Gospel music

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

Contribution: This study recommends that contemporary gospel musicians sing Zulu traditional hymns in the original text to ensure that they do not misinterpret the hymns.

A field recording of this song was made in Sumter County, Alabama between 1937 and 1940 by Ruby Pickens Tartt and John Avery Lomax for the Archive of American Folk Songs at the Library of Congress. Lomax reproduced the Sumter County recordings in his 10-volume collection The Ballad Hunter. Tartt transcribed the lyrics for a BBC production of American folksongs in the 1950s. The lyrics presented here were transcribed from its commercial debut in the early 1940s on Decca Records by the Selah Jubilee Singers. The signature walking bass line is not included in the transcription but is clearly distinguishable on the a cappella recording. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYEk8mHtJmg

Often the issue of archives and repatriation is discussed in terms of dichotomous and unequal exchanges between members of a ‘collecting culture’ and ‘collected culture’. As archiving approaches expand, however, a collected culture or, more specifically, groups from within a ‘cultural heritage community’ can themselves be considered community archivists. While not afforded access to modern audiovisual archiving facilities, there are some groups whose responsibility to a community's music culture extends beyond performance and includes various forms of preservation (e.g., collecting audio and visual recordings and storing sheet music). After decades of functioning as ad hoc community archives, privately held collections of amassed recordings and ephemeral materials run the risk of being lost to poor storage and environmental conditions. Founded in 1981 by composer and educator Dr Margaret Pleasant Douroux, the Heritage Music Foundation (HMF) is an example of a performance and outreach organisation within a heritage community that engages in the preservation of audiovisual materials but does not have access to long-term archival facilities. In an effort to promote proactive and communal archiving, the University of California Los Angeles Ethnomusicology Archive acquired a UCLA Community Partnership grant in 2004 for a year-long collaboration with the HMF in a joint archiving and ethnographic video documentation project called Gospel Archiving in Los Angeles (GALA). While serving as the fieldwork project manager for GALA, I experienced the archiving process from several perspectives including as a member of the heritage community. This paper will describe how institutionally supported community archiving programmes can empower cultural heritage communities by assisting their preservation activities as well as increase community awareness and use of institutional archives by the heritage communities themselves.

The introduction of indigenous Black music—namely, Negro Spirituals, Black gospel, and jazz—into Catholic liturgy has largely been described as a phenomenon emerging in the late 1960s and a few decades thereafter. This paper seeks to explain how the change came about, tracing back to the early years of the US Catholic Church and the varying factors which eventually led to Black Catholic inculturation.

The essays in this book explore the Nobel laureate’s masks, collectively reflecting upon their meaning through time, change, movement, and age. They are written by wonderful and diverse set of contributors, all here for his 80th birthday bash: celebrated Dylanologists like Michael Gray and Laura Tenschert; recording artists such as Robyn Hitchcock, Barb Jungr, Amy Rigby, and Emma Swift; and 'the professors’ who all like his looks: David Boucher, Anne Margaret Daniel, Ray Monk, Galen Strawson, and more. Read it on your toaster!

Foreword by Nana Mouskouri!

