Let the Church Sing! Music and Worship in a Black Mississippi Community

"Religion is a fundamental part of Southern identity, generally, and music is often at its very heart. This is nowhere truer than in the black churches of the Deep South, where communities articulate their view of themselves and the world they live in through the religious songs and hymns that they sing and the highly musical sermons that they hear." "One small, relatively self-contained community in rural Mississippi, Clear Creek, is known in the region, and even beyond, for its intense and imaginative cultivation of music in the context of religious worship. The sermons of their pastor, Rev. Grady McKinney (in common with those of other similar preachers), make resonant use of allusions to daily life as well as to religious principles and Bible stories. Also, the sermons are often delivered in a powerful half-sung manner and underscored by hymn phrases played on the piano. Sometimes the sermons build to a climax that finds its release in a hymn previously hinted at by the preacher and pianist and now sung by the congregaton as a whole." ""Let the Church Sing!": Music and Worship in a Black Mississippi Community is based on years of fieldwork by an Irish ethnomusicologist, who examines, in more detail than ever before, how various facets of the Clear Creek citizens' worldview find expression through religious ritual and music. Therese Smith, though originally very much an outsider, gradually found herself welcomed into Clear Creek by members and officials of the Clear Creek Missionary Baptist Church. She was permitted to record many hours worth of sermons and singing and engaged in community events as a participant-observer. In addition, she conducted plentiful interviews, not just at Clear Creek but, for comparison, at Main St. Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky. All of this enables her to analyze in detail how music is interwoven in the worship service, how people feel about the music that they make and hear, and, more generally, how the religious views so vividly expressed help the Church's members think about the relationship between themselves, their community, and the larger world. Music and prayer enable the members and leaders of the Church to bring the realm of the spiritual into intersection with the material world in a particularly active way."--BOOK JACKET.