high-art composer since Thomas Dorsey,” one who “has built a career and
a solid audience by ingeniously fusing the strings and hauteur of classical music
with the vocal stylings and piano chords of the traditional black church.”7
While virtually every popular and journalistic discussion of Smallwood’s
musical idiom invokes the composer’s relation to some idealized “classical
music,” these accounts flatten the rich sonic and historically influenced textures
of his catalog. For example, “Calvary,” the piece that opens Chapter 2, begins
with a richly orchestrated blues paraphrase of the spiritual “Calvary” and ends
with an a cappella coda that sounds quite Baroque. Moreover, in the 2001
recording of Persuaded: Live in D.C., this curious coda, which might be one
of Smallwood’s most overt gestures toward a “classical” tradition, gives way to
a brief instant of characteristically Black preaching, followed by an extensive
period of holy dancing, all culminating in a reprise of the song’s refrain. This
recombination of a spiritual text and melody, a strident blues framework, and a
chorale coda in the tradition of Bach evinces a musical imagination that “didn’t
make sense” to early label executives, as Smallwood recounts: “I was told that
I couldn’t write by the label; that mixing classical and gospel was not good,
and that no one would accept it. It hadn’t been done before. I wasn’t trying to
do anything new; it was just that that’s all I knew.”8 While Smallwood’s music
might not have made “sense” to various music-industry gatekeepers, perfor-
mances like the 2001 recording suggest that these songs contain a different
kind of logic, one that is immediately familiar to those for whom gospel is the
devotional lexicon. The polysemous “all” uttered by Smallwood in the preced-
ing quotation furnishes the conditions of this legibility. In the first instance,“all”
points to a generative heterogeneity that, as we have seen, is often recruited in
descriptions of African American cultural production. On another level, this
“all” accents the multiple streams of tradition that live within his music, cur-
rents that flow from his earliest musical influences, through his time at Howard,
and across his career.
This inter- stylistic openness ran counter to the institutional culture
Smallwood encountered when he arrived in Howard University in the fall of
1967. “During this period at Howard,” notes the historian, composer, and social
6. “Richard Smallwood,” The Kennedy Center, accessed January 6, 2017, http://www.

kennedy-center.org/artist/A21490.
7. Bill Carpenter, Uncloudy Days: The Gospel Music Encyclopedia (San Francisco: Backbeat
Books, 2005), 377.
8. Smallwood interview, 2011.
activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, “you could be penalized if, as a music major,
it was discovered that you were performing jazz or gospel music.”9 Although
by the late 1960s, gospel had made significant inroads in many of the nation’s
Black churches, the Eurocentrism of academic music departments—including
at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) like Howard—had
yet to make room for gospel in their sacred spaces. But the department’s bias
against nonclassical music would not withstand this growing movement. As
Reagon recalls,
In 1968, Howard University, like many other campuses throughout the country, was
challenged by radical students taking over and sometimes holding hostage administra-
tions and boards of trustees, if they could get them. At the heart of this struggle by
African American students was a challenge to the academy to correct the absence of
African American history and culture from the curriculum. There was also a boiling
anger at the role of leading scholars who, while guarding the doors to the world of
higher learning, had played a major role in the distortion of African American history
and contributions in a way that directly aided the oppression of its people. At Howard
University, gospel music was not included in the curriculum, and its validity as music
worthy of study became one of the issues of the struggle.10
The students’ resistance culminated in a takeover of the Howard Music

Department’s building in the spring of 1968. The students staged a sit-in;
Smallwood accompanied many students as they sang gospel songs during this
days-long protest. Smallwood recalls playing “from sun up to sun down until
there were blisters on [his] fingers.”11 Tangible signs of success soon came
into view. In the semesters following the protest, courses, concentrations, and
ensembles focused on Black music were incorporated into the department’s
curriculum.12
The transformation of Howard University’s music department was animated
by the social energies of Black consciousness that were circulating in the late
1960s and 1970s, a time Guthrie Ramsey describes as an “anchor moment in the
cultural, social, and political realms of 20th-century African American history.”13
From this ferment emerged a reanimation of the Black gospel tradition by musi-
cians of Smallwood’s generation, a subgenre formation frequently referred to
today as “contemporary gospel.” Popular, journalistic, and scholarly discussions of
contemporary gospel frequently return to the release of Edwin Hawkins’s mega-
hit “Oh Happy Day” in the spring of 1969 as a point of departure. Hawkins’s
recording of this song with the Northern California State Youth Choir on their
9. Reagon, If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me, 35.

10. Ibid., 36.
11. Smallwood, Total Praise, 154.
12. Ibid.
13. Ramsey, Race Music, 27.
album Let Us Go into the House of the Lord, while initially imagined as one ele-
ment of a fundraising campaign, became a flashpoint in gospel’s history. Indeed,
pioneering musicologist Horace Boyer begins his history of gospel music from
1945 to 1965 (an era that would be known as “the Golden Age of Gospel”) with
reference to this moment of transition:
By placing [“Oh Happy Day”] in a bouncy tempo, emphasizing its inherent rhyth-
mic possibilities with a drum set and conga drums, featuring the solo voice of a
golden toned alto backed by a youthful-sounding energetic choir, and supporting the
ensemble with piano accompaniment in a style that combined the harmonic variety
of a Duke Ellington and the soulful accentuation of a Ray Charles, Hawkins moved
gospel into a new category.14
According to Boyer, this moment represented a synthesis of “not only what

earlier great gospel musicians had developed, but the entire sacred singing tradi-
tion of African Americans since they adopted Christianity, without which there
would not be gospel music.”15 When I asked Smallwood about this creative
turn, he recounted,
Edwin [Hawkins] was the one who added more of the jazz thing to traditional gospel
music. You know, before the sixties, gospel was basically I-IV-V with a sixth thrown
it every once and a while; maybe some borrowed chords. You didn’t venture into
the 7th, 9th, and 11ths. Edwin brought that on the scene. That’s the thing that really
attracted me and got me to writing. Some of the church folk didn’t approve of it.
They were like: “don’t bring those jazz harmonies in here.” So when I look at him,
I see that he was very monumental in changing the whole look of gospel music in
terms of how you incorporate chords besides the traditional chords everyone else
was using.16
Smallwood’s answer raises two interwoven historiographic threads. First, he

rehearses one of the fundamental metanarratives of gospel’s history, an “ori-
gin story” for contemporary gospel in which Hawkins “added” to “traditional
gospel” a “monumental” contribution. Second, he notes that this contribution
was met with prohibitive commentary and actions from conservative forces in
Black churches. By describing Hawkins’s creative turn as a source of inspiration
for his own musical productions, Smallwood highlights the generative musical
transgressions that run through the Black gospel tradition.
Just as many return to Hawkins to discuss this music-historical moment, vir-
tually everyone who has written about gospel—including Horace Boyer, Robert
Darden, Michael Harris, Anthony Heilbut, Jerma Jackson, Portia Maultsby,
14. Horace Clarence Boyer, How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 5.
15. Ibid.
16. Smallwood 2011 interview.
and Guthrie Ramsey, among others—has emphasized the cycles of controversy

that have attended gospel’s various eclecticisms. As I see it, this omnivorous
orientation is the first of gospel’s three main characteristics. When I talked with
composer Kurt Carr about his craft, he described gospel as “a chameleon,” a
nimble idiom that brings varied musical currents to bear on sacred expression,
even as gospel exerts a powerful influence on those secular genres.17 A second
recurring feature of Black gospel is a preoccupation with traditions, musical
and biblical, one evident even in the song that announced gospel’s contempo-
rary reanimation: Hawkins’s “Oh Happy Day,” which signifies on the epony-
mous 19th-century Baptist hymn. Although they emerged a generation after
Hawkins, many of Kirk Franklin’s biggest 1990s hits, including “Why Do We
Sing” and “Silver and Gold,” have similarly striking ties to extant sources—the
Protestant hymns “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and “I’d Rather Have Jesus,”
respectively. Between these two artists’ catalogs are hundreds of songs that link a
promiscuous interest in contemporary musical forms with a reverent preoccu-
pation with various precedents, populating the gospel “field.”18 Taken together,
these two constitutive elements comprise what, following Mellonee Burnim, I
refer to as “the Black gospel tradition.”19 If, as Burnim asserts, gospel is “a mere
juncture in an ongoing Black music continuum,” what is the basis of this music’s
coherence?20 This question leads me to the third—and most important—feature
of the Black gospel tradition: an enduring understanding of the role that sound
plays in religious experience. I call this the Gospel Imagination. Its genealogy
extends from gospel’s contemporary reanimation to Black sacred musicking
of the 18th and 19th centuries. Its ideological contours were codified during
the Black gospel song movement of the 1930s and 1940s. And its realization
depended on the emergence of the gospel choir.
Gospel’s Choirs
Smallwood’s 1996 recording, Adoration: Live in Atlanta, marked a pivotal moment
in his musical career. Twenty-two years after his first recording with Union
Temple’s Young Adult Choir, Smallwood organized a new choir to formalize
his equally new contract with Verity Records. In his autobiography, Smallwood
comments that the idea of recording with a gospel choir “was something in
the back of my mind that I always wanted to do.”21 After all, Smallwood had
17. Kurt Carr, telephonic interview, October 2019.

18. This term comes from Mark Burford, Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
19. Mellonee Burnim, “The Black Gospel Tradition: Symbol of Ethnicity” (PhD diss.,
Indiana University, 1980).
20. Ibid., 3.
21. Smallwood, Total Praise, 365.
traveled nationally and internationally while he served as a choral clinician and

led choirs, including Metropolitan Baptist Church’s Young Adult Fellowship
Ensemble. Still, Smallwood’s professional recording career had been synony-
mous with a smaller group, the Smallwood Singers.Therefore, he expected that
Vision would be only “a temporary thing.”22 But that was not to be.The success
of the choir’s first live recording cemented its place in Smallwood’s ministry
and in the gospel choir repertory. “Total Praise,” the first song they sang that
evening, is, in Smallwood’s words, “the song that changed everything.”23
The importance of Smallwood’s new choir at this signal moment in his
career parallels the centrality of such ensembles throughout the history of gos-
pel. In fact, the codification of the gospel blues in Chicago during the 1930s
was equally tethered to the formation of new gospel choruses. But the gospel
choir’s great importance is a bit ironic: the mid-19th-century emergence of
choirs in the independent Black churches of the antebellum North was one
part of a concerted strategy to rid these churches of ecstatic practices, conform-
ing to the decorous standards of their white Protestant counterparts.24 While
volunteer choruses assembled during weeknight revivals or other moments of
corporate worship, it was not until the early 1930s that vernacular choral song
entered the Sunday morning services of Chicago’s old-line Black churches—
the established religious communities that Southern migrants discovered upon
their arrival in this urban center. On Sunday mornings, the “politics of respect-
ability” took sonic form as choirs sang “European anthems and unimprovised
hymns,”25 building a “world of Euro-centric, class-based worship.”26 In the
22. Ibid., 3.
23. Ibid.
24. Eileen Southern,“Musical Practices in Black Churches of Philadelphia and New York,
ca. 1800–1844,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 30, no. 2 (1977): 296–312; Portia
K. Maultsby, “Music of Northern Independent Black Churches during the Ante-Bellum
Period,” Ethnomusicology 19, no. 3 (1975): 401–420.
25. The phrase “politics of respectability” is coined in Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham,
Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Although the derivative phrase “respectability politics”
has become a catch-all term for classist, intraracial dynamics, prompting various attempts to
move “beyond respectability,” Brooks Higginbotham’s original theorization centered the
lived experience of working-class women like Nannie Helen Burroughs, complicating the
now common usage of her term. As this chapter continues, I will show that debates about
the place of emotive and ecstatic worship in Black churches testifies to the diverse ways
Black Christians sought to resist myths of Black inferiority. Michael W. Harris, The Rise of
the Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), xvii.
26. Wallace Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago,
1915–1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 102.
1930s, the enduring tensions between assimilationist and traditionalist strains of

worship collided as the combined voices of gospel choruses claimed some of
the ritual space that had previously been dominated by senior choirs based on
European models. At that time, the distinction between the labels “choir” and
“chorus” was paramount because it illustrated the cohabitation of competing
modes of musicking, themselves indexes of opposing understandings of the
right way to worship. As gospel achieved a central place in the musical lives
of Black churches, this opposition became far less important; the difference
between the terms “choir” and “chorus” became less pronounced, varying from
church to church.
On the second Sunday in January 1932, a gospel chorus debuted at Chicago’s
Ebenezer Baptist Church, accompanied by Thomas A. Dorsey and lead soloist
Theodore Frye. This choir emerged from the election of a new Southern pas-
tor, Rev. Dr. J. H. L. Smith, who expressed a longing for “the old-fashioned
songs that were born in the hearts of our forefathers down in the southland.”27
In other words, he advocated for a musical return to the emotional inten-
sity of the Black folk church, which resonated with the many new congre-
gants that the Great Migration had brought to Chicago churches. The debut
of Ebenezer’s gospel chorus realized Smith’s vision, sparking the formation of
many new gospel choruses. Ebenezer’s new vocal aggregation was soon in high
demand, drawing such attention that Dorsey and Frye were recruited away
from Ebenezer to start a gospel chorus at Pilgrim Baptist Church, another
Bronzeville church. One of the largest old-line churches, Pilgrim was led by
Rev. Dr. Junius C. Austin, a remarkable preacher and Pittsburgh native, who
recognized the liturgical revolution that was unfolding in his midst. Austin’s
recognition that these new choral expressions of the gospel blues were strik-
ing a chord with his parishioners—and that they would appeal to many of the
Southern migrants who would soon arrive in his city—was shaped by his con-
gregation’s zealous response to Ebenezer’s visiting chorus, and by the musical
sensibilities that had met him when he arrived at Pilgrim seven years earlier.
In keeping with the old-line emphasis on respectable, sedate worship, Austin
reduced the amount of congregational hymn singing and moved deacon-led
prayer services from the sanctuary to the basement; he did so to prevent any
indecorous fervor from finding ritual expression in the sacred space of the
main Sunday service.28 That Austin felt a need to use his power to constrain
emotive worship reveals the endurance of a deep desire for those very modes
of expression—practices that located the presence of God in the bodies of
believers.
27. Harris, Rise of the Gospel Blue, n.4, from interview.

