Downhome Gospel: African American Spiritual Activism in Wiregrass Country, by Jerrilyn McGregory, is an ethnographic study highlighting various sacred performance communities among black people in the Wiregrass region of the southern United States. As a northerner, born in Gary, Indiana, with a Methodist background, McGregory had not experienced southern African American culture prior to her being employed by the Philadelphia Folklore Project in 1987, where she performed urban ethnographic. As a result of her experiences engaging with black residents of Philadelphia who identified with the south culturally, McGregory embarked upon an approximately fifteen-year research journey of self-discovery in the Wiregrass region, which elucidated her identity as a black northern woman with southern African American cultural and religious roots. McGregory visited 150 sites in the Wiregrass Tri-State region of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, conducting numerous interviews and doing participant observation and archival research. She also employed a hybrid theoretical approach encompassing intersubjectivity, reflexivity, and womanist theology in this ethnographic study, which introduces Wiregrass country’s African Americans and examines their performances of sacred music “outside of Sunday church-related activities” (xvii). The book’s seven chapters and epilogue detail McGregory’s self-discovery as well as African American cultural and religious artistic practices in a unique part of southern North America.
Chapter 1 discusses Wiregrass country as a distinct region not characterized by a plantation system—counter to literature contextualizing southern blacks on plantations. Chapter 2 highlights the importance of burial societies associated with Wiregrass African Methodist Episcopal churches, which provide financial support during life and death circumstances for blacks in the region. Chapter 3 presents Baptist unions and their associated Fifth Sundays events as unique cyclical gatherings where regional church communities advance collective religious and economic stability in various ways. Chapter 4 highlights the shape-note singing tradition among the Wiregrass people, which is significant because this art form has often experienced marginality in literature as an artistic practice in black religious worship. McGregory’s discussion illustrates that shape-note singing has been a significant part of southern black culture for almost a century.
Chapters 5 and 6 provide information on traditional gospel-singing conventions and contemporary gospel-music singing events, respectively, in the region. These two chapters prompted me to reflect on my own childhood in Florida and South Carolina, where I participated in gospel-music singing programs, which served to sustain the genre while forwarding individual and collective agendas of church-goers and the broader community. These chapters mirror my experiences and broadly contribute to the knowledge of black gospel-singing conventions and programs that have been greatly underrepresented in the scholarship. Chapter 7 provides a valuable discussion of the Wiregrass “emboldened” women who function in various leadership and supportive roles that facilitate sociocultural and spiritual awareness in their respective performance communities.
Within these chapters, several communal events associated with the sacred performance communities are assessed, including the twentieth of May celebration (the day of Emancipation in the region), turnout programs (essentially recruitment events for burial societies), shape-note singing conventions, traditional gospel- singing conventions, and contemporary gospel and women’s auxiliary programs. Along with these diverse communal events, McGregory shows how the Wiregrass people, in these varied contexts, congregate in reciprocity to support individuals and groups experiencing issues of health, economic trouble, and death, among other matters. They also affirm a sense of culture through shared local and broader black cultural values that are transmitted during performances featuring past and present songs, stories, and other verbal forms. These southerners exemplify what McGregory calls “spiritual activists” who are bonded through shared communal gatherings, religious artistic expressions, and collective economics as well as diverse cultural practices and traditions. Articulating their identity as “spiritual activists,” the Wiregrass people fashion “intricate networks to sing sacred music, with cultural continuity and a communitarian outlook” (xiii).
The title, Downhome Gospel, might be misleading because this book is not a work primarily on the gospel genre, nor is it solely about music. McGregory engages various “African American sacred music traditions, beyond just gospel music” among the Wiregrass people that facilitate their collective ideals about “gospel” as a signifier for living a distinct religious lifestyle. Therefore, “gospel,” for McGregory, denotes the character of “sacred performance communities that encourage gospel-centered living,” which is a primary focus of the study. Students of black religious music should read carefully though, as McGregory’s definition of the term manifests itself in a collapsing of disparate genres under the central heading of African American sacred music—“spirituals, common meter, Sacred Harp, shape-note, and traditional and contemporary gospel” (xvii). Such collapsing results from the author’s exploration of the “importance of words, not just sounds,” viewing text as the instrument of social censure in black religious music and therefore de-centering specific genres as secondary factors in her study. Situating genres in this way prevents an accurate understanding of music practice and of historical links between some artistic expressions in this study.
McGregory’s definition of “downhome” is borrowed from Jeff Todd Titon’s “blues-oriented formulation of the term,” referring to a “spirit, a sense of place evoked in singer and listener by a style of music.” While used by McGregory to reflect a shared sense of “locality and identity signifying Wiregrass as the home place of these African Americans, “downhome” is problematic because she has not shown that the people actually use the term to define what they do. Like Michael Harris’ use of “gospel blues” denoting musical contributions of Thomas Dorsey—a term McGregory also uses—“downhome” is applied by an outsider to the experiences of the Wiregrass people and is contrary to the aims of this ethnographic study. The application of such etic terminology might warrant caution when ascertaining interpretations and conclusions based upon the consciousness of the people and/or the author.
Nevertheless, these few issues become arbitrary in view of the significant contributions of this research, which represents Wiregrass blacks, who not only perform diverse sacred music styles but also sustain collective sociocultural, spiritual, artistic, and economic dimensions of their mundane lives, reflecting their desires and abilities to effectively serve God and maintain communal solidarity. Downhome Gospel provides new research options for scholars in the disciplines of musicology, ethnomusicology, religious studies, and cultural studies to conduct future explorations in African American expressive culture. In addition, this research offers a unique representation of a core group of black southerners within a diverse sociocultural and economic milieu, differing from representations of African Americans in the south as a monolithic culture. The study also provides a unique assessment of gospel music in a rural setting as opposed to the typical studies highlighting the genre in urban locations. Succinctly put, Downhome expands upon the tropes of diversity, community, tradition, continuity and resilience in black culture in the United States. It does so through McGregory’s journey of self-discovery, which ultimately supplies the reader with an opportunity to identify the Wiregrass people as a diverse collective of African Americans who share in and contribute to the cultural, artistic, and religious experiences of blacks in the United States.
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[Review length: 1154 words • Review posted on December 5, 2011]