THEN SINGS MY SOUL: The Culture of Southern Gospel Singing by Douglas Harrison (review)

In the interdisciplinary study Then Sings My Soul, Douglas Harrison opens cultural studies scholarship to southern gospel music culture (SGM). Seeing SGM as a network of “cultural practices” (24), Harrison understands SGM as a Janus-faced commitment to consecrate ecumenical beliefs within individualized conversion experiences, and to fuse nostalgia with eschatology. Through this flexibility, American evangelicals have discovered a medium where they paradoxically become relativists with “antimodern religious traditions that notionally believe in timeless, unchanging absolutes” (3). Such paradox reveals theological and psychological contradictions, creating much room to appropriate SGM religiously, politically, existentially, and sexually.

Harrison begins by establishing the psychodynamics of SGM identity. Harrison argues that SGM allows evangelicals to employ a “modern method of identity formation” to “reinforce (their) antimodern worldview” (29). Though Harrison does not explain “antimodern worldview,” he does articulate the core of this evangelical identity, primarily their attitudes toward theodicy: how do Christians cope with suffering and remain faithful? SGM allows evangelicals to address such anxiety phenomenologically through music.

Harrison then turns to SGM’s historical roots, critiquing SGM’s “cultural kinship” (90). Though SGM recognizes James D. Vaughan, a successful SGM publisher in the early 1900s, as its founder, Harrison argues for Aldine S. Kieffer, a Confederate soldier–turned-publisher, as SGM’s “father.” Recuperating from the angst of losing the war, Kieffer turned to writing nostalgic (antebellum) lyrics and teaching the shape-note method of music literacy (the basis for SGM quartets) around the South. This history, though, has been lost to a modernized SGM that prefers Vaughan’s symbolic piety as SGM became increasingly ribbed by scandals in the 1960s and 1970s.

Next, Harrison synthesizes the tension between SGM piety and popularity in his chapter on the “Gaitherization” of SGM. Harrison observes that Bill Gaither’s “patriarchal religious emotionalism” signals the culminating point of SGM because through Gaither (SGM’s “pope”) SGM’s “cultural adhesive” becomes a heaven-as-pastoral nostalgia (118). As evangelicals are increasingly “fractious,” Gaither “binds them to an idealized vision of the past” where Christians “indemnify” each other, conveyed through musical dramas of Christian virtue (115).

But even if Gaither culminates SGM history, he does not resolve SGM’s paradoxes. Harrison analyzes these paradoxes by arguing that SGM is “indebted to a fundamentally queer aesthetic” (140). Identifying the diva and drag motifs (e.g., Vestal Goodman), negotiation of “misfits” (e.g., the Mylon LeFevre scandal), and aesthetically similar theatrics, Harrison observes the likeness of “coming out” experiences and soteriological epiphanies.

While Harrison’s historicizing is captivating, his earlier chapters are sprinkled with tangential examples, and as a whole bears minor gaps, the greatest of which is that “modern” is never clarified: in some cases, meaning relativism; or nineteenth-century industrial/technological revolutions; or urbanization and demographic diversity; or political and cultural liberalism. Other notable gaps are commentaries of SGM instrumentation, SGM in American music culture at-large, humor and parody, and other non-WASP audiences. Harrison does speak to SGM’s audience-specific rhetoric, which is the study’s most valuable contribution. Writing with a smooth, light, and self-aware style, Harrison builds a rich history and provides nuanced insight to an overlooked component of modern culture, giving critical music studies and southern studies several new avenues of inquiry.