28. Ibid., 196.
Given their knowledge of Pilgrim Baptist’s old-line ethos, Dorsey and Frye
considered muting their usually fervent musical expression for the February 1932
performance, but they ultimately gave in to their aesthetic and political prefer-
ences, causing the congregation to go in: “when we had finished, the church
was all worked up, and the church was at its highest pitch.”29 From Pilgrim,
one of the city’s most influential Black churches, gospel choruses spread rapidly.
By August 1932, three of the city’s main gospel choruses, Ebenezer Baptist,
Pilgrim Baptist, and Metropolitan Community Church, presented a joint con-
cert. By 1934, thanks to the herculean organizational efforts of Magnolia Lewis
Butts, Theodore Frye, and Dorsey, the now nationwide movement of gospel
song was formally organized into the National Convention of Gospel Choirs
and Choruses with Dorsey as its President.30 And in 1937, the National Baptist
Convention, long a bastion of choral music of European heritage and concert-
ized spirituals, had formed a mass gospel choir. Here, too, Dorsey was in charge.
The success of the choral gospel blues, in achieving national renown and
exciting spiritual ecstasy, was largely unanticipated. Prior to Dorsey’s period
of choral fluorescence, his blues and gospel blues compositions had been writ-
ten in a solo idiom. Though he had enjoyed some success in performances
and demonstrations of his music in venues as prestigious as the 1930 National
Baptist Convention, and in the 1921 publication of Gospel Pearls, his music had
yet to find a stable place in the old-line liturgy.31 Therefore, the invitation for
Dorsey to lead a gospel chorus at Ebenezer Baptist was truly novel. As Michael
Harris notes,
The idea of a chorus of singers of his songs was as much a revelation to him as it was
to numerous persons who first heard it in old-line churches. Indeed, it is the notion
of choral gospel blues as opposed to the more likely solo gospel blues that provides the
most significant twist to Dorsey’s effort to bring his music into old-line churches.32
The chorus provided an ideal vehicle of liturgical transformation for two rea-
sons. First, church leadership could more easily reject a traveling gospel blues
performer than hundreds of its own congregants. Second, blues performance
practice aesthetically resonated with the essential chorality of the spiritual. These
ensembles’ early repertory, which included gospelized forms of extant hymns
and congregational songs, amplified the sense of a return to tradition, which led
these new groups to feel intensely familiar—both in terms of content and style.
29. Thomas A. Dorsey, “The Thomas A. Dorsey Story: From Blues-Jazz to Gospel Song”
(unpublished typescript, c. 1961), 73. Cf. Harris, Rise of the Gospel Blues.
30. The presence of both choirs and choruses in this organization shows the erosion of
any firm distinction between the two.
31. Gospel Pearls (Nashville: Sunday School Publishing Board of the National Baptist
Convention, USA, 1921).
32. Harris, Rise of the Gospel Blue, 203.
Together, these forces made the gospel chorus uniquely suited to fuel the insti-
tutionalization of the gospel blues as a performance practice and a repertory.
Still, it would be nearly three decades before gospel choirs came into national
prominence as recording ensembles. While radio broadcasts of the Wings Over
Jordan Choir and recordings by the church choir of St. Paul Baptist Church in
Los Angeles began to appear in the late 1930s and 1940s, respectively, the gos-
pel choir came into its own with a substantial body of recordings only in the
1960s.33 There may be no more central figure to this movement than the Rev.
James E. Cleveland. This Chicago-born musician grew up singing in one of
Dorsey’s choirs at Pilgrim Baptist Church. He later moved to Detroit to serve
as a musician at the church pastored by Rev. C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s
father. Cleveland rose to prominence as a singer, accompanist, and composer
in his youth, spending several years as the primary musician for the Caravans,
one of the leading ensembles of gospel’s so-called Golden Age (1945–1960).
In 1962, Cleveland moved to Los Angeles, where he made his signal contribu-
tions to the gospel tradition through his musical innovations for the choir. As
Robert Darden notes, Cleveland “looked back to a childhood spent singing
in the choirs of Thomas Dorsey . . . [and was] eager to try a different choral
approach.”34 Beginning in the 1960s, Cleveland supervised numerous record-
ings for the Savoy record label, including his extraordinarily successful and
influential collaborations with the Voice of Tabernacle from Detroit’s Prayer
Tabernacle Baptist Church, the Angelic Choir of the First Baptist Church of
Nutley, New Jersey, and his Southern California Community Choir.35 In 1968,
the new Gospel Music Workshop of America (GMWA) formalized Cleveland’s
influence. Alongside his creative authority at Savoy Records, GMWA would
cement Cleveland’s place in the history of gospel choir recording, the Black
gospel tradition, and American music more broadly.36
I want to suggest that, more than the sheer number of discs produced, the
millions of copies of sheet music sold, or the codification of his music in wor-
ship services, Cleveland’s most enduring achievement is the preoccupation
with tradition that suffuses the gospel choir repertory. Though Cleveland was
33. Robert Darden, People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music (New York:
Continuum, 2004), 271; Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, “The California Black Gospel Music
Tradition: A Confluence of Musical Styles and Cultures,” in California Soul: Music of
African Americans in the West, ed. Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje and Eddie S. Meadows
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 124–177.
34. Robert Darden, People Get Ready!, 271.
35. Claudrena Harold, “‘Lord, Let Me Be an Instrument’: The Artistry and Cultural
Politics of Reverend James Cleveland and the Gospel Music Workshop of America, 1963–
1991,” Journal of Africana Religions 5 (2017): 158.
36. Alan Young, Woke Me Up This Morning: Black Gospel Singers and the Gospel Life (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1997), xxix.
well known for his many compositions, many of his most successful recordings
involved songs and performances that draw attention to precedents—musical
and scriptural. Recordings like the incredibly successful Peace Be Still (Savoy,
1962); Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace (Atlantic, 1972); and Breathe on Me
(Savoy, 1989), one of Cleveland’s last albums, exemplify this preoccupation with
tradition. Beyond the content of the songs themselves, Cleveland often took
great pains to emphasize that his songs came from another place. For example,
“Breathe on Me” (Audio/Video Example I.2 ), the title track of Cleveland’s
1989 recording, reanimates a song Magnolia Lewis-Butts published in 1941.
Cleveland prefaced the performance of the song: “it’s kind of old fashioned,
but this was my choice. All the writers had a song. I reached back and, way back,
young folk won’t know it, but some of the older people might remember the
words.” Listening to Cleveland talk, one gets a sense that he had fond memo-
ries of the song’s original form. Given Lewis-Butts’s role in the early Chicago
gospel community, it is almost certain that she and Cleveland crossed paths.
But, besides remaking extant material, Cleveland’s penchant for reaching back
is especially evident in one of his favorite musical practices: a device known as
the vamp.
The Vamp
The vamp is the central stylistic element of contemporary gospel music.
While vamps were far from uncommon in the first half of the 20th century
(composer and pastor William Herbert Brewster invoked them frequently, for
instance), the ones that emerged in Cleveland’s era—and after—enjoyed a dis-
tinctive importance. Why is the vamp, with its enduring connections to the
oldest African American musical forms, more central to contemporary gospel
music than to that of the Golden Age or the period of gospel’s codification, the
1930s? As much as Cleveland’s particular fondness for the vamp, at this particu-
lar historical moment, contributed to its transformation into an indispensable
component of the gospel choral repertory, he was also responding to broader
cultural currents.37 Cleveland was one of many who came of age in the 1940
and 1950s, under the influence of the Black gospel song movement, and he
was shaped by its “renaissance” of religious intensity.38 Moreover, Cleveland’s
investment in the vamp reflects the same cultural politics that precipitated
GMWA’s formation in 1968. Historian Claudrena Harold rightly contends that
Cleveland’s efforts to institutionalize gospel “reinforced and existed alongside
the intellectual pursuits of scholars such as Horace Boyer, James Cone, and
37. Boyer, How Sweet the Sound, 248.

38. “Gospel Choruses Plan Gala Songfest Aug. 29,” Chicago Defender, August 19, 1933, 13.
Pearl Williams-Jones who viewed gospel music as an integral component of

African Americans’ ongoing quest for self-definition.”39 Indeed, Harold has
uncovered evidence that Cleveland and his associates sought to form a college
for gospel music in Soul City, a section of Warren County, North Carolina,
dedicated to the “Black power experiment” conceived by Civil Rights activist
and attorney Floyd McKissick.40 Cleveland’s interest in this unrealized Black
utopia points to the social energies that characterized the soul era.41 This poli-
tics, this Black consciousness, is of a piece with the 1960s cultural ferment
that inspired Smallwood’s cohort in its fight for Black music’s inclusion on
college campuses—a force that fed the view that gospel is, in Pearl William-
Jones’s words, “a crystallization of the black aesthetic.”42 Both the profusion
of gospel choir recordings and the renewed primacy of the vamp reflect this
pervasive system of thought. If, as William-Jones contends, gospel is a crystal-
lization of the Black aesthetic, Cleveland’s music—and contemporary gospel,
more broadly—offers the vamp as its primary instrument.
Of what is the vamp an instrument? In a 1969 Washington Star article, Donald
Smith described an illustrative performance at Bible Way Church of Jesus Christ
Our Lord in Washington, D.C.; he recalled that as a gospel song’s last line was
repeated, “the members of the choir have melted into the congregation and
still the music goes on; the two groups are one writhing, hand-clapping, thigh-
slapping, glory-shouting company.”43 This transcendent but habitual fusion of
music and movement is the purpose of the gospel vamp. Through the vamp,
musical performances become interworldly events, moments when the seen
world is brought into a meaningful alignment with another. In this liminal
space, gospel song lyrics become something much more powerful: the living
word of God. The vamp’s remarkable ability to provide the kind of embodied
experience that has characterized emotive forms of Black American worship
since the antebellum ring shout is a central reason that it is the defining fea-
ture of the contemporary gospel song. Unlike the term’s connotation in other
musical genres, wherein the vamp is often designed to fill space or occupy time
until the performers are ready to proceed to another, more important musical
event, the vamp is gospel’s main event.44 Guthrie Ramsey describes the vamp
39. Harold, “Lord, Let Me Be an Instrument,” 159.

40. Ibid.
41. Portia K. Maultsby, “Soul Music: Its Sociological and Political Significance in
American Popular Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 17, no. 2 (1983): 51–60.
42. Pearl Williams-Jones, “Afro-American Gospel Music: A Crystallization of the Black
Aesthetic,” Ethnomusicology 19, no. 3 (1975): 373–385.
43. Donald Smith, “The Gospel Way,” Washington Star, January 26, 1969.
44. While there are many examples of ancillary musical cycles, vamps used to support the-
atrical dialogue or anticipate an entrance are good counterexamples of the vamp’s centrality
to gospel music.
in gospel music as a “troping cycle,” a “musical and ideological [remnant] of the

ring shout from the slave past.”45 Following the work of anthropologists Walter
Pitts and Victor Turner, Ramsey proposes that these troping cycles “work as
microrepresentations of the syntax of rituals present throughout the African
Diaspora.”46 In gospel songs, vamps are the place where the performance shifts
into the second, ecstatic “frame of the [ritual’s] metaphorical syntax.”47 But this
syntax is not only—or mostly—metaphorical; gospel performance is animated
by a real preoccupation with escalation, a pursuit of divine transcendence.
Vamps pursue gospel’s telos, Alisha Lola Jones’s term for believers’ “expecta-
tions to have a tangible encounter with God during the worship experience.”48
These expectations have sonic manifestations. While David Brackett is right to
assert that the “vamp at the end of gospel songs . . . allows for vocal/instru-
mental improvisations of increasing intensity causing a corresponding shift in
the music to a higher energy level,” the vamps that pervade the gospel choir
repertory are not only harmonic backgrounds for improvisation; these vamps
also combine music, text, and intensive procedures to power gospel’s fusion of
sound and belief.49
As gospel vamps braid together music and faith, they ground individual
performances in an expansive genealogy of sacred expression. Focusing on this
historical lineage, Horace Boyer defines the vamp as “an old technique used
throughout African American cultural expression in song, dance, drumming,
and storytelling; repetition is used to get the message across and to fire collective
intensity.”50 Indeed, the climactic musical cycles through which contemporary
gospel congregations sound belief bear striking resemblance to descriptions of
Black sacred musicking during the Second Great Awakening, a religious move-
ment that swept across the country between 1780 and 1830, yielding scores
of interracial, ecstatic revival services, which were called camp meetings.51 In
an 1819 publication, Methodist minister John Fanning Watson, deriding the
religious practices that characterized the camp meetings, bemoaning the “long
repetition choruses” that he heard “began among slaves in Virginia.”52 Watson
45. Ramsey, Race Music, 60, 200.

