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1. Glory Bumps or, The Psychodynamics of the Southern Gospel Experience Approaching southern gospel for the first time, listeners often comment on the apparent lyrical and intellectual poverty of the music. Indeed, for someone who has never been rendered speechless by the beauty of a gospel melody or heard—really felt—the “sound of light” pouring from a stage, this music can seem astoundingly shallow and one-dimensional. Southern gospel is no more likely to drift into lyrical vapidity than most American popular music.1 But while we have come to expect banalities and clichés from so many pop, rock, and country lyrics about the heart constantly lusting, loving , and being broken, it can still be strange to hear songs about the eternal soul and everlasting salvation voiced in trite imagery or flimsy metaphors. Here, for instance, is how the old-time classic “I’ll Fly Away” begins: Some glad morning when this life is o’er, I’ll fly away. To a home on God’s celestial shore, I’ll fly away.2 These sorts of conceptually incurious lyrics are typical of most southern gospel songs, which can seem juvenile in their singsong meter, obvious rhyme scheme, and reliance on predictable Christian imagery: “Jesus” rhymes with “frees us” and “God of love” with “home above” and “Mom and Dad will be there, in that city so fair.” As musical compositions, they are often harmonically sophisticated, imaginatively arranged, and impressively performed. But as vehicles for religious expression, they seem to focus mainly on a formulaic reaffirmation of orthodox evangelical notions of filiopietism, divine sovereignty , the rapture of the saints, and other central planks of the premillen- 26 Chapter One nialist worldview that predominates in southern gospel culture. In “I’ll Fly Away,” the lyrical trope is a common one: notionally gazing heavenward in anticipation of eternal paradise, the song predicates its celebration of the afterlife on a shared belief in the sorrow and suffering the Christian endures during the struggles and strife of life on earth. But southern gospel lyrics only tell part of the story. If the experience of country music often starts in the car, with the radio, as Cecilia Tichi suggests, then the experience of southern gospel starts in the pew, the auditorium seat, the folding chair of the county fair. Live performance remains the basic ingredient of experience in southern gospel. Absent this context of performance and the surrounding culture that the music both shapes and is shaped by, lyrics have very little to tell us about the larger affective and experiential dynamics through which the music achieves its full force as an instrument of contemporary evangelical culture. “I’ll Fly Away” lyrically exemplifies the focus in southern gospel music on what David Fillingim has called “a message of world rejection” in a religious vernacular historically associated with southern, rural, conservative Christianity.3 Yet the song does so using a catchy melody and a clappable rhythm that are organized around ascending chord progressions and high, expansive intervals. These musical elements combine across the length of the chorus to suggest the very experience of transcendent spiritual flight even amid life on this earth. The song’s toe-tapping, feel-good style pits the lyric’s notional rejection of this world against an infectious, irresistible, and uplifting musical buoyancy that affectively undercuts the rhetorical emphasis on earthly life as existential incarceration that opens the second verse: “Like a bird from prison bars have flown. . . .” In fact, it might not be too much to say that at its best, the song turns prison life into a musical paradise. By itself, then, scholarly analysis focused primarily on the textual artifacts of southern gospel takes insufficient account of vital, nonverbal elements at work in the music. The singing of lyrics, the way vocalists interpret songs (including their body language and the timbre and dynamic level of their singing voices), the spontaneity of the artist and audience in the live performance , and, perhaps most important, a song’s tune and arrangement—all of these elements interact dynamically and contingently in the musical moment to create a powerful paralanguage to which participants make reference when they explain their connection to southern gospel. Asked as part of my research to talk about a song or musical experience that had made an impression on his life, one fan put it this way: “‘I’ve Come too Far to Turn Back,’ [by] the Hoppers. An oldie but goodie, their remake of this song will give...

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