The gospel about Gospel--the power of the ring.

"I told them today," Albert ("Pete") Pero would often say to me as I met him in the hall coming from one of his classes, "I told them that it's all about ritual."

Never did we go beyond that friendly exchange to test his words of wisdom, but, walking away, I always mused how Pete is one of those who "does" theology to better understand doxology.

When Pete joined the faculty of the Lutheran School of Theology in the late 1970s he began to create a kind of magnetic field in which things African and African American could find energy, be extolled, debated, contextualized, and, above all, embraced, especially since he seemed to contain all of those dynamics within himself. During his early tenure at the seminary African American ritual patterns in community worship came with increased and welcomed regularity. By the end of the 80s, manifestations of the climate he helped to create included black preaching and the emergence of the LSTC Gospel Choir, a group that provided regular injections of its lively music into the campus worship life.

Perhaps because of its seeming distance from what some might consider customary worship music, because it asks of its hearers immediate reaction, and because of its ritual (and therefore very personal, deep, and potentially contentious) dimensions, the Gospel Sound, as Gospel music is often labeled, seems to be a good place to test out formulations regarding the foundations of worship music.

What follows is chiefly propelled by Luther's admonition in the opening paragraphs of his 1523 Formula missae, "we must dare something in the name of Christ." (1) In this case the "something" goes to print for two reasons: (1) as a testimony to Pete's expansive heart, which in matters of culture and ritual always meets questions not with reproof but rather with patient tutoring; and (2) as an attempt to offer a critique of a powerful, deeply meaningful style (2) of music by taking on the role of a critic in the sense musicologist Joseph Kerman (3) proposes, that is, one who does not stop short at repertoire description but considers all the factors involved in the doing of music.

Offspring of a family wide

To discover the gospel about Gospel means sorting through the roots of this music. Origins are many and diverse, including music of populations both white and black.

When Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey took their fledgling program of urban evangelization to Sunderland, England, in 1873, Sankey there devised the phrase "to sing the Gospel" as a way to market their campaign. (4) Advance notice let it be known that Dr. Moody would preach the gospel and Mr. Sankey would sing the gospel. A year later Philip P. Bliss published a collection of the songs used at these gatherings, giving it the title Gospel Songs. (5) From then on, songs that contained a heavy dose of good news for whatever oppressed situation or singer came to be known as "Gospel." Harry Eskew and James Downey offer this succinct definition of Gospel music:

A large body of American religious song with texts that reflect aspects
of the personal religious experience of Protestant evangelical groups,
both white and black. Such songs first appeared in religious revivals
during the 1850s but they are more closely associated with the urban
revivalism that arose in the last third of the 19th century. (6)

But origins of Gospel are far more complicated than such description suggests. Early American settlers, especially New England Protestants, adorned their Calvinist-styled worship with psalms taken from metrical psalters brought along from the old country. Lack of musical instruments in their new surroundings reinforced their traditional conservative inclinations about music in worship. Delivery of the psalms thus relied on a practice known as "lining out." In this method, a leader sang a phrase from the hymn-like psalm in a rather sprightly tempo followed by the rest of the group singing the same phrase but at a much slower tempo. Depending on the situation, untrained singers together often produced heterophony (simultaneous divergent versions of the tune) while a gathering of more gifted ones provided harmony of sorts. Other surprise variations on the tune were derived from occasional ornamentations offered by the musically adventuresome (perhaps as a way to escape the boredom of the slow tempos).

These marks of improvisation themselves probably originated in the folk-song traditions of the immigrants. (7) More significant is that lined-out psalmody shares distinct characteristics with processes inherent to African and African American music. Lining out is nearly identical to the call-response pattern everywhere present in African music, while improvisatory ornamentation serves to give life to both spiritual and Gospel. It is fruitless, if not pointless, to determine who did what first. (8) Rather, the emergence of these practices in several venues reveals an important root of the Gospel style.

Lining out of psalmody lasted well into the eighteenth century, when advocates of "regular singing" devised widespread programs of music education for all levels of psalm singers so that the practice of lining out and its aberrations might fall out of use. In the long run, campaigners for regularity are remembered more for their achievements in music education than for altering practices of psalmody. Lining-out techniques persisted in spite of these attempts at reform, for call-response patterns were alive and healthy in the growing body of African American music called "spirituals."

In the early part of the eighteenth century the importation of slaves from Africa commenced. (9) Newcomers arrived with embedded experience of African musical techniques, repertoires, rhythms, dances, poetry, and patterns of use. There was then, as there is now, no general African music but rather the musics of many nations or tribes.