46. Ibid., 60.
47. Ibid., 200.
48. Alisha Lola Jones, Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male
Gospel Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1.
49. David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000), 118.
50. Boyer, How Sweet the Sound, 217.
51. For a lengthier discussion of camp meetings see Eileen Southern, The Music of Black
Americans: A History, 3rd ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), 82–89.
52. John Fanning Watson, Methodist Error; or, Friendly, Christian Advice, to Those Methodists,
Who Indulge in Extravagant Emotions and Bodily Exercises (Trenton, NJ: D. and E. Fenton, 1819).
decried events when “the coloured people get together, and sing for hours
together, short scraps of disjointed affirmations, pledges, or prayers.”53 Although
Watson failed to comprehend the interworldly coherence of these commu-
nal utterances, his frequently cited jeremiad offers a valuable glimpse into
this historical sound world. Well before, in a 1755 letter to friends in London,
Presbyterian evangelist and eventual College of New Jersey president Samuel
Davies recounts the music making of his enslaved proselytes:
Sundry of them have lodged all night in my kitchen, a torrent of sacred harmony has
poured into my kitchen, and sometimes when I have awaked about two or three-
o’clock in the morning, a torrent of sacred harmony has poured into my chamber
and carried my mind away to heaven. In this seraphic exercise some of them spend
almost the whole night.54
The duration, form, and intensity described in these two historical sources were
often used to reiterate Watson’s critique, a contention that these ecstatic prac-
tices were not the right way to practice religion. Watson’s voice is one of many
in a lineage of injunctions against the endurance of “slave religion.”55 Bishop
Daniel Payne, a 19th-century leader of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME)
Church, was one of the most ardent exponents of this ideology. In his memoir,
Payne recalled his attempts to erase the ring shout from the collective memory
of AME congregants:
About this time, I attended a “bush meeting,” where I went to please the pastor whose
circuit I was visiting. After the sermon they formed a ring, and with coats off sung,
clapped their hands and stamped their feet in a most ridiculous and heathenish way.
I requested the pastor to go and stop their dancing. At his request they stopped their
dancing and clapping of hands, but remained singing and rocking their bodies to and
fro. This they did for about fifteen minutes. I then went, and taking their leader by
the arm requested him to desist and to sit down and sing in a rational manner. I told
him also that it was a heathenish way to worship and disgraceful to themselves, the
race, and the Christian name. In that instance they broke up their ring; but would not
sit down, and walked sullenly away. In some cases all that I could do was to teach and
preach the right, fit, and proper way of serving God.56
Payne’s concerns were both theological and political; they reflect his deep invest-
ment in the freedom and respectability of the new independent Black denomi-
nations.Therefore, as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham records, “for Bishop Payne,
53. Ibid.
54. Samuel Davies, letter of March 2, 1756. Cf. Eileen Southern, Readings in Black American
Music (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1972), 28.
55. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
56. Daniel Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years (New York: Amo Press and the New York
Times, 1969), 253-55; reprint of 1st ed., 1886.
loud and emotive behavior constituted more than an individual’s impropriety

or doctrinal error. It marked the retrogression of the entire racial group.”57
Even as Payne’s recollections describe his lifelong efforts to rid the Black
church of ecstatic practices, they also testify to the prevalent and durable desire
for a robustly embodied religious experience. These conflicting impulses
feed a history full of liturgical compromises. The early-19th-century tensions
“between those who wanted to maintain European models for the music of
the black church and those who insisted upon bringing the African heritage to
bear on the music,” as articulated by Eileen Southern, were mollified by flexible
pastors who allowed congregants to perform spiritual songs of their own cre-
ation “after the formal service and during week-night services.”58 Payne’s quest
to reform Black worship according to European-based notions of respectabil-
ity was broadly symptomatic of a powerful stream of Black religious influ-
ence whose exercise of ecclesial authority could not extinguish many Black
Christians’ attachment to another way of enacting belief.
Instead of moving away from the aesthetic practices associated with the
“invisible institution”59 of religious worship among the enslaved, proponents
of this other path—those who believed in the bodily performance of faith—
demonstrated a consistent preoccupation with Black religious and musical tra-
ditions such that a certain kind of looking back became a tradition unto itself.
At the turn of the 20th century, in the early decades of the renewal movements
that gave rise to the Holiness and Holiness-Pentecostal reformations, which
would later be called “the Sanctified Church,” ministers like Charles Harrison
Mason and Charles Price Jones (and countless parishioners) came to believe that
the emotive physicality of the “old time religion” bore important resemblances
to the behavior of 1st-century Christians.60 A generation later, in early debates
during the 1930s about the origin of the term gospel and its connotation as
upbeat religious music, Dorsey and members of the convention he founded
looked to slave culture and the New Testament for gospel’s roots. Instead of
Ira D. Sankey and Dwight L. Moody’s white gospel hymns, Dorsey located his
57. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black Religion and
Race Records in the 1920s and 1930s,” in The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni
Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America
Today, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 161.
58. Southern,“Musical Practices in Black Churches of Philadelphia and New York,” 302, 309.
59. Raboteau, Slave Religion.
60. Jerma A. Jackson, Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 16–19. Regarding the sanctified church,
see Zora Neale Hurston’s pioneering book The Sanctified Church (Berkeley, CA: Turtle
Island, 1981). For more on the sanctified church’s interdenominational character, see Cheryl
Townsend Gilkes,“‘Together and in Harness’: Women’s Traditions in the Sanctified Church,”
Signs 10, no. 4 (Summer 1985): 678–699.
gospel songs in the New Testament’s first four writings. Ruth Smith, a member
of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, declared in 1935,
“I claim the Gospel Hymn to be a derivative of the Negro Spiritual in that
they carry the same lively trend so given to our nature; songs that exhilarate and
captivate.”61 These concomitant turns to Black musical traditions and scriptural
sources resonated with a cultural politics that contended that reverent restraint
was not the only way to refute myths of Black inferiority.
How might we describe this other irrepressible expressive force, this con-
viction that there was a better way to relate to the divine through connecting
with an African heritage, buttressed by scriptural interpretation? Payne’s own
Recollections offer a helpful, if offensive, vocabulary. To “the ignorant masses”
whom he could not persuade to abandon the music and dance of the ring
shout, this embodied practice “was regarded as the essence of religion.”62 I am
struck by this last phrase of Payne’s, and by its resonances with a line from a
chapter, “Of the Faith of the Father” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic The Souls of
Black Folk (1903). There Du Bois described this holy dance as “the last essential
of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed in than all the rest.”63
Both writers—one a preacher, the other a sociologist—acknowledge that belief
is grounded in this climactic practice, that ecstatic performances are the essence
of religion—an essence that is analyzable in gospel song. As Jerma Jackson notes,
through its wide dissemination in the 1930s and following, this music became
“a space for religious expression.”64 Free to move across denominational lines,
musical sound helped to ignite a new, ecumenical “religious ecstasy.”65 But this
was not the first time music functioned as religious thought; this thread runs
across generations and genres of Black sacred practice, from 19th-century prayer
bands to 21st-century gospel choirs: the abiding conviction that musical sound
can turn spiritual power into a physical reality.
How does musical sound acquire an interworldly efficacy? From the early
Black gospel song movement through contemporary gospel’s choral repertory,
arresting modifications of musical material hold the key to the tradition’s power.
Throughout Thomas Dorsey’s many discussions of his art, he focuses on the ways
that the transformation of musical material against a sounded or perceived back-
ground fuels the circulation of religious affect—the very embodied practices
61. Ruth A. Smith, The Life and Works of Thomas Andrew Dorsey: The Celebrated Pianist and
Songwriter Poetical and Pictorial (Chicago: Thomas A. Dorsey, 1935), 10–11. The text is located
in the University of Mississippi’s Blues Archives; cf. Jackson, Singing in My Soul, 63.
62. Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years, 253–255.
63. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” in The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.
C. McClurg, 1903), 191.
64. Jackson, Singing in My Soul, 65.
65. Arna Bontemps, “Rock, Church, Rock!” Common Ground (Autumn 1942): 75–80.
Payne identified, the very frenzy Du Bois emphasized. In Dorsey’s words,“it isn’t
the tune that makes it; it’s what you put in the tune.”66 Dorsey’s words help us
understand the contribution of the vamp, the central focus of my investigation,
to spiritual practice. As this text unfolds, I will show that through its repetition of
short musical fragments, the vamp draws attention to the kinds of striking altera-
tions that are the stuff of the gospel tradition. The vamp is a vehicle of musical
transformation. As it reiterates the same material, the vamp invites precisely the
kind of conversions from which musical and ritual efficacy spring.
This study understands the vamps that pervade contemporary gospel’s choir
music as manifestations of an enduring system of belief, performance, and
reception, which has traversed centuries of practice—a tradition that is dis-
tilled in the shift that many refer to as “tuning up.”
The Shift: “Tuning Up”

A 1989 performance by Dr. Mattie Moss Clark, another central figure in the
20th-century gospel choral tradition, offers a valuable point of departure (Audio/
Video Example I.3. ). After leading a choir and congregation through her
daughter Elbernita “Twinkie” Clark’s “I Can Do All Things through Christ,”
Moss Clark moves into a prayer. She exhorts the audience to touch their con-
gregants standing beside them, and to “pray for their neighbors.”
Father, in the name of Jesus, we thank you because you been good to us.
We thank you for the doors you opened in front of us.
My God!
We thank you for the peace of mind that you’ve given to us.
We thank you for how you let us go through the [sic] and you watch
over us.
We thank you for how you watched over us for danger and unseen dangers.
Oh God, we thank you: you didn’t have to do it but you did.
And you watched over us, and we thank you, and we bless your name.
Then, Moss Clark’s communal dialogue with an unseen realm shifts to a new
register of speech as she renews her exhortation to the audience, interrupting
her prayer to say, “I don’t hear nobody praying but me. Come on, I wanna hear
you talk to the lord.” As the organist, presumably Twinkie Clark, punctuates
Moss Clark’s statement, the elder Clark makes an emphatic shift. Settling on G4
as a reciting tone, she exclaims,
Lord//you opened doors for me//that no man can shut
You been a doctor before//cause so many times you blessed me
66. Michael W. Harris, interview with Thomas A. Dorsey, January 15, 1977.
You walked with me all day long//You kept me on my job

Thank you, Jesus//Thank you, Jesus
Oh, lordy!
You blessed me all day long
How you walk with me//as I walk through the dangerous streets
You kept me for danger//Unseen danger
You watched over me while I slept all night
You woke me up in the morning//And you taken me on my job
I wanna thank you lawd//Thank ya
Thank ya//For your spirit lord
Thank you for shedding your blood for me
Thank you for washing me clean
Thank you, Lord
Thank you, Jesus
The words “thank you” function as points of emphasis, each marked by height-
ened scalar motion from B♭4 to D5 or from D5 to B♭4, before settling on the
reciting tone. While Moss Clark’s prayer continues for several more minutes,
the dramatic escalation that shapes this performance becomes quite clear early
on. This shift is accompanied by movement from thanking God for communal
blessings to expressions of personal gratitude for God’s protective presence.The
point of inflection, when Clark turns from speech toward song, marshals musi-
cal affect to collapse the distance between her audience and their prayer’s invis-
ible addressee. At the same time, this vocal modulation reveals shared beliefs that
this kind of spiritual connection is precisely the work that music is supposed to
do. This shift is tuning up.
In this prayer, Dr. Mattie Moss Clark—who, from 1968 until the time of her
death in 1994, led the music department of one of the largest Black Protestant
denominations, the Church of God in Christ—highlights the importance of
tuning up to the gospel tradition.67 As a sought-after choral clinician, a com-
poser, and the mother of the ever-popular Clark Sisters, Clark articulated this
arresting musical shift in a particularly illustrative way. But the kind of musical
escalation exemplified by her prayer has long suffused the worship of Black
Christian congregations, especially in the milieu from which Chicago’s first
gospel choruses emerged.The format of the characteristically emotive recorded
sermon that was so popular in the 1920s and 1930s distilled a performance’s
dramatic arc into a very few minutes, calling for a rather stark movement from
one mode of vocality to another, invariably more musical mode. Moreover,
67. The most comprehensive biography of Mattie Moss Clark is assembled in Nina
Christians Ohman, “Sound Business: Great Women of Gospel and the Transmission of
Tradition” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2017).
the “mixed-type” preaching that emanated from old-line Chicago pulpits in

the 1920s and 1930s, a liturgical compromise between assimilationist urges and
vernacular impulses, called attention to a sonic threshold, a point of musical
inflection where lecture gave way to sermon.68 This same climactic orientation
is evident in Thomas Dorsey’s solo gospel blues.
For a closer look at the kind of homiletic escalation that structures cho-
ral expressions of gospel song, consider the concluding moments of a sermon
entitled “By Any Means Necessary,” delivered by the Rev. Dr. Charles Booth in
Jacksonville, Florida, at the Bethel Institutional Baptist Church (Audio/Video
Example I.4 ). Six minutes before Booth returned to his seat in the pulpit, he
made a rhetorical shift toward a story, which, whether real or imagined, served
as a pivot away from the body of his sermon in favor of its ecstatic conclusion.
On his way to ecstasy, Booth proclaimed the following:
A story is told of a young man who went to the National Museum of Art and he
looked up on the wall and he saw a painting that arrested his attention. He stood
there and he looked at the painting. One hour passed, two, three, four hours,
but he just stood there. This was the painting. It was entitled “Checkmate.” And
there was a board with chess items on it. And on one side of the board was a
young man with a rather pathetic and pitiful look on his face. On the other side
of the table was the menacing, sinister glare of Satan himself, with his fingers
together looking into the eyes of the young man. And the painting was entitled
“Checkmate.”
The guard in the museum kept coming by looking at this young man wonder-
ing why in the name of God is he just staring at this painting. The guard came to
him and said, “In a couple of hours we’re closing.” The young man stood there
about five minutes before the gallery closed. Fred Nann, the guard came around
the corner and heard the young man holler, “It’s a lie!” The guard said, “What do
you mean, it’s a lie?” He looked at the painting and he said, “I play chess and I’ve
been standing here looking at that chess board, looking at all of those bishops and
those rooks and I’ve discovered that it’s a lie. It’s not check mate. He’s got one
more move.”
I want to tell somebody, “You’ve got one more move.” I don’t care how much hell
you’re going through, you’ve got one more move. I don’t care what your trials are,
you’ve got one more move. I don’t care what your temptations and your tribulations
are you’ve got one more move.
This turn to a story, a characteristic way of setting up a sermonic climax, served

