... religious reflections and moral musings was shaped by his experience as a Jehovah's Witness, his art reflects perceptions and consciousness that are easily generalized from the larger stream of Afro-American spirituality. Thus we may draw similarities, without extensive complication, between Jackson's work...

...Houston A. Baker, Jr. Baker , Houston A. , Jr. Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic . Madison : The University of Wisconsin Press , 1988 . © Copyright 1989 JBSM /Jon Michael Spencer 1989 Book Reviews 75 Dvorak sums up the apocalyptic...

...Kip Lornell Lornell , Kip . “Happy in the Service of the Lord”: Afro-American Gospel Quartets in Memphis . Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 1988 . © Copyright 1989 JBSM /Jon Michael Spencer 1989 74 The Journal of Black Sacred Music that the political songs still embodied...

...Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Gates , Henry Louis , Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism . New York : Oxford University Press , 1988 . © Copyright 1989 JBSM /Jon Michael Spencer 1989 Book Reviews 75 Dvorak sums up the apocalyptic, eschatological...

...Cornel West Copyright © 1992 by Duke University Press 1992 On Afro-American Popular Music: From Bebop to Rap Corne] West The salient feature of popular music in First World capitalist and Third World neocolonialist societies is the appropriation and imitation of Afro-American musical forms...

...Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Gates , Henry Louis , Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism . New York : Oxford University Press , 1988 . Copyright © 1990 by Duke University Press 1990 flection and the goal toward which all of life strives"-is its...

... Copyright © 1992 by Duke University Press 1992 An Afro-American Composer's Viewpoint Melody, in my opinion, is the most important musical element. After melody comes harmony; then form, rhythm, and dynamics. I prefer music that suggests a program to either pure or program music in the strict...

...Irene V. Jackson-Brown Walter F. Pitts , Jr. Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora . New York : Oxford University Press , 1993 . 199 pp. Copyright © 1994 by Duke University Press 1994 Book Reviews 113 Walter F. Pitts, Jr. Old Ship of Zion: The Afro...

...Cornel West Copyright © 1992 by Duke University Press 1992 In Memory of Marvin Gaye Comel West Much of the significant truth about the career of the Afro-American singer Marvin Gaye may be obscured by the problems of his later life and the manner of his dying !he was shot to death by his...

... Christian cultures, the ideal community-"the norm for ethical re- flection and the goal toward which all of life strives"-is its normative criterion, too. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. The blues...

...Dominique-René de Lerma Copyright © 1991 by Duke University Press 1991 Foreword There was a time when the musical genius of the African American was restricted to rags and coon songs and nothing was known about the talent of such Afro-European composers as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges...

... ofFrench and Comparative Literature at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of City University of New York. Lornell, Kip. "Happy in the Service of the Lord": Afro-American Gospel Quartets in Memphis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. This is essentially an ethnomusicological study of black...

...Earlston E. DeSilva Copyright © 1989 by Duke University Press 1989 ffte Theology olB/11,k Power and B/11,k Song: Jomes Brown Earlston E. DeSilva James Brown is an Afro-American performing artist and soul singer who reigned as "Soul Brother No. 1" during the sixties and seventies, and whose...

... and the gospel songs. This "mood" or mode is the emotional archetype from which the blues spring. The blues, with all of their contradictions, represent, for better or for worse, the essential vector of the Afro-American sensibility and identity. Birthing themselves sometimes between the end of formal slavery...

... of intellectual inquiry into the theology of American popular culture can be pivotal and prophetic scholarship. A number of essays published prior to this collection help substantiate this assertion: "On Afro-American Popular Music," "Sex and Suicide," and "In Memory of Marvin Gaye" by philosopher Comel West...

... Waters is to correct misinterpretations of the relation of the Bible to ancient Africa and to diaspora Afro-Christians. Of major concern is the notion that the Bible is the product of the "white man's religion" and that due to the misconstruals of Eurocentric scholars and missionaries the relation...

... theodicies, then it is a short step to prove that the same could easily hold true for all of its secular musical progeny. This ontological location of early blues existence is emblematic of what Comel West has aptly termed "the Afro-American spiritualblues impulse," in which the music of certain popular...

... that black music land, by extension, the blues) is the best example of what he calls the "Afro-American humanist1' tradition. He describes this tradition in terms of the breadth of black musical expression: "The rich pathos of sorrow and joy which are simultaneously present in spirituals, the exuberant...

... and Pentecostals. But in relation to the larger Afro-Christian community, Jones's reputation as a hymnist is incommensurate with his prolific output of some thousand hymns. While Rev. Charles Albert Tindley, the celebrated Methodist hymnist, composed less than one-twentieth the number of gospel hymns of Jones...

... Name": Black Sacred Music and Social Change. Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1979. - - - . The Soul of Black Worship: Praying, Preaching, Singing. New York: Martin Luther King Fellows Press, 1984. Walton, Ortiz M. Music: Black, White and Blue: A Sociological Survey of the Use and Misuse of Afro-American...