Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel (review)

This excellent book is a significant addition to the body of work perhaps best described as an experience-centered approach to supernatural belief, a recent school of ethnography begun by David Hufford. Also drawing from a background in ethnopoetics and the ethnography of communication, Glenn Hinson has discarded academic language and academic theories such as structuralism or poststructuralism. Instead, in this densely printed but beautifully written volume, he walks the reader through the events of a single Friday night's service at a Long Branch Disciple Church in central North Carolina, part of a two-evening, 20th-anniversary celebration of a homegrown gospel duo, called "The Branchettes," using only the experience of members of the Black sanctified church to inform his narrative about their encounter with the divine. Gospel anniversaries such as this are a significant part of the gospel music tradition, and are devotional as well as musical in character.

This emic approach to ethnography should sound familiar to folklorists and the concept is simple to grasp. This book succeeds in presenting the insiders' views of their experiences when others have not. The author's argument is also quite simple. The overall goal of ethnography, he writes, is to promote the conversation of cultures. His goal in this particular study is to present the worshippers' beliefs about—and experience of—transcendence, in which the human spirit and the Holy Spirit meet during worship. This task requires a method in which the ethnographer suspends his own judgement and presents the experiences of the saints—that is, church members who have professed Jesus as their personal savior. In their own accounts of having church, the saints turn away from the profane, focus their thoughts in worship, create a spiral of increasingly fervent praise, and achieve a congregational accord, a spiritual unison, in which all thoughts are on "parallel paths of praise" (p. 93). At a moment not of human choosing, the Spirit engages them and begins to work through them. When the Spirit does move them, the saints move out of the realm of performance; the words of songs, prayers, or sermons are no longer exclusively the saints', but are also the Spirit's. They are, therefore, revelation, and the saints are vessels of this divine presence. This sanctified reality, which gives to the saints a feeling of absolute ontological certainty, is a reality apart. The author accurately presents this experience of transcendence as absolutely real.

To make his point, Hinson leads the reader through a single service, moment by moment. The first four chapters orient the reader to the overall task that the author has set for himself. These are followed by a narrative in which one chapter after another details a new facet of the gospel program. First are several chapters about the song, scriptural reading, and prayer of the devotional service that begin the program. Later chapters focus on the welcome address offered by one of the Branchettes, the response to the welcome address, and the role of the Emcee in the program. The book concludes with one chapter on the invitation to visitors to join the ranks of the saints, and another on the benediction. Interspersed in this narrative are chapters devoted to more general worship phenomena. One chapter discusses the external, divine authorship of prayer. Another focuses on singing styles and the format of song sets. Two others address the difference between purposeful singing (it is an anointed ministry to praise, to remove burdens that listeners might be undergoing, and to save souls) and false purpose (entertainment). Still another chapter addresses the process of elevating a song in which the singers systematically raise the pitch and tempo of the singing. Then, during the "drive" section of the song, the singers delay the song's resolution—in what is called a "hang up...