Archetypes in white commercial gospel musics: constructing Christian Nationalist identity (2025)

A House Divided? Christian Music in Black and White

Journal of Media and Religion, 2011

This study examines racial discourse evident in gospel music, a predominantly African American genre and contemporary Christian music (CCM), a predominantly White American genre. Analyzing 45 songs on the Billboard year-end charts for 2007 and 2008, the study reveals differences in messages predicated on sociocultural influences. Whereas gospel songs, possessing roots in blues, emphasize opposition and overcoming, CCM songs, establishing its root in the aftermath of the Hippie movement, emphasizes devotion and inspiration. This comparative study lays a foundation for future thematic analysis of Christian music and holds implications for the intersection between social and spiritual identity, the influence of industry practices on cultural production and offers a contributing explanation for issues of race relations even among Christians.

House Divided: Christian Music in Black and White

This study examines racial discourse evident in gospel music, a predominantly African American genre and contemporary Christian music (CCM), a predominantly White American genre. Analyzing 45 songs on the Billboard year-end charts for 2007 and 2008, the study reveals differences in messages predicated on sociocultural influences. Whereas gospel songs, possessing roots in blues, emphasize opposition and overcoming, CCM songs, establishing its root in the aftermath of the Hippie movement, emphasizes devotion and inspiration. This comparative study lays a foundation for future thematic analysis of Christian music and holds implications for the intersection between social and spiritual identity, the influence of industry practices on cultural production and offers a contributing explanation for issues of race relations even among Christians.

Country Music and the Souls of White Folk

THE EVOLUTION OF SACRED MUSIC AND ITS RITUALS IN WATAUGA COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA: A COMPARISON OF CONGREGATIONAL SONG IN TWO INDEPENDENT MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCHES

Shape-note traditions are both a style and practice of rural hymnody that contribute to the varied canon of American folk hymnody. The history of shape-note traditions in the United States highlights the polarity between the early four and seven-shape traditions and the ensuing seven-shape gospel movement, defining the former as traditional and the latter as popular and modern. The designation of gospel music as a popular phenomenon resulted in a variety of responses that shaped the representation of the genre within Appalachia. This thesis is an exploration of seven-shape gospel music and its persistence within rural, independent Baptist churches in Watauga County, North Carolina. I began exploring seven-shape gospel music under the assumption that I was dealing with an obscure singing tradition unique to a small number of rural churches. Therefore, I focused my attention on Mount Lebanon and Mountain Dale Baptist Churches, whose singing practices have been and continue to be defined by seven-shape gospel music. In January 2009, I began observing and researching the singing traditions of these two churches, attending Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening services, having selected these specific congregations for their different interpretations of a shared shape-note heritage. In addition to participant observation, I also conducted interviews with several members of each congregation, focusing in particular on the two choir directors. Over the course of my research, patterns in worship order and style emerged that indicated an intrinsic connection between the rural, independent Baptist church and the seven-shape gospel tradition. My ongoing interviews corroborated that Mount Lebanon and Mountain Dale Churches were not sole remnants of a dying, seven-shape gospel tradition, but rather two examples of an enduring regional practice that persists within the independent Baptist churches in the tri-state area of western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southwest Virginia. As I delved deeper into the history and roots of seven-shape gospel music in Watauga County, I uncovered an entrenched regional singing tradition characterized by monthly and annual singing conventions, indicating a popularity that confounded my initial perception of the movement as an isolated, rural phenomenon. My case study of two rural churches has therefore necessarily shifted to accommodate the vibrant history of rural hymnody in the United States and its controversial representation and preservation in Appalachia, raising important questions about the limitations of regional scholarship that has heretofore discounted the seven-shape gospel tradition as a trait of indigenous worship.

Redneck religion and shitkickin' saviours?': Gram Parsons, theology and country music

Popular Music, 2002

Within the world of contemporary theology there is a phrase that arose in the early 1970s called 'contextual theology'. This is used to describe attempts to locate the Christian narrative primarily within particular locations or communities. It stresses the need to use the local and particular to evaluate the universal and universalistic claims of the religion, the institutions and theology. The reason for this 'theology from below' (i.e. from 'the people') is because what is often presented as universal (i.e. non-contextual) theology is actually itself a contextual reaction (often over centuries) that is implicitly (and often explicitly) North Atlantic (i.e. North American and European) in ideology, focus and implications. It is against this imposed hegemony (often criticized as white and imperialistic) that contextual theology arose as a contested discipline. Its claim was that the linkage of gospel and culture was often expressed in ways opposed to the implied pan-Christian hegemony of 'orthodox belief'. Christianity, it claims, is primarily that which is articulated in and through those on the margins of academic and orthodox, institutionalized Christianity and theology. As such its narrative and articulators are often those excluded from traditional discourse. These counter narratives and articulations are therefore found in what can appear unlikely or contested places and expressions. For contextual theology is primarily a lived theology -the 'god talk' of those who are not professional theologians or even, it many be said, 'orthodox' Christians.

