This house, this music: exploring the interdependent interpretive relationship between the contemporary black church and contemporary gospel music.

In his groundbreaking work Somebody's Calling My Name: Black Sacred Music and Social Change, the Rev. Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker (1979, 17) sets forth the thesis that "what black people are singing religiously will provide a clue to what is happening to them sociologically." (1) Tracing the African and European cultural influences in slave songs, spirituals, and traditional gospel favorites, Walker establishes a clear correlation between lyrical content in black sacred music and the social circumstances of black life. In the same way this was true of the African-American spiritual, for example, Walker concludes that it is no less true of gospel music. Furthermore, in the case of gospel music, he attributes certain sociohistorical factors--the Great Depression, the post-World War II migration of blacks from the South to northern cities, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education, and the civil rights movement--as influential to the rise of the genre (132-141). Walker's work demonstrates how, as in the case with vernacular music generally, the content and structure of early gospel music directly reflects a specific social context.

Twenty-four years and several social contexts later, ethnomusicologist and musician Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. (2003) embraces a comparable interpretive framework wherein he advocates "attending to the specific historical moment" surrounding a particular black musical expression. But he further calls for an examination of the particular social setting that gives rise to that expression. For Ramsey, these settings are community theaters, cultural spaces, or sites of cultural memory, which "provide a window of interpretation that allows [us] to enter into some important ideas about the cultural work performed by music in the processes of African American identity making" (21). Community theaters include "cinema, family narratives, and histories, the church, the social dance, the nightclub, the skating rink, even literature" (21). Intrinsic to this "process of identity making" is the meaning making that transpires within these spaces, for in the community theaters, "real people negotiate and eventually agree on what cultural expressions such as a musical gesture mean. They collectively decide what associations are conjured by a well-placed blue note, a familiar harmonic pattern, the soulful, virtuoso sweep of a jazz solo run, a social dancer's imaginative twist on an old dance step, or the raspy grain of a church mother's vocal declamation on Sunday morning" (25-26; see also Walser 1993; Floyd 1991).

From these starting points, and to enhance our understanding of the theological, cultural, and musical significance of the latest installation of black sacred music--contemporary gospel music--I explore here how recent sociological phenomena have affected this genre's development. My thesis is that sociological factors that affect the contemporary black church are largely reflected in various aspects of contemporary gospel music. In the less than forty years that this form of black sacred music has emerged, the community theater that gave it birth and provided the creative, cultural, and spiritual resources for its vitality--the black church-has been undergoing its own transformation. I consider the impact of two social factors that have contributed to this transformation--integration and secularization--and examine their impact on the emergence, development, and proliferation of contemporary gospel music. By considering how these social realities have affected the black community in a broad sense and the contemporary black church in particular, we can transform our interpretive window into a lens through which understanding is magnified.

The Contemporary Black Church and Contemporary Gospel Music

According to the U.S. Census Bureau (1998), there were approximately thirty-four million black Americans in the United States in 1998. Compared with 66 percent of whites, 83 percent of blacks reported that their religious faith was "very important in their lives." Seventy-five percent of blacks agreed with the statement "God is the all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect creator who rules the world today." In 1999, about 49 percent of blacks labeled themselves "spiritual," and 61 percent labeled themselves "committed born-again Christians" (Barna Research Group). The large majority, roughly 80 percent, of these "committed born-again Christians" belong to the seven historically black denominations: three Methodist churches (African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and Christian Methodist Episcopal Church), three Baptist conventions (National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., National Baptist Convention, America, and the Progressive National Baptist Convention), and one Pentecostal church (Church of God in Christ). With the exception of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), these institutions were founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in response to the racism and rejection faced by blacks within white Christian churches. (2) These seven denominations, along with smaller denominations and predominantly black congregations generally, constitute the larger black church in the United States.

As a sociological reference, my use of the term black church refers to the diversity of a shared tradition of Christian commitment that has shaped the collective black community. Theologically speaking:

 
   Black religion has always concerned itself with the fascination of 
   an incorrigibly religious people with the mystery of God, but it has 
   been equally concerned with the yearning of a despised and 
   subjugated people for freedom--freedom from the religious, economic, 
   social, and political domination that whites have exercised over 
   blacks since the beginning of the African slave trade. It is this 
   radical thrust of blacks for human liberation expressed in 
   theological terms and religious institutions that is the defining 
   characteristic of black Christianity and black religion in the 
   United States. (Wilmore 1983, x, italics added)