Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

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

Article Excerpt
"Let the Church Sing!": Music and Worship in a Black Mississippi Community. By Therese Smith. Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2004. [xxi, 293 p. ISBN 1-58046-157-3. $45.00.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

As a black American born and raised in the Southeast and brought up in a Pentecostal church. I was immediately interested in Let the Church Sing!, an ethnographic study of a rural black Mississippi community, their styles of worship and music, and how their worldview influenced these styles. More than an academic interest, I wanted to know the similarities between that experience and mine. Just as Therese Smith, an Irish ethnomusicologist with a Brown University pedigree, acknowledges that this study is "inevitably coloured by [her] interpretations" (p. 207), so too are my impressions and judgments of her work informed by my experiences growing up in a black church in the South.

Smith has more than an academic interest too--she developed an admiration and intimacy with the congregation that shines through in her writing. Despite this intimacy, Smith's research and methodology are unimpeachable, and she has maintained her external objectivity, while at the same time she perfectly describes some of the internal cultural structures that at times defy explanation.

Updating and expanding her Ph.D. dissertation, "Moving in the Spirit: Music of Worship in Clear Creek, Mississippi, as an Expression of Worldview," (Brown University, 1998), Let the Church Sing! is a well-written, readable, and engaging piece about the "intersection of belief system, expressive culture, and worldview of a single, more-or-less self-contained African American...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!