two functions. First, it established a kind of contemporary applicability for the
message’s scriptural content. Second, it injected the temporality of a new story
into the liminal moment of the sermon’s unfolding. But this was just a bridge.
68. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern
City, vol. 2, reprint (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 673.
As he ends the story and “returns” to the sermon, he takes the story’s punch
line, “having one more move,” and uses it as a fulcrum with which to move
from speech toward song. Booth finds his way to D4 as a reciting tone, prompt-
ing the musicians to enter in support of his apparent apotheosis, creating an
antiphonal context in which he proclaims the following:
Does anybody feel like giving God praise, because God will give you one more move?
Somebody ought to get up on your feet right now and throw back your head and
praise God that in Christ you’ve got one more move! Why don’t you look at some-
body and slap five with them and tell them, “I’m not gon’ sink today because God
has given me one more move.” Somebody ought to praise God! Somebody ought to
magnify God! You got to the church this morning, because God gave ya . . . I said,
“God gave ya” . . . I said, “God gave ya one more move!”
Then, Booth turns away from his sermon, reaching into gospel’s textual reposi-
tory to find words with which to make his sermon a completely communal
performance.
Somebody oughtta praise Him right about now! Can I get a witness in here? The
road is rough.Yeh! And the goin’ gets tough. And the hills . . . are hard to climb. Oh
yeh-he-heh! But I started out . . . a long time ago . . . and there is not dou-ou-
oubt . . . in my mind. I’ve decided, I said, “I’ve decided . . . I said, “I’ve decided to
make Jesus . . . my choice.” Can I get a witness?
My hope is built . . . on nothing less . . . than Jesus’ blood . . . and His righteousness!
I dare not trust . . . the sweetest frame . . . but wholly lean . . . on Jesus’ name! . . . On
Christ . . . the solid rock, I stand! . . . I said, “On Christ . . . not my politics . . . On
Christ . . . not my economics . . . on Christ . . . not my education . . . On Christ . . . not
the hat on my head . . . On Christ . . . not the clothes on my back . . . On Christ . . . On
Christ . . . not the shoes on my feet . . . On Christ . . . not the ring on my finger . . . On
Christ . . . not the car that I drive . . . On Christ . . . not the house that I live in . . . On
Christ . . . not my assets!
But on Christ . . . The Lily Of The Valley . . . On Christ . . . The Bright And
Morning Star . . . On Christ . . . My Joy . . . My Hope . . . My Help . . . My
Salvation . . . My Sanctification . . . My Justification . . . Somebody oughtta help me!
On Christ! . . . On Christ! . . . On Christ! . . . On Christ!
In these moments, Booth does not merely cite these two extremely well-known
songs—“My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less” and “I’ve Decided to Make Jesus
My Choice”—but he remakes them, removing them from their original musi-
cal contexts and forming from them something new. Then, Booth interrupts his
utterance of the second song, interpolating a set of treasured appositions for gospel’s
central character: Jesus, the Christ. The concluding frame of this sermon, then, sits
at the intersection of multiple temporalities—the sanctuary becomes a transcendent
liminal space as the time of the Markan scripture, the aforementioned story, and the
musical temporalities of both songs work together to yield an experience of the
spiritual realm, a space in which believers can be assured that they will overcome
“by any means necessary.” This remarkable performance is also paradigmatic of

what has been called “the musicality of black preaching.”69
While Chapter 1 deals with tuning up’s centrality to the form and function
of gospel compositions, I raise this moment of movement from speech to song
in order to highlight the weaving together of scriptural and musical references
through which gospel sermons evoke an experience of religious ecstasy. This
communal and recombinant expressive ethos, one of the most consistent features
of characteristically Black preaching, is evidence of a tradition that continues to
shape gospel song. This is the Black gospel tradition, and it is especially evident
in the vamp and in the practice of homiletic escalation. In tuning up, one finds
support for Hortense Spillers’s claim that “various features observable in [John]
Jasper’s [famous 19th-century] sermons actually comprise an unbroken tradi-
tion of black preaching.”70 Indeed, the sermons’ “system of symbols, narrative
techniques, and dramatic devices are still manifest in a great variety of unique
musical styles, combinations, and temperaments.”71 While I am not arguing that
diachronic distinctions and synchronic variety in period, theology, region, and
style are insignificant, this book is not about these issues. Healing for the Soul seeks
out the thread that runs through the musical practices that collectively constitute
the Black gospel tradition. I want to accent, more than the fluency with which
preacher, musicians, and congregation collectively produce this moment, the
ambient sense that this was supposed to happen. In the conjunction of form,
performance, and expectation we encounter tuning up as a habitual practice of
transcendence and a formal logic for the Black gospel tradition.
Throughout this book, I argue that this homiletic practice is but one manifesta-
tion of a broader phenomenon. Tuning up, more than the heightened rhetoric at
the end of a sermon, is a sonic device that signals and produces movement between
the material and the spiritual realms of Black Christian experience. Tuning up
concentrates expressive activity on a single moment of transformation, using the
vamp to do what gospel songs always want to do—go to another level.This preoc-
cupation with creating a moment of intensification, a site of inflection, a place of
intersection that announces the shift from one level of performance to another
occurs in Smallwood’s “It’s Working,” in Booth’s sermon, and in Moss Clark’s prayer.
But its conditions of legibility, through which such musical turns enable not just
the experience of human community but also divine transcendence, are informed
69. William Turner, “The Musicality of Black Preaching: A Phenomenology,” in

Performance in Preaching: Bringing the Sermon to Life, ed. Jana Childers and Clayton Schmit
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008).
70. Hortense J. Spillers, “Fabrics of History: Essays on the Black Sermon” (PhD diss.,
Brandeis University, 1974), 83–84.
71. Ibid.
by a set of beliefs about the power of sound: the assertion that it occasions inti-
macy with the divine.This nexus of belief, performance, and reception is the Gospel
Imagination. Tuning up is its logic. The vamp is its evidence.
The Gospel Imagination

As this book attends to the cultural, musical, and theological work accomplished
by gospel vamps, it unfurls a system of belief, performance, and reception that
I call the Gospel Imagination. The Gospel Imagination is, in part, the belief that
musical sound can turn spiritual power into a physical reality—a divine presence
animating human bodies. As such, musical sound enjoys an interworldly existence,
funneling power between the seen world and another. This musical epistemology
unifies composers, performers, and audiences, linking the full range of musi-
cal practices to gospel’s pursuit of religious intensity.72 As it nourishes the sense
that there is another world, the Gospel Imagination affirms Arjun Appadurai’s
proposal that “the Imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of
art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work
of ordinary people in many societies . . . ordinary people have begun to deploy
their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives.”73 While Black gos-
pel’s worldview shapes the “community theater” of the Black church, Guthrie
Ramsey’s term for sites of collective memory where the practice of “everyday
blackness”74 and musical meaning collide, its influence extends into the quo-
tidian affairs of believers. These sermons and songs assert that everyday life is
shot through with a divine presence, a transcendent source of healing for the
soul. Sustained by the arresting sonic shifts explained in these pages, the Gospel
Imagination is a distinctive social imaginary, Charles Taylor’s term for the kind
of “common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely
shared sense of legitimacy.”75 Like the philosopher James K. A. Smith’s notion
of a “Pentecostal social imaginary,” the Gospel Imagination is embedded in “an
72. For more on the set of musical activities combined in my conception of the gos-
pel imagination, see David J. Hargreaves, Raymond MacDonald, and Dorothy Miell,
“Explaining Musical Imaginations: Creativity, Performance, and Reception,” in Musical
Imaginations: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Creativity, Performance, and Reception, ed. David
J. Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell, and Raymond MacDonald (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011).
73. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 5.
74. Ramsey, Race Music, 76–95.
75. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University
Press, 2004), 23.
embodied set of practices and disciplines.”76 While gospel practice bears resem-
blance to many other Christian traditions, it is distinguished by its insistence on
the bodily experience of the presence of God, its interdenominational character,
and its connection to history—a history of oppression and resistance—all of
which demarcate it as a distinctive arrangement of sound and belief.
The imbrication of performance, sound, and belief in the Black gospel tra-
dition might be cast in aesthetic terms. Clearly, the Gospel Imagination has
much in common with “the blues aesthetic,” Travis Jackson’s term for the “set
of normative and evaluative criteria,” “constituted by (learned) practices,” with
“roots in African American culture and musics,” that orients jazz performance.77
Notwithstanding the history and technicity that gospel shares with other idi-
oms of Black music, gospel is distinguished by its explicitly confessional moti-
vations, and by its emphasis on facilitating embodied exchange with another
world. This is not to say that the category of aesthetics can account only for
musics that are tethered to the material world. For example, Gavin Steingo’s
ethnography of the South African popular music genre kwaito describes a “pol-
itics of aesthetics” that turns away from contemporary “social realities” and
“doubles reality,” allowing practitioners to “imagine and experience a world
that does not yet exist.”78 While Steingo is right to assert that music can name
these acts of “separation,” I instead assert that the movement toward as yet non-
existent worlds runs counter to Gospel Imagination. The other world gospel
seeks is believed to be more real than the world that is called material. As Black
Christians seek to exist “in the world, but not of the world,” they seek to bring
spiritual power to bear on material realities, to find healing for their souls.79
This interworldly traffic is intensified by the painful shape of the anti-Black
world, which, as Ashon Crawley asserts, makes it hard to breathe.80 Breathing,
then, becomes an act of resistance, a declaration of allegiance to “otherwise
possibility,” the belief that there are other worlds, other forms of sociality, other
ways of being that lie beyond the self. Crawley’s aesthetic theory is most help-
ful for this book: it clears ground, showing how the practices of preaching,
76. James K. A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy

(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), xviii.
77. Travis Jackson, Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz
Scene (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 109, 172, 126.
78. Gavin Steingo, Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 9.
79. Christian colloquialism based on John 17:14–19 and theorized in Cheryl J. Sanders,
Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
80. Ashon Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2017), introduction.
praying, speaking, and singing acknowledge and produce other realities, “other-
wise worlds” where Black folks can breathe.81 While this book sympathizes with
the plurality of Crawley’s investigation, my focus is on a single other world, one
that gospel habitually seeks, a place where the promises of scripture are realized
in the bodies of believers; this is “the spiritual realm,” the interworldly space
that I theorize in Chapter 3. The Gospel Imagination is a tradition that uses
sound as a way of being in and between worlds.82
Besides the category of aesthetics, I might term this project a musical theol-
ogy, a musical philosophy, or a musical theory. In fact, this study is all three and
more, and to refer to it by any one of the three risks emphasizing one dimen-
sion of this tradition at the expense of the others.What is offered in these pages
is something like a hermeneutic, a poetics, a paradigm for analysis and interpre-
tation. More than anything else, Healing for the Soul is an invitation to listen to
gospel on its own terms. The hearing this book offers pulls together discursive
threads from various disciplines, including homiletics, theology, literary criti-
cism, ritual theory, and philosophies of language, alongside historical, ethno-
graphic, and theoretical approaches to music. As in the music I study, these pages
will include some striking shifts. Occasionally the reader will find surprising
juxtapositions, like Chapter 3’s recruitment of new materialism, philosophies
of language, and biblical studies, in pursuit of an understanding of the incarna-
tional conception of words that animates gospel. In each case, the heterogenous
discourses collected around a topic or song will be dictated by the needs of the
discussion. What I aim to practice is a kind of “theoretical eclecticism,” which
recognizes that this book’s chief concern, the interrelation of belief and expres-
sion, animates many scholarly discourses.83
The access that this project seeks to gospel’s inherently social imagination
motivates its antiphonal form. In these pages, Richard Smallwood’s music and
the ways he discusses his craft anchor my investigation of what musicians imag-
ine themselves to be doing when they do gospel. In the text, Smallwood’s
comments are placed into conversation with ideas from gospel composers like
V. Michael McKay, Margaret Douroux, Kurt Carr, and Donald Lawrence. And
Smallwood’s compositions are interpreted alongside the work of musicians who
include Judith McAllister, Glenn Burleigh, Walter Hawkins, Myrna Summers,
81. Ibid.
82. This term is widely used in Black Studies, especially its Afro-Pessimist strains, which,
following Franz Fanon, recruit it to denote the centrality of anti-Black racism to the pre-
vailing structure of the material world. See, for example, Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White
and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC, and London: Duke
University Press, 2010).
83. Ingrid Monson, “In Praise of Eclecticism: Relational Thinking and Theoretical
Assemblage,” Current Musicology 102 (2018): 191–207.
Twinkie Clark, Andraé Crouch, David Allen, LaShun Pace, John P. Kee, and
Kirk Franklin, among others.
This book’s focus on Richard Smallwood—in title, structure, and content—
reflects my conviction that he is especially illustrative of fundamental charac-
teristics in the Black gospel tradition. An ordained minister who earned the
degree of MDiv from Howard University’s School of Divinity, he epitomizes
the genre’s homiletic ethos. Through his recursive reanimation of scripture and
songs from various musical and textual predecessors, he distills the idiom’s pre-
occupation with tradition. As one known for “synthesizing” gospel music and
classical styles, he offers a particularly striking example of the “self-conscious
hybridity”84 that has shaped gospel since before it was called gospel. Most
importantly, Smallwood’s songs and statements—in public performances and
in interviews with me—offer trenchant insights into the primacy of the vamp
to the gospel choir repertory. As a product of one of the genre’s oldest living
composers, Smallwood’s catalog is an ideal site on which to center this study,
moving, as Chapter 3 does, from one of his earlier songs, “I Love the Lord,” to
one of his most recent, “Same God,” and demonstrating the historical continu-
ity of the vamp’s interworldly function.
Each chapter of Healing for the Soul begins with one of Smallwood’s songs;
three of the chapters end in the same way. The question each answers is “which
aspect of the Gospel Imagination does this song, performance, or contention
elucidate?” In each case, these statements and sounds are placed in gospel’s
broader context, using a dialogic view to explain the tradition’s incarnational
approach to text and time, and its orienting preoccupation with escalation.
While the many analytical vignettes and theomusical insights taken from other
composers amplify the theoretical points made in the various chapters and sec-
tions, the vamp’s centrality to the gospel tradition will become even clearer to
readers when they see the important work this climactic musical section does in
each of Smallwood’s best-known songs. In this book, Smallwood’s oeuvre func-
tions like a gospel song, forming a musical community around shared beliefs.
Gospel and I: “I Love It When You Play