Yet, common characteristics were shared by nearly all of the subgroups, among them the unity of dance and music, the call-response pattern, layered rhythm, the importance of improvisation, and voice quality groomed for outdoors.

The crucible of slavery forged new materials from these musical impulses. Long, difficult hours in the field gave rise to work songs, sorrow songs, and field hollers, not to mention moans and cries. Time away from the field yielded other musical developments. For some slaves a spiritual home of sorts could be found in the worship gatherings of their masters. Psalms sung at these occasions as well as hymns from the pen of Isaac Watts, soon known among them as the "hymns of Dr. Watts," entered the musical vocabulary of bonded African Americans. For most of the others, spiritual relief could be found only apart from the masters, giving rise to the more informal and sometimes clandestine gatherings of blacks in "praise houses" and "brush (or, hush) arbor" meetings.

Here, in the "invisible church," as it is sometimes called, the "black spiritual" underwent significant shaping. Cries and moans were shared, then expanded and contextualized with phrases from other materials. The "ring shout," a kind of shuffled dance, elicited improvised song fragments, later combined in ever more creative ways. Preachers birthed new texts and tunes by way of highly inflected stories and sermons. Conditions that spawned these meetings discouraged lengthy poetic forms in deference to short phrases that could be repeated and recontextualized to ease the specific plight of those gathered. Meanwhile, of course, these songs came to life via the musical patterns brought from the homeland.

In the 1930s George Pullen Jackson, a professor of German from Vanderbilt University, published several collections of what he called "white spirituals," (10) concurrently proposing that this repertoire served as model from which black spirituals were formed. His views have since been capably refuted, (11) even though most scholars acknowledge his pioneering discovery of a significant body of music consisting of folk hymns, religious ballads, and camp meeting spirituals, all of which coexisted with, influenced, and were influenced by the black spiritual. (12)

One of the places where cross-fertilization occurred was in the "camp meeting"--mostly southern rural gatherings that brought together diverse people for several days at a time so that they might be renewed in faith, awakened, or converted. At their peak during the years 1800-1830, these meetings of the "Great Awakening" consisted of much preaching, evangelizing, singing, and sometimes communion. Often whites and blacks met conjointly though divided into separate camps. Side by side they could hear one another's singing. At specified times they came together. Because of the purposes of the gathering, songs often stressed conversion or the fears connected with double predestination. Baptismal themes were rare, because slave masters were known to discourage baptisms of slaves. On occasion a convert chose to fulfill the requisite testimony after conversion by composing a song. Usually these took the form of a ballad (such as "Wayfaring Stranger" or "Wicked Polly"). So that everyone could sing, camp meeting music had to be simple and repetitive. Song leaders had no recourse to keyboards or other accompanying instruments, so they relied on variations of the call-response pattern thereby strengthening its role as a common denominator for much of the sacred singing occurring during these years.

Not all origins of Gospel were rural. Some African Americans living in the northern urban areas of the east coast in particular centered their efforts in developing a hymnody that was built on the foundations of both the spiritual and the gospel songs in the tradition of "Dr. Watts." A pioneer in this effort was Richard Allen, founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1801 he arranged to make available a collection of hymns for his congregation. (13) Not only was his printed collection the first of its kind, but also he set in motion the publication of materials, which gave rise to yet more spirituals as well as providing for the worship of established African American churches.

By the middle of the 19th century, most of the roots of Gospel were established. Stages of growth followed. For instance, the tendency to provide songs in a popular style with musical connections to marches and parlor music and with textual anchors in personal experience and straight-forward expressions of the "good news" flourished in the songs of William Bradbury ("He Leadeth Me"), intended by him to be used in the increasingly popular Sunday School, and in the thousands of hymns by Fanny Crosby ("Blessed Assurance"), to name just two of many sources.

As cities expanded, urban growth from Gospel's roots increased in tandem. The revivals led by Moody and Sankey succeeded because of the popularity of the gospel hymn, a staple at the events. Sankey both sang these songs as solos and developed ways to lead others in song. The Moody/Sankey formula proved to be productive and led to further pairings of evangelist/musician. Bliss also worked with Moody, but after the latter's death William Sunday and Homer Rodeheaver expanded on concepts and repertoire developed earlier. Later still, under the guidance of Charles Alexander, these revivals took on a new informality, with Alexander using the piano instead of the organ, employing sweeping gestures, and filling the atmosphere with banter and jokes. (14)

