Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music

back cover

In this ambitious book on southern gospel music, Douglas Harrison reexamines the music’s historical emergence and its function as a modern cultural phenomenon. Rather than seeing the music as a single rhetoric focusing on the afterlife as compensation for worldly sacrifice , Harrison presents southern gospel as a network of interconnected messages that evangelical Christians use to make individual sense of both Protestant theological doctrines and their own lived experiences. Harrison explores how listeners and consumers of southern gospel integrate its lyrics and music into their own religious experience, building up individual —and potentially subversive—meanings beneath a surface of evangelical consensus. Reassessing the contributions of such figures as Aldine Kieffer, James D. Vaughan, and Bill and Gloria Gaither, Then Sings My Soul traces an alternative history of southern gospel in the twentieth century, one that emphasizes the music’s interaction with broader shifts in American life beyond the narrow confines of southern gospel’s borders. Harrison’s discussion includes the “gay-gospel paradox”—the experience of non-heterosexuals in gospel music—as emblematic of fundamentalism’s conflict with the postmodern world. DOUGLAS HARRISON is an associate professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. A volume in the series Music in American Life L to R: Scott Fowler (of Legacy Five), Mark Trammell (of Mark Trammell Quartet), Glen Dustin (of Legacy Five), and Danny Funderburk take part in the Cathedrals Remember Showcase at NQC 2009. Photo by Jeremy Bell of Bell Media and www. vasoutherngospel.com. 9 7 8 0 2 5 2 0 7 8 5 7 6 9 0 0 0 0 ISBN 978-0-252-07857-6 MUSIC / RELIGION UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield www.press.uillinois.edu ...