That Holy Ghost Chord”
The most important impact on this book comes from my own subject posi-
tion, about which I will now reflect. Black gospel is a tradition I love; many
of my earliest musical memories involve marathon gospel quartet concerts,
featuring assorted groups from Eastern North Carolina, and surrounding areas.
As a musician and composer, my central preoccupation has been gospel choir
84. Ramsey, Race Music, 199.

music. As an ordained minister, my preaching has been shaped by the Black

prophetic tradition and the logic of tuning up. More than an interpretive frame
for a scholarly study, then, the Gospel Imagination is, in part, a reflection of my
experience as a practitioner. Many of the book’s seminal insights were clarified
during a performance, in a moment when gospel’s worlds came into a tangible
configuration. My relationship to the Gospel Imagination, the fact that I am
what Mellonee Burnim aptly terms a “culture bearer and tradition bearer,”85
also shapes the repertory examined in these pages. Beyond Smallwood’s oeuvre,
my strategy for selecting which music to include in this study was not picked
on the basis of some metric such as chart position, but because of the ways in
which these songs illuminate crucial features of gospel performance. I have
attempted to choose music that is regularly performed in African American
churches and rituals, both on Sunday mornings and in moments of national cel-
ebration and mourning—like the funerals for George Floyd, Jr. in Minneapolis;
Raeford, North Carolina; and Houston in June of 2020. As a result, I expect that
most gospel participants will be intimately familiar with the lion’s share of the
selections examined in these pages.
This book is an invitation to a particular hearing of the gospel tradition.The
vamp and tuning up are guides for this hearing; each is a “lens” for my analysis.86
And I am well aware of the force that such frames can exert. Therefore, I want
to emphasize that, while tuning up is a “lens” for this study, it is not just a heu-
ristic: tuning up and the vamp are vital parts of this musical practice. Tuning
up pervades songs and sermons because it reflects fundamental beliefs about
the navigability of worlds, the function of musical sound, and the purpose(s) of
public worship. While the hearing offered in the pages is mine, it is not only
mine. The conversations I have had with gospel musicians, and the attention
I pay to the way these musicians frame their performances, have given me an
opportunity to put my hearing to the test.What emerges is a productive way of
thinking about the structure and functions of gospel song.
While I aim this book toward a broad interdisciplinary audience, music anal-
ysis is one of its primary tools. My method reflects the fact that this book is, in
part, about the practice of music analysis. Rather than moving away from ques-
tions of meaning and function, I contend that this kind of close reading offers
a deeper understanding of the way gospel works. And, given gospel’s generative
place in genealogies of American and popular music, the analytical attention this
book gives to gospel songs—and their vamps—is long overdue. Since almost all
85. Mellonee Burnim, “Culture Bearer and Tradition Bearer: An Ethnomusicologist’s

Research on Gospel Music,” Ethnomusicology 29, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 432–447.
86. Suzannah Clark writes about the impact of choosing music-theoretic lenses in the
Introduction to Analyzing Schubert (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2011).
of the musicological and musico-theoretic attention given to popular music has

been trained on secular forms, this study’s theorization of gospel’s sacred stream
will contribute to an even more robust discussion of the structure and functions
of popular song. By attending to the work that the vamp does in gospel’s explic-
itly religious contexts, this book clarifies why the vamp is used to chase intensity
(spiritual or otherwise) in secular pop idioms. Moreover, I hope that this book’s
approach honors the seriousness and skillfulness that emanates from one of the
most generative traditions of American musicking. Just a quick glimpse at one of
thousands of gospel YouTube tutorials illustrates the devotional technicity that
inspires my project.
Throughout this text, I strive to make the meaning of analytical detail
immediately apparent, so that, in just a few sentences, even the most jargon-
laden statements yield interpretive fruit. This approach, too, is in keeping with
an understanding of this music’s function, of the way complex musical inflec-
tions become apparent to their audiences. I owe this insight to one of my
communities. In one of the most memorable conversations of my ministerial
career, Sister Lawson, a congregant at Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church in
Durham, North Carolina, exclaimed, “I love it when you play that Holy Ghost
chord!” Although this congregant is neither a musician nor a minister, her quick
turn of phrase distilled the alchemy of music and belief that I address in these
pages.Yes, Sister Lawson’s words have stuck with me, offering confirmation of
the attention that many gospel congregants pay to the manipulation of musical
sound, precisely because of its centrality to their experience of the holy. Her
words reminded me that, although I learned various analytical metalanguages
in the music departments of Duke University and the University of Chicago,
I developed a deep embodied attachment to tonality as a young musician, play-
ing for devotional services and accompanying extemporaneous congregational
singing. It was there and then that I learned how to listen. In this book, I seek
to share some of what I heard.
* * *
Much like the gospel song, this monograph has a cumulative design; the
various chapters build on one another, leading to a theory of the vamp in
Chapter 4.
Chapter 1, “‘A Balm In Gilead’: ‘Tuning Up’ and the Gospel Imagination,”
grapples with the oft-cited interrelation of characteristically Black preaching
and gospel music, using what has been called “the musicality of Black preach-
ing” to understand the centrality of vamps to gospel singing. I will argue that
this cumulative turn toward musicality is more than just a homiletical strat-
egy: rather, it functions as the formal logic, the organizing principle, for the
network of belief, performance, and reception that we have come to know as
the Gospel Imagination. Tuning up catalyzes movement between “material”

and “spiritual” worlds, manifesting gospel’s belief that sound is a vehicle for
interworldly exchange. The chapter begins with the live recorded performance
of Richard Smallwood’s song “Healing” (1998), which shows how this piece
stages its own transcendence, musically performing, within the context of song,
what is performed in sermons by the shift from speech to song. After shaping an
understanding of tuning up by using discourses drawn from homiletics, ritual
theory, and phenomenology, I offer a fuller sense of this constitutive practice
by attending to vignettes from four sermons, and four songs: Walter Hawkins’s
“Marvelous,” Judith McAllister’s “High Praise,” Myrna Summers’s “Oh, How
Precious,” and Glenn Burleigh’s “Order My Steps.”
Chapters 2 and 3 seek to understand how tuning up grants believers access
to the invisible. Chapter 2, “The Moment That Changed Everything: Gospel
Music and the Incarnation of Time,” theorizes the simultaneous embodied
experience of multiple forms of time in gospel music. It argues that tuning
up reorganizes the experience of time, enacting a transcendent interruption
of musical temporality. In so doing, this irruptive practice reproduces the
incarnation of Christ, sonifying the divine’s appearance in the material world.
Smallwood’s paraphrase of the spiritual “Calvary” anchors this chapter, doing
for my argument what the crucifixion does for the Gospel Imagination. The
chapter’s first section examines the song’s 2001 live recording, a performance
whose particularly urgent interpenetration of musical, liturgical, and historical
temporalities summons one of tuning up’s most common manifestations—a
trope colloquially referred to as “the Baptist close.” Then I turn to three of
the gospel tradition’s most canonical renderings of Christ’s Passion, Margaret
Douroux’s “He Decided to Die,” David Allen’s “No Greater Love,” and Andraé
Crouch’s “The Blood.” When these performances are viewed together with
“Calvary,” they reveal an incarnational approach to time: a belief that Jesus’s
interruption of human history can be rearticulated through song. As these
songs move back and forth between their site of contemporary performance
and various scriptural narratives, between conception and crucifixion, and
between crucifixion and resurrection, what they offer is no mere retelling: they
assert a critique of linear temporality, producing kairos, a transcendent instant
that links time and eternity. Kairos’s embodied evidence is the subject of the
chapter’s third move. Returning to the live recording of “Calvary,” this section
of the chapter attends to the extended period of holy dancing that framed its
performance—the “‘He Got Up’ Shout.” I will show that the form of inter-
worldly movement that is often referred to as “shouting” constitutes one of
tuning up’s principal bodily manifestations. Shouting is an incarnational prac-
tice, a contemporary revelation of holy presence in human flesh.Through close
readings of LaShun Pace’s “In Everything Give Thanks,” Glenn Burleigh’s “The
Another random document with
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III.
PELON JA TUSKAN SYVYYDESTÄ.
»Minun sydämeni vapisee minussa, ja kuoleman pelko on

langennut minun päälleni. Pelko ja vapistus tulevat minun päälleni,
ja kauhistus peittää minut.» Ps. 56: 5,6.
»Sinä olet koetellut minun sydämeni, ja etsiskellyt sitä öisin —»

Ps. 17:3.
»Sinä päivänä kuin minä pelkään, luotan minä Sinuun.» ps. 66:4.
»Herra on minun valkeuteni ja pelastukseni, ketä minä pelkäisin?

Herra
on minun henkeni tuki, ketä minä vapiseisin?» Ps. 27:1.
»Koska minä Herraa etsin, kuuli Hän minun rukoukseni, ja Hän

pelasti
minut kaikesta, mikä kauhistutti minua.» Ps, 34:6.
Tuskinpa on ketään, joka ei väliin olisi sanonut itselleen: —

»Jumala on niin pyhä, niin puhdas ja ihana, mutta minä olen niin
väärintekijä, saastainen ja alhainen! ja Jumala on niin suuri ja
mahtava, mutta minä olen niin pieni ja heikko! Mitä on minun
tehtävä? Eiköhän Jumala vihaa ja halveksi minua? Eikö Hän tahtone
ottaa minulta pois kaikkia, mitä minä enin rakastan? Eikö Hän
tahtone heittää minua loppumattomaan kidutukseen, kun minä
kuolen? Kuinka minä voisin päästä pois Hänestä? Kuinka kurja
ihminen minä olen, minä en voi päästä Hänestä erilleni! Kuinka minä
siis voisin kääntää pois Hänen vihansa? Kuinka minä voisin saada
Hänet muuttamaan mielensä? Kuinka minä voisin lepyttää ja
tyydyttää Hänet? Mitä minun olisi tehtävä päästäkseni erilleen
Hänestä?»
Onko teillä koskaan ollut semmoisia ajatuksia? Ja saitteko

koskaan kokea, että semmoiset ajatukset, semmoinen orjallinen
Jumalan vihan ja helvetin tuskain pelko tekivät teitä paremmiksi
ihmisiksi? Minä ainakaan en ole sitä kokenut. Ennen kuin te tulette
niitten yläpuolelle — niin korkealle niistä kuin taivas on helvetistä,
niin korkealle kuin vapaa poika on kurjasta, matelevasta orjasta, —
vahingoittavat ne teitä enempi kuin hyödyttävät. Tämä orjuuden
henki, tämä orjallinen pelko ei lähennä meitä Jumalaan, vaan
työntää yhä kauvemmaksi Hänestä. Se ei saa meitä vihaamaan
pahaa, se saapi meidät ainoasti pelkäämään rangaistusta siitä.
Kuinka me siis voimme välttää pahan omantunnon pelotuksia ja

kurjuutta ja kohota ylös synneistämme? Uskokaa mitä teidän
kasteenne selittää. Teidän kasteenne sanoo teille: »Jumala on sinun
Isäsi, Hän ei vihaa sinua, joskin olisit suurin syntinen maan päällä.
Hän rakastaa sinua, sillä sinä olet Hänen lapsensa, eikä Hän tahdo
syntisen kuolemaa, vaan tahtoo kaikkien pelastusta. Hän ei vihaa
mitään, jota luonut on.» Tämä on sinun kasteesi sanoma — että sinä
olet Jumalan lapsi, ja että se on Jumalan tahto ja toivo, että sinun
tulee kasvaa ja tulla Hänen pojakseen, palvellaksesi Häntä
rakkaudessa, luottamuksessa ja miehuullisesti, ja että Hän voipi ja
tahtoo antaa sinulle voimaa siihen; niin, Hän on jo antanut sinulle
sen voiman, jos sinä vain tahdot pyytää sitä ja käyttää sitä. Mutta
sinun on pyydettävä ja käytettävä sitä, sentähden ettei sinun ole
oltava ainoasti Jumalan itsepäinen, tietämätön ja itserakas lapsi,
joka tottelee Häntä rangaistuksen pelosta, vaan sinun tulee olla
Hänen kuuliainen, rakastavainen ja totinen poikansa.
National Sermons.
Jumala ei ole hirmuvaltias, jota on lepytettävä lahjoilla, eikä