O consumo de produtos gospel desperta a atenção recente das ciências sociais. A expressão “explosão gospel”, de Magali Nascimento Cunha (2007), parece bem descrever a intensidade desse processo e, de certo modo, a surpresa que ele causa nos analistas. Dessa forma, encontramos na bibliografia explicações para esse fenômeno, desde as ligadas a questões demográficas (o aumento do número de evangélicos no país), até as que apontam para questões mais propriamente culturais (um impulso propriamente religioso ao consumo) ou econômicas (uma suposta mercantilização da religião). Este artigo se insere neste debate. Observando aquilo que entendemos serem os limites dos argumentos até agora apresentados, buscamos contribuir com explicações de caráter mais ligados aos processos propriamente típicos desse mercado. Em outras palavras, buscamos mostrar que há razões internas que apontam para explicações mais abrangentes em relação a esse fenômeno.
Para proceder nossa investigação, é preciso anotar de que perspectiva estamos empregando o termo gospel. Esse termo possui muitos sentidos que variam de acordo com o que se descreve e com as intenções daquele que descreve. Alguns desses sentidos surgirão neste artigo pelos trabalhos de autores com os quais nos interessa dialogar, mas o sentido que nós adotamos propriamente advém da atribuição a ele dado por agentes ligados ao mercado musical denominado de gospel, sendo o consumo musical nosso tema de pesquisa. O termo música gospel é aqui, portanto, uma categoria nativa que se refere a um gênero musical que, como define Simon Frith (1996, p. 76), é “uma maneira de se definir a música em seu mercado ou, alternativamente, o mercado em sua música”.
Dessa forma, podemos propor que o objeto aqui pesquisado deve ser compreendido de duas formas. De um lado, como um fenômeno próprio de um mercado que, portanto, é produzido em relação a outros tantos fenômenos desse mesmo mercado. Ou seja, ao mesmo tempo em que o gospel se insere em uma racionalidade do mercado de música, nele também se diferencia, concorre com outros gêneros, cria seus próprios circuitos, etc. De outro lado, a música gospel está também inserida em uma sociedade mais ampla, na qual os agentes que com o gospel se relacionam estão produzindo sentido, se relacionando socialmente. Essa perspectiva nos leva a observar a dimensão do consumo do gospel para notar como ele se relaciona com a produção de subjetividades, tanto quanto com a unificação e classificação dos agentes no campo religioso. Os itens do artigo se dividem em razão dessas duas argumentações que, como se verá, se complementam.

Do fans sanctify their heroes? In the past, I have argued that Elvis fandom is not a neo-religious practice but that attention to a modified version of Durkheim's theory of religion can, nevertheless, help to explain it as a form of social interaction. I take that argument further here, first by revealing the ethical and analytical advantages of neo-Durkheimian theory, then by pitting this theory against three aspects of Elvis' sincere engagement with gospel music. Elvis Presley won three Grammy awards for his gospel albums and was the musician who did most to bring the gospel quartet tradition to the mainstream. His eclectic personal ties to spirituality and religion have become a focus of debate within his fan culture. They offer a set of discursive resources through which to explain the emotional impact and social influence of his music. If star musicians are positioned as centres of attention, what happens when they use their privileged position in the spotlight to offer a "spiritual" message?

The song This Christmas by Donny Hathaway is played only once a year during the holiday season. His presence is so strong during the holidays for African Americans because he is one of the distinctive cultural markers of the season. The question at hand is why is he relegated to the Christmas season but what about the rest of the year. In 2010, National Public Radio (NPR) created the series 50 Great Voices as a way to expose NPR listeners to artists who were not at the forefront of public consciousness. On June 26, 2010 Donny Hathaway debuted as the Neglected Heart of Soul but does neglected hold up. I believe neglected becomes situational depending on who is doing the remembering. The objective of my dissertation is to locate Donny Hathaway as a central figure in 1970s Soul music, to understand his growing influence over contemporary artists, and his musical legacy. I used Stuart Hall\u27s representation as my overarching theoretical framework. I wanted a theory that would be fluid enough to be relevant in the different phases of Donny Hathaway\u27s musical career. By using representation I was able to identify and understand the musical influences of Donny Hathaway. The use of representation allowed me to understand the cultural production of young Black men and women as they challenged the politics of respectability of the times. I have always have loved 1970s Soul music. I never knew my combined passions for music and the narratives of the marginalized. I became interested in the musical legacy of Donny Hathaway because he was one of the major forces in early 1970s Soul music. In my dissertation I have situated Donny Hathaway\u27s music within an African American tradition, which is an amalgamation of Gospel, The Blues, Jazz, and Soul music. I wanted to give a voice to the importance of Donny Hathaway\u27s music because he often gets overlooked because of who his contemporaries were, Roberta Flack, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye. My desire for this project is to introduce a new way of understanding the musical legacy of Donny Hathaway

What was truly distinctive about the black Gospel music style of the Sanctified Church was its extensive use of musical instruments previously associated with " the world. " Yet, this fact presents a theological conundrum. The very churches that were so enthusiastically " embracing " the Gospel style were, at the same time, ardently emphasizing strict moral living and the repudiation of all things carnal. In this article, I suggest lines of theological reasoning that may have informed early black Holiness and pentecostal Christians in their widespread liturgical use of the Gospel style. Drawing on primary source material from cogic founding Bishop Charles Mason, I expand Lawrence Levine's model of the relationship between early black Sanctified churches and the secular black musical world and argue that a more nuanced conception of the Christ-world relation than is generally assumed may have undergirded Sanctified development of early Gospel music.

