Then sings my soul : the culture of southern gospel music / Douglas Harrison.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Harrison, Douglas, 1975-

Series:

Music in American life

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gospel music--Southern States--History and criticism.

Gospel music.

Popular culture--Religious aspects.

Popular culture.

Southern States.

Physical Description:

xi, 228 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2012]

Summary:

In this ambitious book on southern gospel music, Douglas Harrison reexamines the music's historical emergence and its function as a modern cultural phenomenon. Rather than seeing the music as a single rhetoric focusing on the afterlife as compensation for worldly sacrifice, Harrison presents southern gospel as a network of interconnected messages that evangelical Christians use to make individual sense of both, Protestant theological doctrines and their own lived experiences. Harrison explores how listeners and consumers of southern gospel integrate its lyrics and music into their own religious experience, building up individual-and potentially subversive-meanings beneath a surface of evangelical consensus.

Reassessing the contributions of such figures as Aldine Kieffer, James D. Vaughan, and Bill and Gloria Gaither, Then Sings My Soul traces an alternative history of southern gospel in the twentieth century, one that emphasizes the music's interaction with broader shifts in American life beyond the narrow confines of southern gospel's borders. Harrison's discussion includes the "gay-gospel paradox"-the experience of non-heterosexuals in gospel music-as emblematic of fundamentalism's conflict with the postmodern world. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction : A native informant's report from the field

Glory bumps, or the psychodynamics of the southern gospel experience

Nostalgia, modernity, and the reconstruction roots of a tradition

The rise of "southern" gospel music and the compensations of history

The gaitherization of contemporary southern gospel

Southern gospel in the key of queer

Epilogue : the soul's best song

List of songs referenced

Appendix : methods and preliminary findings of a survey of attitudes and beliefs about southern gospel music.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780252036972

0252036972

9780252078576

0252078578

9780252094095

0252094093

OCLC:

759594358