työnteettäjä, jota on tyydytettävä hänen orjainsa työllä. Hän on Isä,
joka rakastaa lapsiaan, joka antaa ja rakkaudesta antaa, joka antaa
kaikkea runsaasti soimaamatta. Hän ei totisesti halua kenenkään
syntisen kuolemaa, vaan soisi hänen kääntyvän pahuudestaan ja
elävän. Hes. 33:11. Hänen tahtonsa on hyvä tahto, ja kuinka paljon
tahansa ihmisten synti ja hulluus voipikin vastustaa sitä ja joksikin
ajaksi näyttää johtavan sen väärään, niin on Hän kuitenkin liika suuri
ja liika hyvä halveksiakseen tai moittiakseen ketään ihmistä, ei edes
pahinta. Kärsivällisesti, jalosti, jalomielisesti odottaa Jumala —
odottaa että ihminen, joka on hullu, huomaisi oman hulluutensa;
odottaa että se sydän, joka on koettanut löytää huvinsa kaikessa
muussa, on huomaava kaikessa muussa pettyvänsä, ja tulee
takaisin Hänen tykönsä, kaiken terveen ilon lähteelle, kaiken
ihmiselle todella sopivan elämän kaivolle. Kun hullu huomaa
hulluutensa, kun itsepäinen ihminen luopuu itsepäisyydestään, kun
kapinoitsija alistuu lain alaiseksi, kun poika palajaa takaisin Isänsä
kotiin — ei ole mitään ankaruutta, ei mitään nuhdetta, ei mitään
kostoa; vaan Jumalan ijankaikkinen, rajaton rakkaus tulvii vastaan
niinkuin ennenkin. Luoja on alentunut odottamaan luomakuntaansa,
koska Hän ei tahdo ottaa vastaan luomakuntansa pelkoa, vaan
luotujen olentojensa rakkautta; ei ihmisen huulien, vaan sydämen
kuuliaisuutta, koska Hän tahtoi että ihminen palajaisi takasin, ei
vapisevana orjana herransa luo, vaan poikana, joka vihdoinkin
huomasi, minkälainen isä hänellä oli, jonka hän oli hylännyt, ja tuli
sen tuntemaan silloin kun kaikki muu petti. Antaa hänen tulla
semmoisena takasin ja hän on havaitseva, että kaikki on anteeksi
annettu, ja kuulee Isän sanovan: »Tämä minun poikani oli kuollut ja
virkosi jälleen; hän oli kadonnut ja on taas löydetty.» Luk. 15:24.
Discipline and other Sermons.
Kun myrsky tulee; kun murhe, pelko, ahdistus ja häpeä tulee,

silloin alkaa Kristuksen risti tulla meille tärkeäksi. Sillä silloin
katsomme me kurjuudessamme ja hämmennyksessämme ylös
taivaaseen ja kysymme: Onko taivaassa Yksi, joka ymmärtää kaiken
tämän? Käsittääkö Jumala minun vaikeuteni? Tunteeko Jumala
minun vaikeuteni? Välittääkö Jumala minun vaikeudestani? Tietääkö
Jumala mitä vaikeudet merkitsevät? Tai onko minun taisteltava
elämän taistelu yksin, niin ettei Jumala ymmärrä eikä auta minua,
joka loi minut ja on asettanut minut tänne? Silloin tuopi Kristuksen
sydän sanoman meidän sydämeemme, jota ei mikään muu eikä
kukaan muu olento maan päällä voi tuoda. Sillä se sanoo meille:
Jumala ymmärtää sinut pienimpään, sillä Kristus ymmärtää sinut.
Kristus tuntee sinun puolestasi; Kristus tuntee sinun kanssasi;
Kristus on kärsinyt sinun kanssasi ja kärsii sinun kanssasi. Sinä et
voi saada mitään kokea, jota ei Kristus olisi kokenut. Hän, Jumalan
Poika, kärsi köyhyyttä, pelkoa, häpeää, kuolon tuskaa jopa
kuoleman sinun tähtesi, että Hän taitaisi tuntea sinun heikkoutesi ja
auttaa sinua kestämään ja johtaa sinua turvallisesti kaiken läpi
voittoon ja rauhaan.
Westminster Sermons.
Vaikk'emme onnellisesti kyllä enää usko kummituksia, joitten

ennen aikaan sanottiin tulevan noitain, kyöpelien ja pahain henkien
kautta, on kuitenkin olemassa yksi kummitus, jota meidän on
uskottava, sillä se tulee meille Jumalalta ja sitä on kuunneltava
niinkuin Jumalan ääntä, ja se on meidän oman synnin, hulluuden ja
heikkouden pelko, joka tulee meille unissa ja unettomina öinä. Me
voimme oppia jotain näistä yöllisistä haaveista ja yöllisistä unista;
sillä ne ovat usein Jumalan sanomana meille, ja kutsuvat meitä
katumukseen ja elämän parannukseen. Ne ovat usein Jumalan
tuomion kirjana, johon meidän synnit ovat kirjotetut ja jonka Jumala
levittää eteemme näyttääkseen meille niitä, mitä olemme tehneet.
Jumala lähettää ihmisille unia, jotka johtavat näkemään
entisyyttämme ja muistuttavat menneistä asioista, jotka kovin
helposti ovat unohtuneet; ja nämä nöyryyttävät, katumusta
herättävät unet ovat Jumalan varoitus siitä, että luonnon saastutus
on uudesta syntyneissäkin ja ettei mikään ilman Jumalan Hengen
alituista apua voi varjella meitä jälleen lankeemasta tai Jumalasta
poistumasta.
Pelotususkonto on mitä pintapuolisin kaikista uskonnoista.

Jumalan vastustamaton tahto ja Hänen kaikkivaltiutensa voivat
itsessään näyttää pimeiltä, joskin syviltä, niinkuin kalvinilaiset ne
käsittävät, koska he eivät ymmärrä Hänen siveellistä olentoaan. Sen
tosiasian ohella, että Hän on armollinen niin hyvin kuin vanhurskas
Jumala, muistakaa että Hänen sisin olentonsa on rakkaus, ja silloin
ukkospilvi tiukkuu kultaa ja täyttyy hiljaisesta sateesta ja puhtaasta
valosta. Kaikki Jumalan syvyydet ovat kirkkaat ja loistavat; sillä
Jumala on valkeus.
Letters and Memories.
Minä en hätäile enkä tahdo hätäillä mistään (Jumalan avulla, joka

tähän asti on auttanut minua). Miksi väsyttäisimme sitä vähäistä
elämää, joka meissä on, kun Hän on luvannut pitää huolen meistä,
uudistaa nuoruutemme ja runsaasti antaa meille kaikkea, mikä on
hyvää meille?
Ja mitä meidän vaikeuksiimme tulee, eikö meille ole sanottu:

»Niinkuin sinun ikäsi, niin sinun väkevyytesi lisääntyy». 5 Mos.
33:25. Eikö vaikeudetkin ole Jumalan lähettämät? Jumala ei salli
onnen maljan tulla kovin makeaksi. Ja kun katsot niitä, eivätkö ne ole
olleet siunattuja opetuksia? Emmekö ole aina kiusauksista päässeet
ulos? Siten saapi Jumala aikaan hyvää pahasta, eli oikeammin
välttämättömästä saapi Hän aikaan voimaa. Korkein hengellinen
kasvatus on täynnä mitä pienimpiä ajallisia tapauksia, ja halvinkin
satunnainen puute voipi tulla välikappaleeksi herättämään eloon
uinuvia, mitä jaloimpia lahjoja.
Se on suuri salaisuus; mutta me olemme aikaan ja paikkaan

kytkettyjä eläimiä; ja läpi aikojen erityisissä paikoissa kasvatetaan
meidän eläimellistä luontoamme. Olkaamme sentähden vain
kärsivällisiä, kärsivällisiä; ja antakaamme Jumalan, meidän Isämme,
opettaa meille Hänen omat opinkappaleensa Hänen omalla
tavallaan. Koettakaamme oppia se hyvin ja oppia se pian; mutta
elkäämme kuvailko että Hän alkaa soittaa koulun kelloa ja laskee
meidät ulos leikkimään, ennen kuin meidän oppijaksomme on opittu.

Elämän kaikissa vaiheissa elä suinkaan pidä — minä pyydän
sinua — mitä Jumala lähettää, vahingollisena meille, vaan usko että
Hän lähettää meille, mikä hyödyllistä on. Muista että kaikki nämät
seikat ovat oikeat ja tulevat meille erityisestä syystä, erityisellä
tarkotuksella ja niitten takana on erityinen ajatus kätkettynä; ja joka
napisee niitä vastaan, hän ei usko elävään Jumalaan (ei ainakaan
siinä silmänräpäyksessä).
Elä luule, etten minä usein joutuisi hämilleni: »masentuneena,

vaan ei kadotettuna», 2 Kor. 4:9. Ei, Kristus hallitsee, kuten Lutherus
tavallisesti sanoi — ja sentähden en minä pelkää, »vaikka vuoret
siirtyisivät (ja minä niitten kanssa) ja heitettäisiin keskelle merta».
Kaikki nämä tuskat tulevat sinulle hyödyksi. Ne ovat kaikki

tarpeelliset ihmisen synnyttämiseksi — koska ne kehittävät hänessä
sitä Jumalassa riippuvaisuutta, joka on ainoa oikea itsenäisyys,
ainoa oikea voima. Oikein sanoi vanha Hiskias: »Herra, niistä elää
ihminen (nim. vankeuksista, surusta, sairaudesta), ja niitten kautta
koko minun henkeni elämä ylläpidetään». Es. 38:16.
M.S. Letters.
Meidän Herramme sanoi: »Elkää murehtiko huomisesta päivästä;

sillä huomisella päivällä on suru itsestään; tyytyköön kukin päivä
suruunsa.» Mat. 6:34. Ja emmekö saa kokea että Herramme sana
on tosi? Ketkä ovat ne ihmiset, jotka saavat enin työtä tehdyksi
elämässään vähimmillä vaivoilla? Ovatkoon ne hätäileviä ihmisiä?
Ovatkoon ne niitä, jotka kuvittelevat itselleen kaikellaisia
vastoinkäymisiä ja jotka alituiseen kysyvät: mitähän jos tuo eli tämä
tapahtuisi? Kuinkahan mulle tulisi mahdolliseksi päästä semmoisten
vaikeuksien läpi? Ei, kaukana siitä. Elkäämme kuluttako sitä voimaa,
minkä Jumala on antanut meille täksi päiväksi, turhaan pelkoon eli
turhiin unelmiin huomispäivästä. Kullakin päivällä on kylliksi huolia ja
suruja. Sen vaikeudet ovat kylliksi siksi päiväkseen ja sen siunaukset
samoin. Tämä päivä ja huominen voipi saada kokonaan toisen lopun
kuin me olimme toivoneet. Niin kyllä — mutta ne voivat myöskin
saada aivan toisen lopun kuin olimme pelänneet. Elä katso kovin
kauvaksi tulevaisuuteen, ett'et tulisi näkemään tulevaisia, ennen kuin
voit kestää sitä näkyä. Jos me saisimme edeltä päin nähdä tulevia
vaikeuksia, voisi se ehkä murtaa sydämemme; ja jos saisimme
edeltä päin nähdä tulevaa onnea, voisi se ehkä hämmentää
päämme. Elkäämme sekautuko tulevaisuuteen, vaan
tyynnyttäkäämme sielumme ja pysyttäkäämme se yksinkertasena
niin kuin pienet lapset, jotka tyytyvät kunkin päivän ruokaan, kunkin
päivän läksyjen lukuun ja leikkituntiin, jonka ohella meidän tulee olla
varmat, että Taivaallinen Mestari tietää kaiken, mikä oikein on ja
miten Hän tahtoo kasvattaa meitä ja mihin Hän tahtoo ohjata meitä,
vaikk'emme sitä tiedä emmekä tarvitse muuta tietää kuin sen, että se
tie, jota myöten Hän johtaa jokaista meistä — jos me vain
tottelemme ja seuraamme, askel askeleelta — viepi ylös kohti
ijankaikkista elämää.
All Saints’ Day Sermons.

IV.
YKSINÄISYYDEN, ONNISTUMATTOMUUDEN JA PETTYMYSTEN

SYVYYDESTÄ.
»Minun sydämeni on lyöty ja kuivettunut kuin heinä. Minä olen

kuin
yksinäinen lintu katolla.» Ps. 102: 5,8.
»Minun ystäväni ja sukulaiseni pysyvät erillään minun vaivoistani,

ja
minun lähimäiseni seisovat kaukana.» Ps. 38:12.
»Katso minun oikealle puolelleni ja näe! Siellä ei yksikään tahdo

minua tuntea; turvaa ei ole minulla missään, ei kukaan välitä minun
sielustani. Herra, Sinua minä huudan ja sanon: Sinä olet minun
turvani. Koska minun henkeni on ahdistuksessa, tiedät Sinä
kuitenkin minun tieni.» Ps. 142:4—6.
»Herra on armollinen ja vanhurskas, ja meidän Jumalamme on