Among African Americans, the emancipation of the slaves seemed also to elicit an emancipation of the black spiritual. Collections began to appear, which in turn supplied the grist for choral arrangements eagerly sought by prestigious choral groups such as the Fisk Singers in the 1870s. The Fisk group and its many imitators brought a certain respectability to the spiritual even if certain important characteristics of this music were lost in the process. Meanwhile, matters were not as settled as these arrangements suggested. While slavery technically ceased at the conclusion of the Civil War, transplanted African Americans continued to experience oppression, particularly in northern cities. The lack of economic opportunities made things worse. From the midst of those conditions arose a new yearning for hymns of comfort, satisfied in part by the urban revivals but also by an expanding African American gospel hymnody typified and perhaps best represented by Charles Albert Tindley ("Stand by Me"). (15)

Tindley's texts and tunes resonated well with African Americans and soon gained popularity among those churches that emerged from the Azusa Street Revivals in Los Angeles (1906-1909). The excitement generated by these intensely personal and powerful worship experiences created a link to both black and white gospel hymns, particularly as they were "African-Americanized" through syncopation, interval alteration (following African models), and call-response delivery. But even this kind of growth required yet more maturation before it could be recognized as Gospel:

The basic performance style of 20th-century black gospel music
originated in Memphis in about 1907 when the founders of the Sanctified
Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, inspired by a revival they had
attended in Los Angeles, instituted their own services, characterized by
speaking in tongues (glossolalia), shouting, trances and visions, and
suitably emotional music, often improvised and sung in a highly charged
style. Performances by skilled songleaders evoked from the congregation
bodily movement ... rhythmic responses ... and occasional shouted
interpolations in the tradition of 19th-century ring shouts and circle
dances. (16)

Traditional Gospel in these early years evolved often from a fruitful combination of evangelist and musician(s), such as (male) quartets or (female) trios. One such combination was that of Theodore Frye, Thomas Dorsey, and Reverend Smith at Ebenezer church in south Chicago. Dorsey came to Chicago from Atlanta where he had made a name for himself as a blues singer. His personal life was full of complications, but he was always convinced that whatever the difficulties there was good news, which could be expressed through techniques at the hand of the blues singer. The death of his wife and child in 1930 set him in a desperate search for some good news. He found it as he shaped the famous song, "Precious Lord." (17) Dorsey's influence upon Gospel and gospel singers together with his organizational abilities were far reaching. Blues linked to Gospel yielded a sound ripe for exploration.

Such a merger serves as an early example of how Gospel musicians engage in an enriching interchange between idioms of the church and those outside of church. Sometimes the dialogue eventuates in significant new alterations to the form. To sing the blues adequately, for example, requires a soloist; otherwise the personal dimensions of the idiom are diminished. Dorsey's reformulation, therefore, coupled to an established practice of (personal) improvisation in the musical roots of Gospel, led to a new focus on individual performers and a search for new ideas in music outside of church. In the subsequent history of Gospel, as a matter of fact, individuals and small ensembles figure largely.

Fascination with individual performers reached a new level in 1969 when Gospel singer Edward Hawkins recorded "Oh Happy Day." The recording met with almost instant success across the charts. Most historians agree that Hawkins gave birth to "contemporary Gospel." (18)

In summary, Melva Costen offers this description of traditional Gospel Sound:

1. Texts are often subjective and filled with hope, thanksgiving, and lamentation; some texts speak objectively of the Triune God with a strong focus on Jesus.

2. Texts are strophic in form, tending to be sixteen or thirty-two measures long.

3. Improvised manner of the style of delivery is as important as what is sung. Delivery often includes spoken vocal injections and chanted testimonies.

4. Melodies often utilize flatted thirds and sevenths, as in the blues tradition.

5. The use of marked syncopation and highly improvised instrumental accompaniment serves as a driving force of the music.

6. There is careful utilization of techniques to "fill in" measures of rests, such as arpeggios, passing tones, runs, chromatics, or glissandi. (19)

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Gospel sound--for some it's just so much static

"It's not necessarily a pleasurable experience for the uninitiated," writes Viv Broughton of the Gospel Sound. (20) Indeed, down through the years there have been those, African Americans included, who have protested the introduction of any kind of music into worship that displayed signs of African origins. In 1841 the AME Church passed a resolution urging their preachers to "strenuously oppose the singing of ... tunes and hymns of our own composing." (21) In our own day strong reactions from Euro-Americans against the introduction of Gospel into worship usually go undocumented (for obvious reasons), but they nevertheless exist. Carefully researched apologies for the music increase in number but nevertheless reveal a perceived need to keep on making the case for its inclusion in mainstream thinking about worship music. (22)

Too often reasons for continuing resistance to Gospel are advanced with little or no recognition of its roots or its innate potential, resulting in few paths towards resolution. Unfortunately, the real gospel about Gospel is overshadowed by entrenched views and an unwillingness to understand its origins. Here the proposal is not to ignore the perceived problems but rather to name them, understand them, and move on to the potentials of gospel about Gospel.

