Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2022 Lewis Lockwood Award, American Musicological Society Winner, Emerging Scholar-Book Award, Society for Music Theory Winner, Ruth Stone Prize Society for Ethnomusicology.
• Winner of Winner, Emerging Scholar-Book Award, Society for Music Theory Winner, Ruth Stone Prize Society for Ethnomusicology.

Overview

Between the first and last words of a black gospel song, musical sound acquires spiritual power. During this unfolding, a variety of techniques facilitate musical and physical transformation. The most important of these is a repetitive musical cycle known by names including the run, the drive, the special, and the vamp. Through its combination of reiteration and intensification, the vamp turns song lyrics into something more potent. While many musical traditions use vamps to fill space, or occupy time in preparation for another, more important event, in gospel, vamps are the main event. Why is the vamp so central to the black gospel tradition? What work-musical, cultural, and spiritual-does the gospel vamp do? And what does the vamp reveal about the transformative power of black gospel more broadly? This book explores the vamp's essential place in black gospel song, arguing that these climactic musical cycles turn worship services into transcendent events. A defining feature of contemporary gospel, the vamp links individual performances to their generic contexts. An exemplar of African American musical practice, the vamp connects gospel songs to a venerable lineage of black sacred expression. As it generates emotive and physical intensity, the vamp helps believers access an embodied experience of the invisible, moving between this world and another in their musical practice of faith. The vamp, then, is a musical, cultural, and religious interface, which gives vent to a system of belief, performance, and reception that author Braxton D. Shelley calls the Gospel Imagination. In the Gospel Imagination, the vamp offers proof that musical sound can turn spiritual power into a physical reality-a divine presence in human bodies.

Full Product Details

9780197566466

Table of Contents

Reviews

Braxton D. Shelley's Healing for the Soul is, beyond any doubt, the best book written on gospel music. It is the most theoretically sophisticated and existentially grounded analysis of how sonic vamps and tuning ups turn spiritual power from another world into physical reality and material effects. Shelley engages the profound works of the great Richard Smallwood as a way into the complex dynamics of time, space, sound, reception and belief in the enactment and embodiment of the gospel imagination. This instant classic forever changes modern scholarship in contemporary music and Black cultural performance! -- Cornel West, Harvard University The 'New Gospel Music Studies' is here to stay, and Healing for the Soul is a shining example of why. With it, Braxton Shelley emerges as a leading and incisive voice of this exciting movement. This profound and illuminating book could only have been written by someone who's spent years on the cultural frontline: in the pulpit, behind a Hammond B-3 organ, and immersed in the archives of gospel music's history and lived experiences. If you're looking for a musical, theological, and sociological explanation of the technology of gospel music's preoccupation with transcendence, search no further. Healing for the Soul will 'take you higher. -- Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania

The 'New Gospel Music Studies' is here to stay, and Healing for the Soul is a shining example of why. With it, Braxton Shelley emerges as a leading and incisive voice of this exciting movement. This profound and illuminating book could only have been written by someone who's spent years on the cultural frontline: in the pulpit, behind a Hammond B-3 organ, and immersed in the archives of gospel music's history and lived experiences. If you're looking for a musical, theological, and sociological explanation of the technology of gospel music's preoccupation with transcendence, search no further. Healing for the Soul will 'take you higher. * Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania * Braxton D. Shelley's Healing for the Soul is, beyond any doubt, the best book written on gospel music. It is the most theoretically sophisticated and existentially grounded analysis of how sonic vamps and tuning ups turn spiritual power from another world into physical reality and material effects. Shelley engages the profound works of the great Richard Smallwood as a way into the complex dynamics of time, space, sound, reception and belief in the enactment and embodiment of the gospel imagination. This instant classic forever changes modern scholarship in contemporary music and Black cultural performance! * Cornel West, Harvard University *

Author Information

Minister, musician, and musicologist, Braxton D. Shelley is an assistant professor in the Department of Music at Harvard University, and the Stanley A Marks and William H Marks Assistant Professor in Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. After earning a BA in Music and History from Duke University, Shelley received his PhD in the History and Theory of Music at the University of Chicago. Alongside his scholarly and practical investment in African American gospel music, Shelley's research and critical interests extend into media studies, sound studies, phenomenology, homiletics, and theology.

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