laupias.
Minä olin viheliäinen, ja Hän pelasti minut.» Ps. 116: 5,6.
Suru — suru ja onnistumattomuus — pakoittavat ihmiset
uskomaan, että on Yksi, joka kuulee rukouksen, pakoittavat heidät
korottamaan silmänsä sen Yhden puoleen, joka heitä auttaa. Kun
meitä todellisuudessa kohtaavat pelättävät vaarat, kuolema,
pettymykset, häpeä ja häviö — ja etenkin ansaittu häpeä ja ansaittu
häviö — sulavat kaikki syyt pois; ja se mies eli nainen, joka aikanaan
oli liika kernas sanomaan: »Voi, Jumala ei näe eikä kuule», alkaa
kiihkeästi toivoa, että Jumala todella näkee, että Jumala todella
kuulee. Synkkinä hetkinä, jolloin ei mitään lohdutusta tai apua ole
ihmisellä, jolloin hänellä ei ole mitään pakopaikkaa, eikä kukaan
ihminen välitä hänen sielustaan, silloin tulee tuo pelätty, mutta mitä
siunatuin kaikista kysymyksistä esille: Mutta eikö ole Yksi, joka on
korkeampi kuin kukaan ihminen, jonka turviin minä voin paeta? Eikö
ole Yksi, joka on korkeampi kuin ihminen, ja joka välittää minun
sielustani ja niitten sieluista, jotka ovat minulle rakkaammat kuin oma
sieluni? Eikö ole ketään ystävää? Ketään auttajaa? Ketään
vapauttajaa? Ketään neuvon antajaa? Eikö ole edes ketään
tuomaria? Eikö ketään rankaisijaa? Eikö Jumalaa, olkoonpa niinkin
että Hän on kuluttava tuli? Olenko minä surkeudessani yksin
avaruudessa? Onko minun kurjuuteni aivan aatteeton ja toivoton?
Ellei ole ketään Jumalaa, niin on kaikki minulle toivotonta ja kuolon
omaista. Mutta jos on olemassa Jumala, silloin voin minä toivoa, että
on jotain tarkotusta minun surkeudellani; että se tulee minulle
erityisestä syystä, olkoonpa niinkin että se on minun oma syyni.
Silloin voin minä keskustella Jumalan kanssa, joskin ehkä yhtä
kiihkeillä sanoilla kuin Job ja kysyä: Mikä on tämän surun tarkotus?
Mitä olen minä tehnyt? Mitä pitäisi minun tekemän? Minä tahdon
sanoa Jumalalle: »Elä minua tuomitse, anna minun tietää, miksi sinä
taistelet minun kanssani! — Minä tahdon puhua Kaikkivaltiaalle, ja
minä haluan todistaa asiani Jumalan edessä.» Job. 10:2; 13:3. Oi,
ystäväni, minä uskon että ihminen voipi saada rohkeutta ja viisautta
puhua näin ainoasti Pyhän Hengen kautta. Mutta kun hän kerran on
sanonut näin sydämestään, alkaa hän tulla vanhurskautetuksi
uskosta; sillä hän uskoo Jumalaan. Hänellä on ollut luottamus
Jumalaan — niin, paljoa enempi — hän on tunnustanut Jumalan
vanhurskauden. Hän on tunnustanut, ettei Jumala ole ainoasti voima
tai luonnon laki, ei ainoasti hirmuhaltija tai kiusanhenki; vaan järkevä
Olento, joka tahtoo kuulla järkevää puhetta, ja vanhurskas Olento,
joka tahtoo osoittaa vanhurskautta Hänen luomiaan olentoja
kohtaan.
Westminster Sermons
Kuta syvempi ja katkerampi sinun yksinäisyytesi on, sitä enempi

olet sinä Hänen kaltaisensa, joka huusi ristillä: »Minun Jumalani,
minun Jumalani, miksis minun hylkäsit?» Hän tietää miltä
semmoinen suru tuntuu. Hän tuntee pienimmänkin sinun tähtesi.
Vaikka kaikki hylkäisivät sinut, Hän on vielä sinun kanssasi, ja jos
Hän on sinun kanssasi, mitäpä se silloin tekee, jos kuka tahansa on
sinut vähäksi ajaksi hylännyt? Ei toki mitään, sillä autuaat ovat, jotka
nyt itkevät; sillä ketä Herra rakastaa, sitä Hän kurittaa; ja sentähden
että Hän rakastaa köyhiä, sallii Hän heidän tulla syvälle nöyryyteen.
Kaikki ovat nyt siunatut, paitse synti; sillä kaikki paitse synti ovat
vapaaksi ostetut Jumalan Pojan elämän ja kuoleman kautta.
Siunatut ovat viisaus ja rohkeus, ilo ja terveys, kauneus, rakkaus ja
avioliitto, lapsuus ja miehuus, jyvät ja viinipuun hedelmä, muut
hedelmät ja kukkaset; sillä Kristus osti ne elämällään vapaiksi. Ja
siunatut ovat myöskin kyyneleet ja häpeä, siunatut ovat heikkous ja
rumuus, siunatut ovat kuoleman tuska ja sairaus, siunatut ovat
meidän syntiemme surullinen muisto ja särjetty sydän ja katuvainen
henki. Siunattu on kuolema ja siunatut ne tuntemattomat tienoot,
missä henki odottaa ylösnousemisen päivää; sillä Kristus lunasti ne
kuolemallaan. Siunatut ovat kaikki, heikot yhtä hyvin kuin
voimallisetkin. Siunatut ovat kaikki päivät, pimeät kuin valosatkin,
sillä kaikki ovat Hänen ja Hän on meidän; ja kaikki ovat meidän, ja
me olemme Hänen ainiaaksi.
Sentähden huokailkaa vain, te murheelliset, ja iloitkaa keskellä

murhettanne; kärsikää edelleen, te kärsiväiset, ja iloitkaa keskellä
surujanne. Iloitkaa siitä että olette tulleet surevain pyhän
veljeskunnan jäseniksi; iloitkaa että teidät on katsottu mahdollisiksi
Jumalan Pojan kärsimysten yhteyteen. Iloitkaa ja uskokaa edelleen;
sillä surun jälkeen tulee ilo. Uskokaa edelleen; sillä ihmisen
heikkoudessa on Jumalan voima tuleva täydelliseksi. 2 Kor. 12:9.
Uskokaa edelleen; sillä kuolema on elämän portti. Pysykää lujana
loppuun asti ja pitäkää sielunne kärsivällisyydessä lyhyen aikaa
(Luk. 21:19), ja ehkä hyvinkin lyhyen aikaa. Kuolema tulee pian, ja
pikemmin vielä ehkä Herran Jesuksen päivä. Kuta syvempi suru on,
sitä lähempänä on pelastus: Yö on pimein juuri ennen päivän
nousua; kun tuska on suurin, syntyy lapsi; ja Jesuksen päivä on nyt
käsissä.
National Sermons
Sinä joka olet uupunut ja vaivautunut; sinä joka muutamin ajoin

kuvailet että Herran käsi on lyhetty, ettei se voi pelastaa, ja olet
valmis huudahtamaan: Jumala on minut unohtanut; ota sinä vastaan
lohdutus ja katso Kristukseen. Sinä et voi koskaan tulla varmaksi
Jumalan rakkaudesta, niin kauvan kuin et muista, että se on sama
kuin Kristuksen rakkaus; ja katsomalla Kristukseen opit sinä
tuntemaan sinun Isäsi ja Hänen Isänsä, jonka kaltainen ja jonka
kuva Hän on, ja sinä saat nähdä että se Henki, joka käypi ulos
Heistä molemmista, on laupeuden ja rakkauden Henki, joka ei voi
olla menemättä ulos etsiäkseen ja pelastaakseen sinua, siitä
yksinkertasesta syystä että sinä olet kadotettu. Katso Kristukseen,
sanon minä; ja ole varma siitä, että mitä laupias Samarialainen teki
haavoittuneelle matkustajalle, sen saman tekee Hän sinulle, koska
Hän on Ihmisen Poika, inhimillinen ja ihmisrakas.
Oletko sinä ryöstetty, haavoitettu, hyljätty, jätetty kuolemaan,

kulunut elämän taisteluissa ja pudonnut maailman epätasaiselle
maantielle ilman neuvoa, ilman voimaa, ilman toivoa, ilman
suunnitelmia? Silloin muista että täällä maailmassa kulkee Yksi,
näkymätön, vaan kaikkialla läsnä oleva, jonka näkö on kuin Ihmisen
Pojan näkö. Ja Hänellä on aikaa, ja Hänellä on tahtoa pysähtymään
ja palvelemaan semmoisia kuin sinä! Ei ole ketään ihmisolentoa niin
halpaa, ei mitään inhimillistä surua niin pientä, jota kohtaan Hänellä
ei olisi aikaa, tahtoa ja voimaa osottaa laupeutta, koska Hän on
Ihmisen Poika. Sentähden tahtoo Hän myös pysähtyä sinun
luoksesi, olepa ken tahansa, jos olet väsynyt ja vaivautunut etkä voi
löytää mitään lepoa sielullesi, ja Hän pysähtyy juuri siinä
silmänräpäyksessä ja sillä tavalla, joka on paras sinulle. Kun sinä
olet kärsinyt kyllin kauvan, vahvistaa, voimistaa ja perustaa Hän
sinua. Hän on sitova sinun haavasi ja vuodattava niihin Hänen
Henkensä — Pyhän Hengen, Lohduttajan — öljyä ja viiniä ja hoitava
sinut omaan majaansa, josta on kirjoitettu: »Sinä suojelet heitä
kasvojesi edessä ihmisten salajuonilta, Sinä kätket heitä majassasi
riiteleväisiltä kieliltä. — Hän antaa käskyn enkeleillensä sinusta, että
he suojelevat sinua kaikilla teilläsi (Ps. 31:21; 91:11); ja lopuksi
antaa Hän sinulle levon Isän helmassa, josta sinä niinkuin kaikki
ihmissielut olet alussa lähtenyt, ja johon sinä lopuksi olet palautuva
yhdessä kaikkien niitten ihmissielujen kanssa, joilla on itsessään
Jumalan ja Kristuksen Henki ja ijankaikkinen elämä.
Me pidämme kaikki lohdutuksesta. Mutta minkälaisesta

lohdutuksesta me emme ainoasti pidä, vaan myös hyödymme?
Semmoisestako, joka miellyttää? Ja että saisimme olla vapaita
pelosta, tuskasta ja surusta? Semmoista lohdutusta me ihmisraukat
emme tarvitse tässä matoisessa maailmassa, että saamme elää
hyvinvoinnissa, vaan että tulemme voimakkaiksi. Meidän
tarvitsemamme lohduttaja ei ole semmoinen, joka tahtoo sanoa
ainoasti ystävällisiä sanoja, vaan joka tahtoo auttaa meitä — auttaa
uupunutta, yksinäistä, raskautettua sydäntä, jolla ei ole aikaa
levähtää. Me emme tarvitse loistavia, hymyileviä kasvoja, vaan
voimallista, auttavaa kättä. Sillä me voimme olla semmoisessa
tilassa, että hymyily loukkaa meitä ja että ystävällisyys — joskin
olemme siitä kiitolliset — ei lohduta meitä enempää kuin ihana
soitanto ihmistä, joka on hukkumaisillaan. Me voimme olla kurjat
emmekä voi muuten olla ja ehkä emme tahdokaan jättää
kurjuuttamme. Me emme halua luopua surustamme, emme tahdo
unohtaa sitä, emme uskalla sitä. Suru on niin kauhea, niin vihlova,
niin selvä, että Jumala, joka on meidän sydäntemme opettaja ja
holhooja, toivoo kai meidän näkevän sen kasvoista kasvoihin ja
kantavan sitä. Isämme on antanut meille kalkin — eikö meidän ole
juotava se? Oi jos meillä olisi lohduttaja, joka auttaisi meitä juomaan
loppuun katkeran maljan, että voisimme uskoa ja sanoa Jobin
kanssa: »Katso, vaikka Hän minut tappaisi, enkö minä vielä sittekin
toivoisi?» — että saisimme viisauden ottaa rauhallisesti vastaan
surumme ja oppia se läksy, minkä sen on meille opetettava, — että
se antaisi meille lujan tahdon pysymään raittiina ja hiljaa keskellä
maallisen elämän rientoja ja vaihteluita. Jos meillä olisi semmoinen
lohduttaja, emme välittäisi, joskin hän väliin näyttäisi enempi
ankaralta kuin lempeältä; me voisimme kärsiä nuhteita häneltä, jos
me vain saisimme häneltä viisauden ymmärtää nuhteet ja rohkeuden
kantaa kuritusta. Missä on semmoinen lohduttaja? Jumala vastaa:
Tämä Lohduttaja olen Minä, taivaan ja maan Luoja. Maan päällä on
lohduttajia, jotka voivat auttaa sinua viisailla sanoilla ja jaloilla
neuvoilla, jotka voivat olla voimallisia kuin mies ja helliä kuin nainen.
Mutta Jumala on voimallisempi kuin mies ja hellempi kuin nainen; ja
kun miehen voimakas käsivarsi ei enää sinua kanna, ovat sinun
tukenasi kuitenkin Ijankaikkiset Käsivarret.
All Saints' Day Sermons.
— — — Te olette pettyneet. Muistakaa, jos te tulette alakuloisiksi

työnne tähden, ettei siitä mitään ole hukkaan mennyt. Muistakaa että
hyvä puoli jokaisesta hyvästä työstä pysyy ja leviää ja pyrkii yhä
pitemmälle; ja se mikä epäonnistuu ja hukkaan menee on tapausten
ulkonainen kuori, joka ehkä olisi voinut olla paremmin tehty; mutta
paremmalla tai huonommalla ei ole mitään tekemistä tosi hengellisen
hyvän kanssa, jota sinä olet tehnyt ihmissydämille, ja siitä Jumala
varmaan tahtoo palkita sinua Hänen omana aikanaan ja Hänen
omalla tavallaan.
Elä masennu, joskin ulkonaista nöyryytystä, pettymystä ja

onnistumattomia yrityksiä annetaan sulle aluksi. Kun Jumala
totuudessa ja todella on Isämme, niin kurittaa Hän jokaista, ketä Hän
rakastaa, samoin kuin isä sitä poikaa, josta Hän iloitsee. Ja »ennen
kuin sinä olet tyhjennetty omasta itsestäsi, ei Jumala voi täyttää
sinua» on kuitenkin totinen ja käytännöllinen sääntö, vaikka se onkin
vanhain mystikkojen lause. Käy tietäsi eteenpäin, vaikkakin tie
totiseen valoon käypi pitkää polkua ylöspäin.
Mitä minun suunnitelmiini tulee, on se vähäinen asia, ovatko ne