Four such problems arise from the review of Gospel's roots: (1) theological assumptions behind texts; (2) dominance of entertainment values; (3) implied call to holistic worship; (4) the use of Gospel as a shibboleth for anti-racism.

Theology. While for many people the intensely personal, heartfelt lyrics and the ecstatic delivery of Gospel provide a means to express their own spirituality, for others the theological assumptions behind and in the text appear to be contrary to many of their most deeply held convictions. The latter would be true especially of those whose catechetical training consisted of deliberate delineation of positions regarding certain areas of Christian teaching.

That the theology of some Gospel might be bothersome should come as no surprise. Origins in the camp meetings and in situations where baptism, for instance, was discouraged produced emphases on conversion (and/or double predestination) and one's experience of coming to faith. Further, rural contexts of earlier Gospel suggest that texts originated from people who were prevented from or had no access to formalized catechesis (often true of the spiritual leaders as well), so that formulations of Christian belief grew chiefly from experience or handed-down folk belief. In addition, later Gospel emerged from the holiness churches and naturally bears the marks of Pentecostal tenets.

In Gospel, more often than not the "cry" came first, poetry second, and musical formulation last. Other repertoires of music evolve differently. That said, Gospel texts tend to express things that upon further thought are more complicated than presented. "Lead me, guide me along the way; for if you lead me, I cannot stray." (23) Well, yes--but then again, no. Does that mean that, should I stray, God is no longer leading me? Given my straying, does God pop in and out of my life? What kind of capricious God is that? Or does it mean that I am praying for God's hand in my life in spite of all my straying? Well, yes--but then again, no.

It is to be noted that Gospel-music scholars recognize how some texts can skew understandings of the faith in unhelpful ways. In a 1993 workshop on multicultural church music Costen reflected on how she incorporates Gospel music into her worship planning by selecting songs that are in line with community creedal affirmation.

Favorite Gospel songs often evolved from theological climates unaware of more critical readings of the Christian sources. John Spencer, in turn, has issued a call for a new ethnic hymnology, one that is both exegetically responsible and faithful to scriptural visions of the place of women and the equality of races. "The problem is our hymnody," (24) he writes, and then issues this invitation: "I am calling for a reformation, a renaissance, comprised of a renewed look at the history, cultures, and cosmologies of Africa in order to create a hymnody that, somewhat like the poetic and narrative literature of the Hebrew Bible, esteems Africa." (25)

There is no way to resolve all the issues of theology and Gospel text, especially if such theological issues are presented or imagined as gates to a full embrace of Gospel as worship music. A better path is to acknowledge problematic areas, discuss them, attempt to understand them, and see where the path leads. To ignore theological difficulties fosters dishonesty and the kind of relativism that muddies the apostolic faith and spirit.

Meanwhile, getting to the gospel about Gospel may in fact moderate theological concerns that are so often troublesome for the "uninitiated."

Entertainment. "In the 1960s, gospel music became entertainment," writes Samuel Floyd, (26) confirming what others both inside and outside the Gospel culture have either said or felt. The aura of the entertainment mode comes naturally to Gospel. As one looks to its origins, the profile of the solo singer gradually expands, probably because the role of improvisation is at the core of early psalmody, the spiritual, and the Gospel blues. Like it or not, the Gospel idiom encourages the display of an individual's abilities; if any should happen to appreciate those gifts, they naturally reward such talent with applause. Applause leads to fame, and fame leads to demand. Individuals or ensembles therefore look for those signs of achievement in order to affirm their own sense of mission and purpose.

One of the marks of Gospel and its roots has been the interchange between Gospel and its precursors and popular music. Commentators have not hesitated to take notice of what sorts of repercussions such an alliance has yielded. Boyer points out that in the 70s Gospel let itself be disconnected from the "black church" and then found it had to recreate for itself a kind of sense of church in the performance space. (27) And soon thereafter, he continues,

The response to gospel singing changed from soft weeping, fainting and
speaking in tongues to that of a rock concert, with applause in
recognition of vocal pyrotechnics. And, as in rock concerts, high-volume
amplification now became a part of the performance. (28)

So it is that almost concurrent with its emergence the history of Gospel becomes a history of individuals and groups: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Willie Mae Ford Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Marion Wilson, Roberta Martin Singers, Clara Ward Singers, Sallie Martin Singers, Barrett Sisters, the Winans, and so on.

