Gospel Harmony: American Popular Sacred Music, 1871-1969 (original) (raw)
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Methodist history, 2014
For the historical development of hymnody, nineteenth-century America is a particularly fruitful period for research. Building upon the foundations of European tradition, Christians in the United States began developing a hymnic corpus unique to their own experience. American hymn writers began composing their own texts; the folk shape-note expression of the era furnished hymnody with many enduring hymn tunes (i.e., “Amazing Grace”/“New Britain,” “Foundation,” “Beach Spring,” “Holy Manna”); the African American spirituals were forged in the crucible of slavery and continued legal forms of oppression (i.e. Jim Crow segregation); finally, from these many sources, the uniquely American genre of gospel music was born, developing and strengthening at camp-meetings and revivals that swept across the American landscape. With Methodism’s close ties to the frontier religion of the camp-meeting and revivals, the story of U.S. Methodist hymnody is intertwined with that of gospel music, as many...
Dialog, 2009
In the heated discussion about different church music styles, one aspect often gets overlooked: the similarities between traditional hymns and the modern or contemporary Praise and Worship music (P&W). Aiming at unfolding some of these similarities, this article contemplates technological, sociological, and theological perspectives to reveal parallels between the two practices and postulates P&W as today's evangelical hymnody in North America.
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Choral Journal, 2004
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Whilst Christian congregational music has long been an object of reflection and study it has often been pushed towards the margins of the various disciplines that it inhabits. In this article I survey some of the challenges such study has faced before suggesting that recent disciplinary developments have served to prepare the ground for increased study of Christian congregational music. I suggest that ethnomusicology, in particular, has played an important role in motivating recent enquiry across a range of disciplines although not without facing a number of further challenges itself. I suggest that a field of Christian congregational music studies is beginning to emerge and finish by outlin- ing recent contributions to scholarship from a range of perspectives.
Dialog-a Journal of Theology, 2009
In the heated discussion about different church music styles, one aspect often gets overlooked: the similarities between traditional hymns and the modern or contemporary Praise and Worship music (P&W). Aiming at unfolding some of these similarities, this article contemplates technological, sociological, and theological perspectives to reveal parallels between the two practices and postulates P&W as today's evangelical hymnody in North America.
Spirituals and Gospel Songs: Messages of Unity, Hope, and Deliverance
IJASS, 2021
Spirituals and gospel songs have a capacity to instill courage and bring people together. Spirituals helped enslaved Americans of the antebellum American South persevere through unimaginable hardships and look optimistically to a future of freedom. Similarly, gospel songs have inspired strength and Christian harmony for centuries. This essay briefly explores the roles spirituals and gospel songs played at the end of the American Civil War and in the postwar endeavors of The Fisk Jubilee Singers and Moody-Sankey revivalists. The essay also includes analysis of Albert Brumley's popular twentieth-century gospel song "I'll Fly Away," its relationship to spirituals, and its positive reception by African American performers. There are two intended purposes: to indicate how spirituals and gospel songs provide creative insights into specific historical moments and to show how their verses transcend those moments to express broader messages of unity, hope, and deliverance.