Introduction

The authors in this volume were originally assembled by Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., who invited them to participate in a weekend colloquium at the Center for Black Music Research in 2006. There they exchanged ideas on the broad topic of religious/spiritual functions in Black music of the Caribbean and the United States. One of the original members of this group was philosopher Paul Taylor, who drafted an article on Thomas Dewey’s ideas about the relationship between the aesthetic and the religious. Taylor’s piece focused on the problem of “compartmentalization,” the tendency to mark off special times and places for religious or aesthetic experience. He foregrounded Dewey’s concern for “democratizing” the religious and the aesthetic by acknowledging them not only in the church or concert hall, but also in everyday social experience. For a variety of reasons, Taylor’s article did not end up in this volume (I hope he will publish it elsewhere), but he provided us with a useful frame in which to analyze tensions and overlaps between sacred and secular in black music.

Several of the essays in this volume take this overlap between sacred and secular as their primary focus. David Brackett’s piece on Robert Johnson, for example, reviews debates about Johnson’s alleged pact with the devil. He acknowledges that writers and scholars may have blown this myth out of proportion, but also evokes the broader context in which the blues was performed and received to suggest that “these songs of Johnson’s evoked an intersubjective sense of religiosity.” Brackett argues that evocations of the sacred in Delta blues do not necessarily depend on Robert Johnson’s relationship to the devil, and that the blues should be understood in relation to broadly shared cosmologies and musical practices of the African diaspora. Loren Kajikawa’s piece asks similar questions about soul singer D’Angelo’s references to Vodou in his music and album art—should this be understood as commercial posturing or as a sincere acknowledgment of relationships between Haitian Vodou and the Pentecostal worship tradition in which D’Angelo was raised? David Stowe’s essay, which examines different settings of Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon . . .”), also challenges the boundary between popular and religious music. Stowe compares the meanings this song held for Christians at different times, in both black and white churches, revealing overlaps between the political and the religious, sacred and secular.

A specific concern that is common to many of these essays is the role of music in spirit possession, a function that is common to religious music practices throughout the African diaspora. John Murphy provides an ethnographic, musical, and theological overview of one specific tradition of spirit possession in his discussion of a Santería ceremony, in which batá drumming summons and distinguishes the orisha spirits. Teresa Reed describes techniques of heating up the congregation and invoking the Holy Spirit in the Pentecostal Church in which she was raised, and compares them to the worship practices of Spiritual Baptists in Trinidad, as well as the Heavenly Army in Haiti. She notes similarities of practice and repertoire that link these disparate groups despite the colonial ideologies that make Pentecostals mistrust those Caribbean denominations. Rebecca Sager’s essay also seeks to identify some of the musical practices that are shared by black religious communities in the Caribbean and the United States. She analyzes a Haitian Vodou song and compares it to music making in black Baptist churches, both in Haiti and Austin, Texas. Citing John Blacking’s theories of transcendence through music, as well as theories of music entrainment, Sager compares the way music functions to heighten spiritual communication in three different religious communities of the African diaspora. Brackett and Kajikawa expand the frame of comparison further, challenging the compartmentalization of the spiritual into specifically religious contexts and pointing to secular musical structures/strategies that have similar spiritual functions.

The most general connecting thread between all these essays is the history of musical exchange between the Caribbean and the United States. All the authors in this volume reference African cultural roots and diasporic connections between the communities they are engaging. Both...