Those deterred by this seeming preoccupation with the entertainment dimension of Gospel can discover company among Gospel practitioners and scholarly fans themselves. Anthony Heilbut, in his much-quoted study of Gospel, (29) devotes a major section of his work to describing the tension, if not chasm, that exists between those of the old school of Gospel--practitioners predating the lure of public popularity--and those of the new school. Slightly more pointed are recent comments from Obery M. Hendricks Jr., president of Payne Theological Seminary in Wilberforce, Ohio:

As the result of the "clowning" that has become normative and its
pervasive performance-orientation, its emphasis on "wrecking the house,"
and shameless appeals to emotion, the contemporary Gospel music genre
has come to function as an opiate for the masses of African American
people.... Like a drug, its goal is not to empower its users to change
reality, but simply to change the way they feel. (30)

A differing view comes from Clara Ward, one of the earliest proponents of contemporary Gospel. She defends the use of the popular venue by pointing out that God intended the message of the gospel also for those who "in many cases never attend a house of worship." (31) Costen, too, though worried that Gospel will belong no longer to the church but to an increasingly large business corporation, nevertheless wants to have faith in Gospel's long and beneficial history of interchange.

For those put off by these tendencies it should be noted that currently most styles of worship music are subject to the dangers of commoditization and, worse, the dynamics of entertainment. One cannot wait around until these issues are completely fixed before taking on the culture that accompanies a new idiom.

Holistic worship. When a musical worship encounter is "gospelized," expectations are that participants become totally involved. Depending on the local context, such bodily investment translates into swaying, clapping, audible interjections, moaning, even screaming, swooning, and trancelike modes of behavior. Total body involvement is endemic to African musics. In that context it finds release in the dance, itself a sign of the dancer's connection to the earth since most dances from Africa originated as outdoor cultic activities. Music and dance together then ritualize the correlation of body, voice, mind, and the earth.

Displaced African musics provided fertile ground for the development of the black spiritual, one of the progenitors of Gospel. Slave culture made possible the support of certain syncretistic elements (32) that evolved naturally from the displacement process. Among those was the welcome extended to trancelike behavior. (33) Openness to physical involvement in worship thus came naturally and could be linked to similar features. From Pentecostal environs, consequently, the Gospel enterprise began to assimilate an appreciation for the importance of intense emotional response to the music. (34)

More recently, proponents for the whole body at worship point to the concept of participatio actuosa (active participation), a new pattern of worship that is liberally treated by the Second Vatican Council in Sacrosanctum Concilium. (35) Meant to encourage Roman Catholics to take a more active role in the liturgy, the directive resonated far beyond that church, causing liturgical reformers everywhere to advocate for increased action in worship. African models helped to grasp the possibilities. But for some an invitation to "gospelizing" matters liturgical translated into an invitation to a kind of conversion, to a completely new mode of behavior which meant reprogramming nearly everything they held to be dear about worship. What is more, the invitation came with the implications that more bodily involvement actually represented a more natural state and that what they were accustomed to represented a lesser system of negotiating life and worship.

There are two issues here in need of address. First, the reluctance to enter the Gospel music arena may represent more than a simple fear of programmed bodily involvement such as "passing the peace." Behind invitations to loosen up in worship may in fact be the questionable assumptions that things African (and hence Gospel) are more primitive, more natural, than habits European and that African and African American music is hence more directly in touch with the body and consequently better. Simon Frith, without naming Gospel, has raised concerns about such a typically Romantic notion, and, citing John Chernoff, he approvingly iterates that "African music and dance are not performed as unrestrained emotional expression but are rather ways of realizing aesthetic and ethical structures." (36) Frith notes that "ecstatic" is the most "inappropriate adjective to apply to African music" (37) because the feelings associated with this music, while intense, are not intended to be overwhelming or out of control. Invitations to Gospel, therefore, fare best when they avoid guilt-inducing exhortations to return to a more primitive state supposedly unbridled.

Second, holistic worship can manifest itself in a variety of ways. Clapping and swaying are not necessarily the only marks of whether or not one's body is "into" the worship moment. While some clap, interject, and sway, others might be thoroughly invested in and aware of the visual effect such bodily investment creates.

Embracing Gospel as worship music can occur much more easily without burdening it with extraneous agendas, even though it is hard to imagine anyone not moved to some physical response to the driving rhythms.

Shibboleth. In Judges 12:6 the writer recounts how the password Shibboleth was used by the sentries of Gilead to detect boundary crossings by Ephraimites. The Ephraimites were unable to say the word and were thus reckoned as outsiders. It may not be too great an exaggeration to say that Gospel has often been held hostage by political agendas with the result that the use (or nonuse) of Gospel in a given worshipping assembly is thought to be a mark of how deeply the gathering is committed to anti-racism and other African American causes.

