Religious Sounds: Music, Race, and Spirituality

Does this sound religious? People often answer intuitively, and their answers rarely match. Why does Contemporary Christian Music strike some as too worldly, and others as too religious? How did Sister Rosetta Tharpe — a woman with an electric guitar on a nightclub stage — scandalize her church? In this course we will explore a variety of genres, some rooted in Black American musical culture, such as jazz, hip hop, and country, and others drawn from global traditions like qawwali and reggae. Analyzing recordings, interviews, industry documents, and press coverage through affect theory, sound studies, Black studies, and religious history, we will ask why these judgments fall where they do, and what religion in modern American life sounds like.