Cet article analyse l’impact d’Internet sur les musiques évangéliques d’Éthiopie et de sa diaspora. En prenant pour objet d’étude le groupe de discussion Facebook « Rate This MezmuR », l’auteur met en évidence les débats esthétiques qui traversent la communauté de musiciens évangéliques éthiopiens à l’échelle transnationale. Il ressort que les « traditionalistes », attachés aux musiques « culturelles » d’Éthiopie, s’opposent aux « modernistes », qui voient dans l’utilisation du synthétiseur, des échelles occidentales et des chants de Gospel nord-américain la voie à suivre pour porter l’hymnologie éthiopienne vers des sommets plus spirituels. À partir de l’étude de cette communauté virtuelle transnationale, rassemblant des Éthiopiens localisés dans le monde entier, se dégagent des enjeux identitaires qui se manifestent directement dans la musique.

This article presents an analytical paradigm that employs the repetitive musical cycle known as “the vamp” to illuminate the interrelation of form, experience, and meaning in African American gospel music, focusing on music performed by gospel choirs with soloists. I argue that, more than just a ubiquitous musical procedure, the gospel vamp functions as a ritual technology, a resource many African American Christians use to experience with their bodies what they believe in their hearts. As they perform and perceive the gospel vamp's characteristic combination of repetition and escalation, these believers coproduce sonic environments that facilitate the communal experience of a given song's textual message. Through close readings of four canonical songs from the gospel choir repertoire—Kurt Carr's “For Every Mountain,” Brenda Joyce Moore's “Perfect Praise,” Richard Smallwood's “I Will Sing Praises,” and Thomas Whitfield's “I Shall Wear a Crown”—the article examines the phenomenological implications of gospel's communal orientation, outlines the relationship between musical syntax, musical experience, formal convention, and lyrical content in this genre, and suggests that analyzing gospel offers a way of studying how many black Christians come into contact with the invisible subjects of their belief.

Tweaked after first public performance by the High Five, University City Summer Band, June 21, 2016.

Kenneth Morris tells the story of his musical and spiritual pilgrimage in “I’ll Be a Servant for the Lord,” a 1987 interview conducted and edited by Bernice Johnson Reagon and published in WE’LL UNDERSTAND IT BETTER BY AND BY (Smithsonian, 1992). The score of “Just a Closer Walk” arranged for vocal quartet is adapted for brass quintet by David Jones, tuba.

Morris was born in Jamaica, NYC in 1917. He studied classical piano from grammar school through high school, though he preferred playing jazz with his neighborhood peers. After high school he attended both CUNY and the Manhattan Conservatory of Music. While a student at the latter, Morris organized an impressive jazz ensemble that landed a gig at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1934.

Remaining in Chicago for health reasons, Morris was introduced to music publisher Lillian Bowles, who hired him as an arranger. Morris worked for Bowles from 1937 to 1940 when he teamed up with the legendary Sally Martin to form the Martin and Morris Music Studio. The storefront sign at 43rd St and Indiana Ave heralded the studio as Arrangers • Publishers • Distributors ••• Everything in Religious Music.

In the interview a year before his death, Morris described how he came to arrange and publish the studio’s runaway hit:  “[Just a Closer Walk with Thee] was an arrangement that I made on an old spiritual. … I went to Kansas City to a conference of some kind, and one of the choirs there sang it. I asked them where they heard it, and they asked their choir director, Mr. William R. Hurse, where they had gotten it from. He didn’t know; he had heard it all of his life. I had never heard it before. I am the one who made the arrangement; the first one that was put in print was mine. I took it to the National Baptist Convention in 1944 and presented it with my group, the Martin and Morris Singers, and it simply clicked. After we left there, everybody was using it” (336). A half century later, Sweet Honey in the Rock recreated the original Martin & Morris sound on vol. 3 of the Smithsonian/Folkways and NPR album WADE IN THE WATER.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_fR2C0mcqI

Recruited as choir director by the Rev. Clarence H. Cobb, founder and pastor of the First Church of Deliverance in Chicago, Morris inaugurated a new era in gospel music by having Cobb purchase a Hammond organ for the church in 1939. But that’s another story.