“I’m On My Long Journey Home”: Rhetorical Identification in the Bluegrass Gospel Singing of Ralph Stanley and the Stanley Brothers

"Res Rhetorica", 2017

The gospel songs of Ralph Stanley offer solace by means of identifi cation with the singer’s losses and struggles, but they also offer a metaphoric framework of journey and homecoming found in many folk and country songs. The framework gives shape and meaning to the troubled aspects of life that make up much of the content of bluegrass songs, sacred and secular. Referencing Kenneth Burke’s early theories of rhetorical identifi cation and symbolic appeal, this study reads the inclusion of gospel songs in stage and recorded performance as a secularized means of self-definition: singers and listeners are linked as people with common origins and destinations. While expected themes of repentance and faith run throughout these gospel songs, the progressive form of home that is lost and then recovered sets up a secular analogy to the story of sin and redemption so common in American Protestant Evangelicalism. By scattering these songs throughout a bluegrass performance, the journey toward ...

Review of Redneck Liberation: Country Music as Theology By David Fillingim

Justice, Deborah. 2015. “A Cosmopolitan Dichotomy: Mainline Protestantism and Contemporary versus Traditional Worship Music.” The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities, Suzel Reily and Jonathan Dueck, eds. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A Cosmopolitan Dichotomy: Mainline Protestantism and Contemporary versus Traditional Worship Music Faced with a twenty-first century crisis of cosmopolitan identity, North American mainline Protestants have turned to dichotomized musical diversity. For the better part of United States’ history, White-Anglo-Saxon Protestants had seen their identity and worship practices established as hegemonic norms. However, since the 1950s, these mainline denominations have been shaken by steady losses. Taking stock and noting that their historical evangelical Others using more “contemporary” music were thriving, mainline churches soon had their own miked singers, guitarists, and drummers leading praise and worship choruses in addition to hymns, pipe organs, and chancel choirs. Despite increasing relativism, globalized mainline cultural positions, and liberal theology, the musical expansion was quickly channeled into a Contemporary versus Traditional worship music binary that continues to dominate discourse and practice. During the Worship Wars of the 1990s, the two styles came to be seen as largely incompatible and churches now often have separate Contemporary and Traditional services. The first section of this chapter analyzes why, given the many styles, genres, and traditions actually played in these churches, mainline Protestants have essentialized the musical, cultural, and theological omnivorism of their ecumenical cosmopolitanism into an oppositional either-or choice. What prompts a local congregation choose to channel their music through this pervasive dichotomy? In the second section, I draw upon Sznaider, Beck, Rommen and fieldwork among Presbyterians in Tennessee, to demonstrate how one mainline Protestant congregations has engaged with the Contemporary-Traditional dichotomy to position themselves within broader flows of Christian media and meaning. Analyzing repertoire choices, performance choices, and congregant reception, I demonstrate how this congregation embraces the broad label of Contemporary, but brings the details in line with their local vision of self-identity. This chapter provides an analytically contextualized case study of how, by adopting and adapting the symbolic categories of Contemporary and Traditional, mainline Protestant churches are using music to assert themselves as part of a dynamic Christian network engaged in a discourse of cultural vitality.

In Praise of Authenticity? Atmosphere, song and Southern states of mind in Searching for the Wrong-eyed Jesus

It so happens' writes Michael O'Brien, 'that a disproportionate amount of American popular culture […] is southern. Jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, rock music, country and western,

Sacralizing the Secular? From the Blues to Gospel and Back Again

Just as Sunday in the United States is the time most reserved for sacred practices, Saturday night is perhaps most identified with secular forms of diversion. These moments, so close chronologically, are perhaps also not so far apart in terms of meaning. They are forms of communication and ritual that have more in common than might at first appear. New forms of sacred practices, in fact, can be tied to what were once quite secular elements—or which both might be seen as religious. Saturday night may well be intimately connected to Sunday morning. In the case of African American Blues music the connection is compelling: although the nature of the relationship is disputed, scholars agree that Gospel music is closely tied to the Blues. This is in spite of the Blues being seen as the " Devil's music. " The nature of the sacred-secular divide is a critical question for Pentecostalism, a religious movement deeply influenced by African American religious styles since its beginnings at Azuza Street in Los Angeles some 101 years ago, as well as in charismatic movements, including the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, now in its 40 th year. Catholic connection, global connection to 500 million Pentecostals worldwide. Such phenomena have occasioned a sacralizing of secular behavior as well as a secularizing of formerly sacral elements. Their exploration permits theoretical inquiry into the relationship between religion and social change.