When the words roll and the fire flows: Spirit, style and experience in African-American gospel performance

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of communication and experience in African American gospel events. Arising out of field research among members of the sanctified church, this study focuses on the ideational and experiential contexts of gospel performance, looking beyond music per se to explore the encompassing world of faith and religious discourse. The dissertation\u27s goal is to describe those principles which community members use to recognize, assign, and create meaning in gospel events (or programs , as they are generally designated within the Black community). Meaning is here treated not as a static category of significance, but rather as a situational construct, a signification grounded in cultural knowledge, tempered by human experience, and negotiated in social discourse. It is created rather than given, negotiated rather than declared. Within the gospel community, this process finds its base in the triangulated nexus of aesthetics, belief and experience. Ordered investigation of these linked domains demands an approach which allows simultaneous exploration of the broadest spheres of context and the most intimate spheres of feeling. Such an approach is found in the ethnography of communication, which provides a framework for structured inquiry into the working interlock of culture. This study enters this framework at the level of event, extending inquiry both paradigmatically--to incorporate the full range of co-occurrent expression--and syntagmatically--to include the larger devotional sequences in which song is embedded. Paradigmatic depth reveals simultaneity of action and expression, unveiling co-occurrent complementarity in the linguistic, kinesic, and proxemic realms. Syntagmatic breadth reveals expressive flow, disclosing correspondences and correlativity among communicative units. Together, they yield a textured tapestry of music, motion, speech and silence. The exploration of performance and belief remains shallow, however, until it confronts the lived reality of sanctified experience. For members of the sanctified church, experience--specifically, the experience of being touched by the Holy Spirit--grounds faith in a universe whose experiential contours are palpably different from those encountered prior to conversion. Accepting the transcendent touch as the experiential leitmotif of sanctified expression, this study reveals how gospel events are structured so as to invite the descent of the Spirit