Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music is a thoughtful and provocative monograph that addresses lacunae in ethnographic research on southern evangelical culture, religion, and music by delineating the important historical roles played by composer/publisher Aldine S. Kieffer (and his partner Ephraim Ruebush), and by songwriter/performer Bill Gaither (and his wife Gloria), and in particular through its investigation of the queer counterculture extant within mainstream fundamentalist Christianity. Author Douglas Harrison’s central concern is the various ways that southern gospel—also referred to as “white gospel with a southern accent” (114)—provides participants with intellectual and emotional skills to function as “modern pluralists or situational relativists” (3), negotiating their orthodox beliefs and traditional values in the context of heterodox and rapidly evolving contemporary lifestyles. What draws homosexuals to a religious culture that patently rejects them? How do worshippers steeped in nostalgia for the past and holding to the promise of a better afterlife find their places in the here and now? In its exploration of tensions arising between the putative polarities of insider and outsider status, the sacred and the secular, homosexual and heterosexual identity, music as ministry versus music as entertainment, professional and amateur forms of participation, academic analysis and emotional authenticity, diversity and conformity within a community, and tradition and change, the book raises and unpacks complex issues sure to inspire many points of departure for its readership.
Harrison is in a unique position to interface with this material: a Baptist preacher’s son, a former performing pianist, a diehard southern gospel fan (affectionately identifying himself as a “diesel sniffer”) (14), a prominent blogger in the community (his averyfineline.com has posted over seven years, read by a predominantly male, overwhelmingly white population), an English professor, and a gay man whose academic interests and sexual coming out led him to abandon his childhood faith, even as he continued to embrace the music. In general, Harrison maintains a reasonable balance as a former “southern Baptist sissy” (17), keeping critical distance from a subject he clearly has a strong passion for. His writing style is well developed, dappled with astute references to Dickenson, Emerson, Milton, and St. Augustine, or Christian song lyrics, though, as an insider/expert he is apt to drop terms like “Arminian” (38), “dispensationalists and (pre)millennialists” (44), “filiopietistic” (96), or jargony constructions like “psychosocial DNA” (7), that will confuse laymen. Indeed, many will not understand his central term, “evangelicals,” used to describe participants in the specific sub-culture he is writing about, though its general boundaries gradually emerge in the course of discussion. Scholars requiring historical background should consult James Goff’s Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel Music [1] or, for a broader, shallower purview, Don Cusic’s The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel and Christian Music [2], or Bill Malone’s Southern Music, American Music [3], before examining Harrison’s work, which critically engages more specific issues.
In his introductory chapters, Harrison explores the shades of meaning created through music, juxtaposing the perspective of academic analysis with that of religious experience. How is a secular scholar to understand and represent religious experiences? And if, as Harrison states, “the antimodern worldview of conservative evangelicalism that predominates in southern gospel fuels suspicion of entendre and interpretive ambiguity in language and resists intellectualized reflection on the subtexts of experience” (14), how then is one to assess the quality and value of religious musical expression? In contrast, what, if anything, can academic perspectives offer the evangelical community? And how are southern gospel fans to communicate the nuanced individual understandings of faith that underlie their orthodox public expressions? In general, Harrison tries to exploit his position as a “privileged marginal” [4] in order to address these issues, “mediat[ing] between the secular and sacred audiences encompassed by [his] approach” (141).
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 provide a selective history of southern gospel music from the Reconstruction Era onwards. Against the backdrop of a developing New South, which reimagined its pastoral roots in the context of encroaching modernity, Harrison discusses gospel hymnody, the commercialization of southern gospel music through songbook publishing and rising performance standards, shape-note music schools, singing conventions, the shift from participation to spectatorship, and the emergence of the so-called “southern gospel” genre, differentiating itself from contemporary Christian music and black gospel music. In chapter 3, Harrison challenges the conventional wisdom of anointing James D. Vaughn the “father” of southern gospel music, proposing in his place Aldine S. Kieffer, an argument adamantly opposed—if begrudgingly respected—by reviewers such as Daniel J. Mount [5]. In brief, Harrison’s chief ammunition against “Vaughnism” (82) is to show that Kieffer was an “originator” (21) who set historical precedents that paved the way for Vaughn’s transitional innovations. Chapter 4 spotlights the charismatic impact of Bill and Gloria Gaither and their Homecoming Friends franchise, which culminates each year in the National Quartet Convention. Harrison is especially interested in the presentation of nostalgia, masculinity, and in the ascendancy of professionalization over participation in gospel performance, suggesting that there is a harmful element of escapism in the “Gaitherization” of gospel, even as nostalgia provides an effective resource for mediating and managing contemporary cultural changes.
The concluding chapter, “Southern Gospel in the Key of Queer,” ties together two forms of outsiderness alluded to throughout the book, religious and social, suggesting that “spiritual marginality and social misfittedness” (148) are related human conditions, discordant identities subject to profound paradigm shifts through spiritual awakening and/or sexual coming out. In addition to a fascinating look at the appropriation of the fashions and stage mien of gospel divas Vessel Goodman and Tammy Faye Baker by drag queens, Harrison analyzes the dialogue and subtext of Del Shore’s play Southern Baptist Sissies [6] to expose what he calls (adapting W. E. B. DuBois’s concept [7]) “queer double consciousness,” referring to a “subjectivity derived from dissonant spheres of postmodern life: fundamentalist evangelicalism and transgressive sexuality” (153). His remarks in the epilogue imply that we are all like the “misfits, outcasts, nonconformists, and strugglers” (168) that covertly populate gospel music, each finding in the inarticulable “truths” of the music a means for understanding and expressing our heterogeneous identities.
End Notes
[1] James Goff, Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
[2] Don Cusic, The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel and Christian Music (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2002).
[3] Bill Malone, Southern Music, American Music (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003).
[4] A formulation borrowed from John Champagne’s Ethics of Marginality: A New Approach to Gay Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 91.
[5] “Book Review: Then Sings My Soul (Douglas Harrison),” posted at http://www.southerngospelblog.com/archives/14963 (accessed Feb. 18, 2013).
[6] Del Shores, Southern Baptist Sissies (New York: Samuel French, 2001).
[7] W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Books, 1989 [1903]).
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[Review length: 1136 words • Review posted on March 20, 2013]