Another part of my conversation with Richard Paul and the The Kennedy Center's ArtEdge podcast "Civil Rights on the B-Side" has been produced and podcasted by Public Radio International's Studio 360. As noted in the last podcast about rare and largely unknown protest songs, the music of the Civil Rights movement can not be confined to Freedom Songs popularized by the Freedom Singers and socially conscious folk music. African Americans' desire to respond to what was happening to them in the most tumultuous time since Reconstruction was not contained to a chosen talented and brave few....

My bibliographic entry for the Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies Online is now available. The article, “Gospel Music,” includes over 130 entries related to Black gospel music research, reference sources, textbooks, recordings, documentaries, and printed music. Though it was a mammoth undertaking, I am very happy I could include contemporary research and emerging scholars such as Bob Darden Bob Marovich Alisha Lola Jones Christina Zanfagna Connie Wong Yu Braxton D. Shelley Valerie Dickerson Cordero Melvin Butler, Jean Kidula, and so many others along with established gospel music research pioneers.
Below is an abbreviated link to some of the 15,500 word entry. Oxford Bibliographies is a subscription based publication and may be available through university library sites.

My first instrument was the piano. When I was in grammar school, I was given lessons from a teacher who lived just around the corner. About the time I was ready for junior high, a Gibson-playing Texan moved in next door, taught me a few chords, and let me play along with him on his old learner’s guitar. In the eighth-grade I started on baritone in band class, then switched to trombone through my high school years. I started college as a piano major, but changed to a pre-ministerial curriculum in liberal arts including classical Greek. Music became my avocation. Sometime in the 1980s I took up the tuba—I already knew the Bb fingering from playing the baritone in junior high—and organized a brass quintet to play at various seminary functions. Eventually I became a regular member of the University City Summer Concert Band, which did me the honor of playing my arrangement of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” in the summer of 2015.

The Sensational Nightengales are a gospel quartet organized in 1942 that over the years—they were photographed giving a concert in Vienna as late as 2006—has remained close to their original calling of evangelism and spiritual edification. “It’s Gonna Rain” takes the story of Noah to remind listeners that God “commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness” (Acts 17:30-31).

The transcription of the lyrics was made directly from the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Aby2QyhkiA

Juneteenth on Greenwood: A Celebration of Oklahoma's Black Music Traditions

Edited by Willie Smyth with essays by Guy Logsdon, William Savage, Kerry Kudlacek, and Willie Smyth honoring Oklahoma's Black Jazz, Blues,  and Gospel music heritage.

Gospel musicians have recorded several food-related songs about southern and soul foods such as Tye Tribbett’s live performances of “There Will Be Chicken After Church” and Here II Praise’s “Chicken Song” (1998).  Through Tribbett, Here II Praise and others' performances about church and food consumption, we find illustrations of the ways in which traditional food metaphors in gospel repertoire symbolize the formation of Christian community. However, in the Truthettes’ gospel performance of “Peanut Butter and Jelly,” I explore the ways in which the humble, portable food metaphor is another aspect of African American Christian community building and sustenance. The Truthettes perform spiritual transformation by using the meanings generated by a food metaphor -- a symbol from which a Christian believer may fast or more specifically, for which they involuntarily lose their appetite, demonstrating belonging and entry into African American church families.

Recent scholarship in Black studies has interrogated how communities of color are created, sustained, and made legible. Especially within queer of color critique, there has emerged a growing archive and, subsequentially, a robust scholarship that questions mainstream queer studies. In divulging queer forms of knowledge production, scholars have produced works that counter many Black epistemological and ontological assumptions. E. Patrick Johnson, in particular, has done much to frame queer of color studies around the concept of communities, especially in Sweet Tea, No Tea, No Shade, and Black. Queer. Southern. Women and now in Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women. Recently, Alisha Lola Jones built on his scholarship, establishing the importance of ethnographic engagement in queer communities of color. Following Johnson’s lead, Jones’ Flaming explores Black male sexuality within Black Pentecostalism. Here, she uncovers a complex network of signifying across various sexualize...

