SINGING IN THE SPIRIT: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF GOSPEL PERFORMANCE IN NEW YORK CITY\u27S AFRICAN-AMERICAN CHURCH COMMUNITY

This study explores the production, performance, and evaluation of community-based gospel performance in New York City\u27s southern black church community. Based on field research with non-commercial quartets and groups, it examines the learning process, the structure and organization of the gospel service, systems of native aesthetics, and the manner in which religious and artistic concerns are balanced to create a performance that is spiritually and aesthetically pleasing. Concluding interpretations fall into three primary areas: (1) As ritual practice, gospel performance serves as an extension of the Sunday morning worship service--a public occasion where sacred ideation, emotion, and experience become tightly entwined. Through song, testimony, and dramatic movement, gospel performance renders the intellectual suppositions of fundamentalist Christianity emotionally convincing by evoking deep spiritual, moral, and aesthetic sentiments. (2) Gospel performances serves as a symbolic vehicle for the maintenance of southern rural identity, religion, and values in a northern urban environment. Songs and testimonies are rich with romantic imagery of the rural South, and often urge listeners to go back to the old-time way of southern life when people supposedly worked hard, respected their family and elders, and practiced genuine Christian values. For older, southern-born singers and their audiences, gospel servers as a mechanism for combating the constant encroachment of urban, secular life. (3) Changing patterns of performance style in African-American sacred singing reflect the complex forces of migration, urbanization, acculturation, and cultural revitalization which have shaped twentieth century black life. The transition from the older jubilee/harmonizing quartets to gospel groups during the early 1940\u27s is interpreted as a revitalization of older, southern African-American and African stylistic traits. The rise of the shouting-style, hard gospel sound in cities like New York during the post-War years is a direct response of a dislocated, rural people seeking to sustain a sense of cultural and ethnic identity while struggling to establish a viable community in their new urban world