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Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age.

Article Excerpt
Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age. By Jerma A. Jackson. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. [xii, 193 p. ISBN 0-8078-2860-2. $18.95.] Illustrations, index, bibliography.

Since the original publication of Anthony Heilbut's The Gospel Sound in 1971, there have been not more than a handful of well-researched histories of twentieth-century African American religious music, nor have there been many good biographies of the major figures in gospel music. Jerma A. Jackson's Singing in My Soul is somewhat disappointing, because it has the makings of either a groundbreaking study of the role of women as musical missionaries in African American churches, or a thoughtful biography of the controversial gospel singer-guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but is instead an uneasy combination of the two. That said, Singing in My Soul is an important, if unfocused, analysis of the tradition of the female solo singer in African American religious music, a line that goes through...

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