In recognition of Black History, this blog post presents a brief profile of hymnist Thoro Harris, who was respected by F.F. Bosworth, Aimee Semple McPherson, and other prominent church leaders. In the 1920s, Harris published Bosworth’s songbook, “Revival Flame: Bosworth Campaign Special." #FFBosworth #BosworthMatters

This article is a chapter in a book, entitled "African-American Traditional Arts and Folklife in Oakland and the East Bay," edited by Willie R. Collins. The article examines African-American gospel music between the 1940s and 1960s in the San Francisco Bay of California, providing a musical context for the development of contemporary gospel that began during the late 1960s.

If you're in or near Washington, DC on June 4th, come on and check us out at the American Folklife Center's free symposium, "Documenting Culture in the Twenty-First Century." I will be chopping it up about gospel archiving in the 21st century and community/institutional collaborations.

#LibraryOfCongressBound

Gospel songbooks published in the South at the turn of the twentieth century used seven shapes rather than round note heads to represent steps of the diatonic scale. With the exception of the note head, the conventions of these books were identical to their round-head counterparts. Soprano and alto voices were on the top staff with a G clef, tenor and bass on the bottom with an F clef.  The lyrics were printed between the two staves, and the melody was assigned to the soprano.  While this disposition is unremarkable today, it reflects a complex historical and social setting in the nineteenth-century South.

Seven-shape songbooks evolved from the four-shape tunebooks of the early nineteenth century which were printed with one voice part to a staff. The words of each verse were distributed between the staves with the melody placed in the tenor voice. While the adoption of seven shapes has been well documented, the transition in the scoring of vocal parts is less well understood. I identify these changes using the tunebooks and monthly journals published in the 1860s-80s by the Ruebush-Kieffer Company of Virginia, one of the most successful Southern shape-note publishers in the nineteenth century.

This study reveals a connection between the evolution of the printed songbook page and emerging social forces within post-Civil War Southern life, including the expanding role for women in the church, the growing sacred music publishing industry in the South, and the continued engagement with social tensions, such as North-South and progressive-conservative.

*A version of this work was presented at the 2013 Annual Conference of the Society for American Music, Little Rock, Arkansas

The program for a caroling event using bluegrass instrumentation (guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle, & harmonica) for carols of various traditions, interspersed with the reading of Isaiah 9:1-7. 

"Praise him with stringed instruments and harp" --Psa 150.

I investigate the various paradises employed in the 1920s African-American gospel blues of Blind Willie Johnson, an itinerant street-preaching musician with a distinctive gruff vocal style and influential slide guitar technique.

In his recorded songs, Johnson offered apocalyptic vignettes rooted in deep knowledge of scripture. Johnson conflated, with complex creative and political results, different paradises. Some theological/scriptural: the Old Testament search for, and epic journey to, the land of Canaan promised to God's chosen people; the post-death heaven of eternal life for any believer in the good news of the New Testament; and the apocalypse of the Revelation. Other paradises were political and earthly: utopian dream for political emancipation of African-Americans and transformation of society in the South; and the paradise of freedom after escaping the oppression of the South in the Northern cities or Canada.

A frequently employed example is the multivalent significance of the crossing of rivers. The river may be the figurative boundary between the living and the dead, a geographical boundary or location relating to travel northwards, the river to be crossed in order to reach Canaan, and also any political or ideological obstacle between the contemporary situation and the imagined paradise of emancipation.

The dense mix of symbols and layering of current, Biblical and suggested future events (such as ), lend an elusiveness to meaning necessary in an oppressive racist society, but also offer rich possibilities for meaning to be produced in connections and interactions between levels of suggested and explicit narrative. The weaving of different levels of textual reference is matched in sound by such devices as use of different voices (in Johnson's various different vocal styles, as well as with backing singers), varying levels of decipherability of lyrics, the replacement of some vocal lines with slide guitar lines, removing words yet leaving traces of implied words, while also pointing towards their removal.