onnistumattomia tai ei. Mutta vaikkakin satoja suunnitelmia
epäonnistuisi, ei se kuitenkaan minun vakuutustani muuta, että ne
ovat kokeita oikeaan suuntaan; ja minä tahdon kuolla toivossa
saavuttamatta lupauksia, mutta nähden ne kaukana ja tunnustaen,
että minä olen vieras ja pyhiinvaeltaja.
Siis minä olen tyytyväinen, kun minulle epäonnistuu. Koetuksieni

kautta olen minä oppinut arvaamattomia totuuksia itsestäni,
lähimäisistäni ja Jumalan Kaupungista, joka on ijankaikkinen
taivaassa, ja joka alituisesti tulee alas ihmisten joukkoon ja tulee yhä
lähemmäksi toteutumistaan kullekin tulevalle miespolvelle.
Me toivomme Kristukseen tulevassa elämässä niin hyvin kuin

tässäkin — toivomme että Hän tulevassa elämässä tahtoo antaa
meille voimaa, että se onnistuu, joka täällä epäonnistuu meille; että
Hän on tekevä meidät hyviksi ja hyvää tekeviksi ja joskaan emme
siellä tee toisia hyviksi (sillä me uskomme että siellä ovat kaikki
hyviä), niin täysin saamme nauttia sitä iloa, jota olemme kaivanneet
maan päällä — sitä iloa että näemme toisia hyviä, niinkuin Kristus on
hyvä ja täydellinen, niinkuin meidän taivaallinen Isämme on
täydellinen.
All Saints' Day Sermons.
Monta on, jotka Jumalan armosta ovat itseensä saaneet

jumalallisen janon korkeampaan elämään, jotka ovat tyytymättömiä
itseensä, häpiävät itseään, joita tyydyttämättömät kaipaukset
vaivaavat, vaikutukset, joita he eivät voi selittää, voimat, joita he
eivät voi käyttää, velvollisuudet, joita he eivät voi täyttää, eksyttävät
opit, joita he eivät voi saada selville; monta on, jotka tahtoisivat ilolla
tervehtiä jokaista muutosta, vaikkakin mitä kauheinta, joka tekisi
heidät jalommiksi, oikeammiksi, rakastavammiksi, hyödyllisemmiksi,
selvemmiksi sydämessä ja terveemmiksi mielessä; ja jotka
kuolemaa ajatellessa sanovat runoilijan kanssa: Elämää eikä
kuolemaa minä etsin, elämää minun hermoni harrastavat, enempi
elämää ja täydempää elämää minä tarvitsen. — Heille voimme
sanoa, minkä Jumala on sanonut jo kauvan sitte: Olkaa hyvässä
turvassa. Armolahjojaan ja kutsumistaan ei Jumala kadu. Rom.
11:29. Jos sulla on jumalallinen jano, tulee se varmaan tyydytetyksi.
Jos te halajatte tulla paremmiksi miehiksi ja vaimoiksi, niin te
varmaan tulette. Olkaa vain uskolliset näille korkeammille
vaikutuksille; oppikaa toki olemaan halveksimatta ja tukahuttamatta
tätä jumalallista janoa; taistelkaa vain edelleen, huolimatta
erehdyksistä, huolimatta onnistumattomista yrityksistä, vieläpä
huolimatta synneistä, joitten tähden teidän taivaallinen Isänne
kurittaa teitä, vaikkakin Hän antaa anteeksi; huolimatta kaikista
pettymyksistä taistelkaa edelleen. Autuaat olette te, jotka isootte ja
janootte vanhurskautta, sillä te ravitaan. Mat. 5:6. Teille sanotaan
tämä eikä turhaan: »Henki ja morsian sanovat: tule! Joka janoo, hän
tulkaan, ja joka tahtoo, hän ottakoon elämän vettä lahjaksi.» Tim.
22:17.
Water of Life—Sermons.
Ihmisen sydän ja sielu tarvitsee enempi kuin »uskonnon», niinkuin

on kirjotettu: »Minun sieluni janoo Jumalaa, elävää Jumalaa». Ps.
42:3. Ihminen tarvitsee elävän Jumalan, joka pitää huolen hänestä,
antaa anteeksi hänelle, pelastaa hänet hänen synneistään; ja Hänet
olen minä löytänyt Raamatusta enkä mistään muualta, paitse
elämän johdatuksista, joita Raamattu yksin selittää.
Mitä oli Kristuksen elämä? Se ei ollut täynnä syvämielisiä

tutkimuksia, hiljasia ajatuksia ja selviä näkyjä, vaan se oli elämää,
täynnä taistelua pahaa vastaan; totisia, kauhistavia rukouksia ja
taisteluita sisällisesti, alituista ruumiillista ja sielullista työtä
ulkonaisesti; pilkkaa ja vaaroja, hämminkiä ja ankaria koetuksia ja
katkeraa surua. Se oli Kristuksen elämä — se on melkein jokaisen
hyvän ja suuren miehen elämä, kenestä vain olen kuullut. Se oli
Kristuksen kalkki, josta Hänen oppilaittensa oli juotava yhtä hyvin
kuin Hänen; se oli se tulikaste, jolla he olivat kastettavat samoin kuin
Hän; sen oli oltava heidän uskon taistelunsa; se oli se murhe, jonka
läpi heidän ja kaikkein muitten suurten pyhimysten oli mentävä
taivasten valtakuntaan. Sillä se on varma että kuta kovemmin
ihminen taistelee pahaa vastaan, sitä kovemmin paha taistelee
vastapainoksi häntä vastaan; mutta se onkin varma että kuta
kovemmin ihminen taistelee syntiä vastaan, sitä enempi on hän
Vapahtajansa Kristuksen kaltainen, ja sitä ihanamman palkinnon hän
saavuttaa taivaassa.
Village Sermons.
V.
EPÄILYKSEN, PIMEYDEN JA HELVETIN SYVYYDESTÄ.
»Herra, minun autuuteni Jumala! Minä huudan päivällä ja yöllä

Sinun puoleesi. Anna minun rukoukseni tulla Sinun eteesi. Sillä
minun sieluni on surkeutta täynnä, ja minun elämäni on tullut liki
tuonelaa. — Sinä olet minun painanut syvyyksien kaivoon,
pimeyteen ja kadotukseen.» Ps. 88: 2—4,7.
»Jos minä vuoteeni tuonelaan rakentaisin, katso, sinä sielläkin

olet. — Sillä ei pimeys sinun edessäsi pimitä, ja yö valaisee
niinkuin päivä.» Ps. 139:12.
»Minä hartaasti odotin Herraa, ja Hän kallisti korvansa minun

puoleeni ja kuuli minun huutoni. Ja Hän veti minun ylös turmion
haudasta ja syvästä loasta, ja asetti minun jalkani kalliolle. Ja Hän
antoi minun suuhuni uuden laulun, ylistysvirren meidän
Jumalallemme.» Ps. 40:2—4.
»Mutta Jumala on vapahtava minun sieluni tuonelan vallasta,

sillä Hän korjaa minun luokseen.» Ps. 49:16.
Se on välistä totta että myrskyn jälkeen tulee päiväpaiste. Välistä
— kukapa voisi muuten elää? — vaan ei aina. Samoin on totta, että
useimpain ihmisten elämässä on vaikeita aikoja, jolloin iskut
seuraavat iskuja, laineet laineita, vastakkaisilta ja odottamattomilta
tahoilta, kunnes kaikki Jumalan aallot ovat vyöryneet sielun ylitse.
Kuinka pikkumaisia ja turhia ovatkaan semmoisina pimeinä aikoina
kaikki ylpeät koetukset riippua syvyyden päällä itseensä luottaen, ja
siinä koettaa kehittää itselleen luonnetta olosuhteitten avulla.
Ihmisestä näyttää kyllä helpolle ilman Jumalaa kasvattaa itseään,
niin kauvan kuin hän loikoo mukavasti toimetonna sohvallaan. Mutta
toista on joutua ihmiskunnan todellisten ja tavallisten kokemusten
pyörteisiin ja vihkiytyä vasten tahtoaan epäilyksen, pelon ja
pimeyden kauhujen kautta murheitten veljeskunnan jäseneksi, ja
siellä tulevat saman kaltaisiksi yksinkertaisin talonpoikaisvaimo ja
mitä suurin sielu, joka on vaikuttanut useihin sukupolviin. Olkoonpa
juutalainen, pakana tai kristitty, olkoonpa mies mitä vastakkaisimman
uskon ja elämän katsannon tunnustaja — olkoonpa Moses tai
Sokrates, Esaias tai Epictel, Augustinus tai Muhammed, Dante tai
Bernhard, Shakespeare tai Bacon — heillä kaikilla on yksi yhteinen
tuntomerkki, nim. että he vähintään yhden kerran elämässään ovat
vajonneet pohjattomaan syvyyteen ja siellä ovat he synkimmässä
pimeydessä kysyneet kaikkein tärkeimmän kysymyksen: »Onko
olemassa Jumala? ja jos on, mitä tekee Hän minulle? — Kun
ihminen tuntee olevansa turvaton näkymättömän voiman käsissä,
voimatta irtautua, ja tietämättä onko se vain satunnaista tai
välttämätöntä tai onko se hävittävä vihollinen; kun hän on tässä
asemassa, niin mikäpä pakopaikka olisi vetäytyä kovasti kuoreensa
ja huutaa: »minä tahdon kestää, vaikka koko maailma olisi minua
vastaan». Se kuuluu kyllä kauniilta! Mutta kuka on niin tehnyt? Ei, on
olemassa ainoasti yksi tie, yksi halkeama, jonka läpi me voimme

Healing For The Soul Richard Smallwood The Vamp and The Gospel Imagination Braxton D Shelley Full Chapter

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Healing For The Soul Richard Smallwood The Vamp and The Gospel Imagination Braxton D Shelley Full Chapter

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Healing for the Soul: Richard

Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

around a moment of transcendence, an instant when the song shifts to a height-

B efore the beginning of Richard Smallwood’s 1996 recording, Adoration: Live

title is “It’s Working (Romans 8:28)” (Audio/​Video Example I.1 ), reanimates

1. Romans 8:28, King James Version (KJV).

As Smallwood’s song works, turning musical sound into spiritual power,

2. Richard Smallwood, Total Praise: The Autobiography of Richard Smallwood (Newark,

Building on this eclectic collection of influences, Smallwood attended a

6. “Richard Smallwood,” The Kennedy Center, accessed January 6, 2017, http://​www.

The students’ resistance culminated in a takeover of the Howard Music

9. Reagon, If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me, 35.

According to Boyer, this moment represented a synthesis of “not only what

Smallwood’s answer raises two interwoven historiographic threads. First, he

and Guthrie Ramsey, among others—​has emphasized the cycles of controversy

17. Kurt Carr, telephonic interview, October 2019.

traveled nationally and internationally while he served as a choral clinician and

1930s, the enduring tensions between assimilationist and traditionalist strains of

27. Harris, Rise of the Gospel Blue, n.4, from interview.

37. Boyer, How Sweet the Sound, 248.

Pearl Williams-​Jones who viewed gospel music as an integral component of

39. Harold, “Lord, Let Me Be an Instrument,” 159.

in gospel music as a “troping cycle,” a “musical and ideological [remnant] of the

45. Ramsey, Race Music, 60, 200.

loud and emotive behavior constituted more than an individual’s impropriety

The Shift: “Tuning Up”

You walked with me all day long//​You kept me on my job

the “mixed-​type” preaching that emanated from old-​line Chicago pulpits in

This turn to a story, a characteristic way of setting up a sermonic climax, served

“by any means necessary.” This remarkable performance is also paradigmatic of

69. William Turner, “The Musicality of Black Preaching: A Phenomenology,” in

The Gospel Imagination

76. James K. A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy

Gospel and I: “I Love It When You Play

84. Ramsey, Race Music, 199.

music. As an ordained minister, my preaching has been shaped by the Black

85. Mellonee Burnim, “Culture Bearer and Tradition Bearer: An Ethnomusicologist’s

of the musicological and musico-​theoretic attention given to popular music has

the Gospel Imagination. Tuning up catalyzes movement between “material”

PELON JA TUSKAN SYVYYDESTÄ.

»Minun sydämeni vapisee minussa, ja kuoleman pelko on

»Sinä olet koetellut minun sydämeni, ja etsiskellyt sitä öisin —»

»Herra on minun valkeuteni ja pelastukseni, ketä minä pelkäisin?

»Koska minä Herraa etsin, kuuli Hän minun rukoukseni, ja Hän

Tuskinpa on ketään, joka ei väliin olisi sanonut itselleen: —

Onko teillä koskaan ollut semmoisia ajatuksia? Ja saitteko

Kuinka me siis voimme välttää pahan omantunnon pelotuksia ja

Jumala ei ole hirmuvaltias, jota on lepytettävä lahjoilla, eikä

Discipline and other Sermons.

Kun myrsky tulee; kun murhe, pelko, ahdistus ja häpeä tulee,

Vaikk'emme onnellisesti kyllä enää usko kummituksia, joitten

Discipline and other Sermons.

Pelotususkonto on mitä pintapuolisin kaikista uskonnoista.

Letters and Memories.

Minä en hätäile enkä tahdo hätäillä mistään (Jumalan avulla, joka

Ja mitä meidän vaikeuksiimme tulee, eikö meille ole sanottu:

Se on suuri salaisuus; mutta me olemme aikaan ja paikkaan

Letters and Memories.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

title is “It’s Working (Romans 8:28)” (Audio/Video Example I.1 ), reanimates

6. “Richard Smallwood,” The Kennedy Center, accessed January 6, 2017, http://www.

and Guthrie Ramsey, among others—has emphasized the cycles of controversy

Pearl Williams-Jones who viewed gospel music as an integral component of

You walked with me all day long//You kept me on my job

the “mixed-type” preaching that emanated from old-line Chicago pulpits in

of the musicological and musico-theoretic attention given to popular music has