Healing for the Soul - Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination

This book uses one of the most important features of the black gospel song-a repetitive musical cycle known as the vamp-to illuminate this tradition's powerful combination of sound and belief. Combining resources from music studies, religious studies, and cultural studies, the book shows how the immediacy of musical sound brings black Christians into meaningful contact with the invisible subjects of their beliefs. The deeply embodied ways believers engage gospel music, then, evidence the transcendent work gospel songs are used to do.

List of contents

• About the Companion Website


• Preface


• Reimagining Gospel: An Introduction


• Chapter 1: "A Balm In Gilead: "Tuning Up" and the Gospel Imagination


• Chapter 2: The Moment That Changed Everything: Gospel Music and the Incarnation of Time


• Chapter 3: "The Evidence of Things Not Seen": Gospel Vamps and the Incarnation of Text


• Chapter 4: The Pursuit of Intensity: A Formal Theory of the Gospel Vamp


• Coda


• Index

About the author

Minister, musician, and musicologist, Braxton D. Shelley is an assistant professor in the Department of Music at Harvard University, and the Stanley A Marks and William H Marks Assistant Professor in Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. After earning a BA in Music and History from Duke University, Shelley received his PhD in the History and Theory of Music at the University of Chicago. Alongside his scholarly and practical investment in African American gospel music, Shelley's research and critical interests extend into media studies, sound studies, phenomenology, homiletics, and theology.

Summary

Between the first and last words of a black gospel song, musical sound acquires spiritual power. During this unfolding, a variety of techniques facilitate musical and physical transformation. The most important of these is a repetitive musical cycle known by names including the run, the drive, the special, 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, arguing 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 author Braxton D. Shelley calls 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.

Additional text

The 'New Gospel Music Studies' is here to stay, and Healing for the Soul is a shining example of why. With it, Braxton Shelley emerges as a leading and incisive voice of this exciting movement. This profound and illuminating book could only have been written by someone who's spent years on the cultural frontline: in the pulpit, behind a Hammond B-3 organ, and immersed in the archives of gospel music's history and lived experiences. If you're looking for a musical, theological, and sociological explanation of the technology of gospel music's preoccupation with transcendence, search no further. Healing for the Soul will 'take you higher.

Product details

• Authors: Braxton D. Shelley, Braxton D. (Assistant Professor Shelley
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.06.2021
• EAN: 9780197566466
• ISBN: 978-0-19-756646-6
• No. of pages: 320
• Series: AMS Studies in Music; AMS STUDIES IN MUSIC SERIES
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Music > Music theory