To be sure, it is difficult to document such tendencies--Who would want to declare such motivations? On the other hand, there is a history of linkage between a commitment to African American agendas and the use of Gospel. Cheryl Sanders writes that Gospel has been a key factor in attracting young people to corporate advocacy of equality among the races.

Indeed, black gospel choirs are present at public and private colleges
and universities all over the U.S., including those whose student bodies
are predominantly white. To designate the proliferation of collegiate
gospel choirs as a movement seems appropriate, since they emerged as
student-initiated organizations during the peak period of black student
involvement in public protests, political organizations, and demands for
black studies programs, outlasting many other institutionalized
expressions of black awareness among college students. (38)

Those reluctant to feign receptivity of Gospel music reach that condition not because of the linkage of public program and music. Rather, it seems, they resist manipulation around hidden agendas. It is one thing to explore a musical expression as part of a total self-examination of local ministry and mission; it is another to use Gospel as proof of something that does not yet exist. Tokenism of this sort may in fact lead to greater negativism toward ministerial hopes and foster division within a worshipping assembly.

Power of the ring

Issues latent in its customary use sidetrack the potential contribution of Gospel for Christian assembly. But it need not be so. Already it has been noted that the roots of Gospel reach back to the ring shout. Samuel Floyd believes the shout to be not only the single most important foundation of black music but also the source of its power. He writes:

The shout was a distinctive cultural ritual in which music and dance
were merged and fused. In the ring the musical practices of the slaves
converged in the Negro Spiritual and in other African-American musical
forms and genres. In this way, the ring helped preserve the elements
that we have come to know as the characterizing and foundational
elements of African-American music. (39)

From George Washington Cable's 1886 description of a Sunday recreation on Congo Square (Place Congo) in New Orleans we discover some of the dynamics inherent to most ring shouts, even though he described an Americanized, if not partly fictionalized, version of an activity born in former times. Cable describes how the people gathered together according to their national ancestry (tribes), forming rings that circumscribed rhythm makers while others stood outside the ring to support and interact with those of the circle. He writes of call/response patterns, hand clapping as substitutes for drumming, dancers entering and leaving the ring, individuals inserting improvised variations on song patterns, and occasional moments of trance. (40) Because those who formed these rings represented different national origins, several rings tended to emerge at the same time, creating a kind of ecumenical communion of assemblies.

Slipping into ecclesiastical metaphor here is not a stretch, for among the slaves the ring served also religious purposes. It was an easy transition to move from the ring that referenced the African High God to a ring that honored the Christian God. But then the ring did change to accommodate its new purposes among slaves adjusting to faith practices of their masters. For these participants, Eileen Southern writes, "the shout was not under any circumstances to be construed as a dance." (41) They sang only songs of a religious nature ("running spirituals"), and some participants were careful not to cross their feet by lifting them from the ground lest they slip into nonreligious versions of the practice. "Dancers" characteristically joined these circle formations by confining movement to the head and upper parts of the body and by moving the circle along with a kind of shuffle. Exhibitions of individual skill were welcomed, and, if there were drummers in these rings of new purpose, they would be located in the center, while others stood on the outside of the circle offering handclapping. Reports indicate that these versions of the ring shout often followed formal gatherings in the praise houses or constituted the core of late-night gatherings in the bush arbor. Because the ring enabled the people to ventilate their innermost feelings and needs, this mode of assembly was widespread and common.

Use of the ring at the camp meetings of the Great A wakening poignantly illustrates its deep meaning and enduring potential. On the last day of these revivals, it was reported, the African Americans present began knocking down the plank partitions that separated the white quarters from those of the blacks, and then the blacks would encircle the entire assembly to begin the farewell march around the gathering. (42) The ring signaled, if only momentarily, the vision of new orders.

Where's the power? The power lies partly in the pervasiveness of the ring and in its august roots in the homeland from time immemorial. Floyd marvels at how performers and listeners together explored, affirmed, and celebrated their culture in the ring, thereby fulfilling the marks of a good performance. (43) In this single activity individuals sought out the traditional collective religious experience, and the ring did not let them down; it provided that kind of continuity which stood firmly against the forces that would tear them down as well as apart.

But its power resides more forcefully in the activity constituting its existence. The ring enacts the community its members both deeply remember and presently seek. It is flexible. The ring can always expand--easily. It welcomes the individual and the individual's gifts. Its very movement inscribes the changes that are forced upon it, but it does so by creative adaptation while being sustained by its own power. The ring does not exclude because of heterodox station but rather expects some to have a part by being outside the ring; yet even those in such liminal space are needed for the enactment, too. In points of entrance, in the circular movement, and in places in between, the ring offers individuals an opportunity to find a way to "explore, affirm and celebrate their feelings of who they are," (44) which, for the slaves, it seemed, was subjected at every juncture to attempts at obliteration. The ring enacts and in some respects suspends the tensions and negotiated resolutions that exist between the individual and the larger cultural community. The ring is therefore a metaphor for the worshiping Christian assembly.

