Written in a clear and refreshing style for students and scholars alike, the author provides a comprehensive timeline, an extensive bibliography, and careful definition of terminology wherever necessary.
From the 1920s to the 1940s, Leo Sowerby created popular secular works while his sacred compositions led admirers to call him the "dean of American church musicians." Yet in time, Sowerby's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Canticle of the Sun and the rest of his corpus lost favor with the A-list symphonies and prominent musicians who had once made him a ......
Internationally recognized Bach authority Hans-Joachim Schulze authored a 225-part series on the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach. In this collection, James A. Brokaw II translates a selection of the essays, illuminating a wide range of biographical and cultural features of Bach's life and creative milieu. Schulze's lively and engaging ......
In the late 1920s, Reverend A. W. Nix (1880-1949), an African American Baptist minister born in Texas, made fifty-four commercial recordings of his sermons on phonographs in Chicago. On these recordings, Nix presented vocal traditions and styles long associated with the southern, rural Black church as he preached about self-help, racial uplift, ......
How James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir Created a Gospel Classic
In September of 1963, Reverend Lawrence Roberts and the Angelic Choir of the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, teamed with rising gospel star James Cleveland to record Peace Be Still. The LP and its haunting title track became a phenomenon. Robert M. Marovich draws on extensive oral interviews and archival research to chart the history ......
Spiritual Quartet Singing in the Struggle for Black Education
Black education in the South was the great social program of the post-Civil War era. Desperately strapped for operating capital, the first freedmen's schools resorted to a bold fundraising experiment. Student troupes were sent to the North singing Negro spirituals, the sacred songs of slavery, in order to generate goodwill and entice financial ......
Heavily influenced by Bill Monroe, the "Father of Bluegrass" in the 1940s and '50s, gospel music in the South began to shift into bluegrass gospel, a style that combines both genres. In Bluegrass Gospel: The Music Ministry of Jerry and Tammy Sullivan, anthropologist and journalist Jack Edward Bernhardt explores the lives, music, and ministry of ......
Heavily influenced by Bill Monroe, the "Father of Bluegrass" in the 1940s and '50s, gospel music in the South began to shift into bluegrass gospel, a style that combines both genres. In Bluegrass Gospel: The Music Ministry of Jerry and Tammy Sullivan, anthropologist and journalist Jack Edward Bernhardt explores the lives, music, and ministry of ......