The strength and depth of, and contemporary legitimacy of, Christian myth afforded an acceptable site discourse through which to communicate subaltern expression of paradise hoped for. The apocalyptic thunder of Johnson's voice, the force of his Biblical invocations, and the glossolalic strains of his guitar, figure in sound the possibilities of better worlds, presaging the position and function of faith and music, able to be expressed more explicitly, in later Civil Rights struggles.

This presentation will examine the power and dynamics of race-neutral ideology as potentially detrimental to the study of popular music. In particular, I wish to offer a critique of ‘post-racial’ liberalism and forms of crude relativism (individualistic, cultural, and religious), arguing that these are deficient political and theoretical approaches to addressing issues of music, race, and faith in the 21st century. As a case study, I will focus on my critical and ethnographic research of Black Pentecostal ‘gospel drumming,’ utilizing it as a musical point de capiton to help bind these intersecting lines of conflict within Leftist political thought and ideology.

The emphasis of maintaining ‘race-neutral’ positions is common amongst music practitioners and consumers; it is advertised in mainstream drumming publications and popular educational products; and it is supported within academic circles and written as an integral part of governmental policy. Institutionally, post-racism/colorblindness/race-neutralization serves to finesse the persistence of racism in order to maintain ‘universal’ ideals and political issues, informing how individuals and communities may view the cultural production and value of music.

Although ‘post-racist’ ideals are meant to help correct and address persistent racial inequalities, they can often produce an opposite result: the rationalization of racially based stereotypes. In the case of gospel drumming, it is simultaneously universalized and ‘exceptionalized’, offered as an objective set of skills and techniques for all drummers to develop, while visually, it is presented as culturally and religiously Black (in drumming DVDs, magazines, and advertisements). This tension between an inclusive approach that portrays gospel drumming as a set of race-neutral skills, and the obviously Black-specificity of its’ marketing, helps to illustrate the veil of ‘post-racist’ ideology. In this case, the celebration of Black musical exceptionalism is a symptom of naturalizing Black culture within ‘equal’, race-neutral space. Drawing from the work of Slavoj Zizek, I argue that these developments help to rationalize the capitalistic injunction to ‘enjoy’ without moral accountability, as the need to neutralize race can be an acceptable way to ‘enjoy our symptoms’ (i.e., fetishizing and commoditizing blackness).

"This presentation will discuss the role of vituperation in the gospel ‘drum shed,’ a term derived from Lawrence Levine’s text, “Black Culture and Black Consciousness” (Levine 8). Referring to anthropological accounts of various African ceremonial traditions, Levine discusses the unique public practice of harsh, verbal criticism utilized in these communities to resolve conflict and relieve one’s emotional, spiritual, and psychological issues. According to Levine, the African ‘verbal arts’ provided an individual with the ability to achieve cathartic release without disturbing communal solidarity (Levine 10). Throughout the experiences of slavery, segregation, and the civil rights’ movement in the United States, vituperative practices were integral for transcending oppression and adversity, manifesting into various forms of expression in black culture. Today, we now see this performative trope in the communal practice of ‘shedding’ in gospel drumming. Gospel drumming is directly associated with Christian worship music, emerging as one of the most popular trends in drumming culture today. The ‘shed’ is a unique performance event that occurs outside the church service context, allowing for individuals to perform with one another and participate in an inclusive discourse of humor, encouragement, and critique through the competitive display of musical ability. Although gospel drumming techniques and practices have been adopted (or, appropriated) into the repertoire of many non-black drummers, it is largely portrayed as a specifically black form of musical expression. Subsequently, one can claim they are ‘performing gospel’ if adhering to an objectivist standpoint of playing the transcribable notes, rhythmic patterns, and drum fills (i.e., divorcing the sacred, cultural, and historical). Utilizing Levine’s term of vituperation as a hermeneutic ‘point of departure’ — bringing to light issues of black music appropriation, musical meaning, and narratological analysis, the gospel shed can point to a unique emancipatory discourse that is rooted in black spirituality and transcendence."