Nowhere is that better perceived than in the invitation to improvisation. Recalling, for example, the lining-out practice of early American psalm singing, it is easy to appreciate how improvisatory participation is central to the American experience of religious singing. It is also central to the processes of the ring shout. Spaces exist for one to take up the song and give it an individual twist. In the case of Dorsey, maintains Floyd, such gaps for improvisation were purposely introduced in order to invite personal testimony. (45)

The meaning of such implied invitation is clear in the ring--it enacts the very relationship the individual has to the ring, the individual both receiving its ordination while affirming loyalty to the community's song, and therefore its existence. The meaning and place of improvisation in other kinds of musics are less well understood, though recent attempts are to the point. In a study that seeks to navigate around the notions of "work" as fixed composition and composer as priestlike dispenser, Bruce Benson strikes a case for the mediating function of improvisation, that is, the interpretive activity of both performer and listener while a "piece" of music comes alive. For Benson, the musical event is one that includes composer, performer, and listener, and at each level there is a kind of improvisation going on. Compositions are living organisms, he proposes, "pieces" of a whole that exists partly in conception but also in performance and in a history of listening. The musical experience is therefore a dialogue, which means--and here is where the argument becomes pertinent--that musical events happen in community, (46) they require an "infusion of life" in order to be music, and they are endemically ethical. (47) What drives this understanding of music is the notion of improvisation--the individual shaping of what is already provided. (48)

From a related perspective, Andrew Cyprian Love has made a case for the importance of improvisation as a tool for setting in motion the experience of "becoming" as described by Heidegger. (49) While Love's concern grows out of his skills as an organist, he recognizes its usefulness in broader strokes, advocating for more spontaneity in liturgical act.

Is that it, then? Improvisation finds a musical home in the liturgy because it manifests a quirky need of liturgy to show some spontaneity? The significance of these appeals for improvisation are, I suspect, much more profound. Both Benson and Love point to an appreciation for music that includes far more than the process of rendering chart into sound. Improvisation throws its weight to the significance of music as process. By introducing the neologism of "musicking," Christopher Small has called attention to the radical implications of music in this new light. (50) Musicking, Small advances, is a political matter in the widest sense; it is "an important component of our understanding of ourselves and of our relationships with other people and the other creatures with which we share our planet." (51) Small wants us to grasp the significance of how the musical act establishes a set of relationships and that it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies.

The ring, its invitation to improvisation, its affirmation of the old communal bonds, is an enactment of things far beyond anything that might be captured on an iPod. The ring enfolds deep relationships and energy for living. It takes no large leaps of the imagination to perceive how the ring is well-suited to express--no, the word is enact--Christian Eucharistic assembly. For it is in Eucharistic assembly that the Holy Spirit calls believers together again and again to shape them into the body of Christ. That shaping remains incomplete idea unless it is somehow enacted, so that individual members might gain a vision of what the body is like even outside specified time and space. The musicking of the ring enacts holy ensemble, set in motion by the Master of the ring himself.

By reclaiming its roots and power in the ring, Gospel as style does what Eucharistic liturgy asks of its participants: to manifest the bodily energy provided by its Head. The good news about Gospel is that its origins set it free from theological positioning, the lure of entertainment, the lonely burden of soliciting holistic worship posture, and enslavement to racist agendas. The good news about Gospel is that the dynamics of the ring are a friendly call to other styles of worship music as well, so that all the musicking of the assembly be an enactment of holy ensemble.

The power of the ring, finally, elicits practical questions that are at the very foundations of worship music of all kinds, including Gospel. What to do with the bystanders? Are they secondary to the event or integral to the ensemble? Will they be welcomed in the ring should the Spirit call them there? Where will the singers and "drummers" be placed in the assembly? Will they be able to shape the ring easily and naturally? In the larger unfolding of parish worship renewal, is it time for the people of the ring (Gospel musicians or any musicians, for that matter) to "make a grand march round de encampment," (52) inviting those within the camp to join them at the margins in order to be the body of Christ in the world?

Ah, but now we are back to the classroom. The truth of the matter is that it is all about ritual.

1. Luther's Works 53: Liturgy and Hymns, ed. Ulrich Leupold (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965), 19.

2. The word "style" is a deliberate choice, since Gospel is less about a specific form or repertoire and more about individual performance, a point that figures largely in what follows. Any form of music can be "gospelized," as attested recently by the Gospel version of Handel's "Hallelujah" chorus. See Melva Costen, "African-American Liturgical Music in a Global Context," in African-American Worship: Faith Looking Forward, The Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center, 27 (Fall 1999/Spring 2000): 84.

3. Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), chap. 1.

4. Costen, "African-American Liturgical Music," 85.

5. Philip P. Bliss and Dwight W. Whittle, Gospel Songs (Cincinnati, 1874).

6. The New Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 7th ed., s.v. "Gospel music," by Harry Eskew, James C. Downey, and H. C. Boyer, 172. Hereafter this encyclopedia is abbreviated NGDMM.

7. Die Musik im Geschichte und Gegenwart, Sachteil, rev. ed., s.v. "Sacred Singing," by Bernd Hoffmann, 797. Hereafter this encyclopedia is abbreviated MGG.

8. See a balanced discussion of this in NGDMM, s.v. "Spiritual," by Paul Oliver, 192.

9. Jacqueline Cogdell Djedje, "African American Music to 1900," The Cambridge History of American Music, ed. David Nichols (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 115. In the prior century most slaves came from the West Indies.

10. See, for instance, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (Chapel Hill, NC, 1933).

11. John Lovell, Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 92-98 passim.

12. See NGDMM, "Spiritual," 192, and Costen, "African-American Liturgical Music," 85.

13. Richard Allen, A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors (Philadelphia, 1801).

14. NGDMM, "Gospel music," 174.

15. Tindley's New Songs of Paradise (Philadelphia: Paradise Publishing Company, 1916), went through seven editions, according to Costen, 87.

16. NDGMM, "Gospel music," 179.

17. The story of Dorsey's life and contributions is brilliantly told by Michael Harris in The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

18. NGDMM, "Gospel," 179, and Tony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 30.

19. Costen, "African-American Liturgical Music," 91.

20. Viv Broughton, Black Gospel: An Illustrated History of the Gospel Sound (Poole: Dorset: Blandford Press, 1985), 7.

21. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 131.

22. See, for instance, Costen, Heilbut, and Broughton, who writes in Black Gospel, p. 9: "I'd like to hope that the world would begin to listen to black gospel. Not for its excitement, not for entertainment, not as an anachronism, not as a precursor of other music, not as a collector's obsession, not as a primitive art form, not as a folk music (though it may be all of these); not even necessarily for the lyrics of the songs, for they are frequently banal in isolation. Gospel deserves to be heard for the depth of its prophecy out of the mouths of its prophets ... great wisdoms and jubilations, pulsing through the music quite apart from what is actually being articulated."

23. "Lead Me, Guide Me," This Far By Faith (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), #70.

24. Jon Michael Spencer, Sing a New Song: Liberating Black Hymnody (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 20.

25. Spencer, Sing a New Song, 23.

26. Samuel A. Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 196.

27. NGDMM, "Gospel Music," 180-81.

28. NGDMM, "Gospel Music," 180-81.

29. Heilbut, The Gospel Sound, 320-25.

30. Obery M. Hendricks Jr., "'I am the Holy Dope Dealer': The Problem with Gospel Music Today," The Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 27 (Fall 1999/Spring 2000): 55.

31. As quoted in Costen, "African-American Liturgical Music," 93.

32. MGG, 793, 795.

33. The classic study on music and trance is Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance, rev. Brunhilde Biebuyck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Rouget maintains that music's role in trance is mediating and that the person experiencing the trance is a willing and active partner in the event.

34. See Judith Becker, "Anthropological Perspectives on Music and Emotion," Music and Emotion, ed. Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 150, where the author discusses "Pentecostal arousal" as an example of religious ecstasy which is used to confirm the salvation of the worship.

35. "Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy," Documents on the Liturgy 1963-1979 (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1982), 4-27. Pertinent articles are 14-20.

36. John Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 150.

37. Simon Frith, Performing Rites (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 131.

38. Cheryl Sanders, "Resistance, Rebellion, and Reform: The Collegiate Gospel Choir Movement in the United States," The Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 27 (Fall 1999/Spring 2000): 202.

39. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 6.

40. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 35-37.

41. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 169.

42. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 88.

43. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 228.

44. Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue (New York: Riverrun Press, 1987), 416.

45. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 128.

46. Bruce Ellis Benson, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 48.

47. Benson, The Improvisation, 164.

48. Benson describes eleven different kinds of improvisation, pp. 26-30.

49. Andrew Cyprian Love, Musical Improvisation, Heidegger, and the Liturgy: A Journey to the Heart of Hope (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2003).

50. Christopher Small, Musicking (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 13.

51. Small, Musicking, 13.

52. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 88.

Mark P. Bangert

John H. Tietjen Professor of Worship and Church Music

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago