Research On Religion » jazz

Lerone Martin on Preaching on Wax and Phonograph Religion

tonygill — Sun, 13 Nov 2016 09:00:57 +0000

For a few decades in the early-mid 20th century, the sermons of a number of African-American preachers were recorded on “wax” (or vinyl records) and distributed widely, a phenomenon that became known as “phonograph religion.” Prof. Lerone Martin, an assistant professor at the John C. Danforth Center for Religion & Politics at Washington University, joins us to discuss this fascinating period in history and bring along a couple audio clips for us to enjoy and analyze. Dr. Martin begins by explaining how he came to his dissertation project of examining “phonograph religion.” His upbringing in a religious household with many audio sources — radio, cassettes, CDs — piqued his interest and set him down an academic path to explore how “preaching on wax” all began. Lerone treats us to the story of Rev. James M. Gates as he makes a journey from Georgia to Columbia Studios in New York City to record a number of sermons. Amazingly, these recorded sermons sold upwards of 50,000 copies, which, when one considers the population of the United States and limited availability of phonographs (especially in poor rural areas), would be equivalent to a platinum album in today’s market (roughly a million copies). Prof. Martin lays out both the social, demographic, and religious landscape of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century, noting that it was a period of migration from rural areas and into cities. Two strands of religious preaching emerge during this time — one associated with the black literati and that focused on a more urbane and educated approach to spiritual worship, and another that brought the folk worship practices of rural communities into the city. It is this latter stream that found a home in the phonographic recording medium, a method of distribution that was popular with the “common folk” and that lent itself well to the rhythmic preaching and use of music common in rural African America churches. We talk about the demographics and theological themes of phonographic preachers, noting that they tended to come from Southern Baptist or Pentecostal traditions instead of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches and how issues of personal piety, “fire and brimstone,” and “proper” gender roles were emphasize in many of the recordings. We discover that Rev. Gates recorded a couple of his sermons on the same day, and in the same studio, that Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong were recording “salacious” jazz and blues songs. This story prompts Tony to ask whether recording executives worried that promoting religious tracts that warned of the sinfulness of modern music might cut into the profits of the jazz side of the business. Lerone notes that many people listened to both and so long as the recordings sold well, labels such as Columbia, Okeh, and Merrit Records were happy to keep supplying them. Our conversation also covers how people used these recordings, often sharing them around the neighborhood or taking them on car and train trips (as many of the phonographs were hand cranked). The last portion of our conversation provides an audio taste of some of these sermons, with Dr. Martin explaining the relevance of each one. We hear Rev. FW McGee’s “Jonah in the Belly of the Whale” and J.C. Burnett’s “Downfall of Nebuchadnezzar,” estimated to be the highest selling sermon of that era. Lerone also explains how these sermons took on various social issues such as the concern over the rise of “chain stores” and how they might be displacing smaller “mom and pop” businesses in local communities. We hear part 1 of Rev. Gates’s sermon “Goodbye Chain Stores,” and Prof. Martin then discusses its characteristic style and significance. We note the interesting paradox that while Gates was critical of chain stores (such as Woolworth’s), the phonographs and recordings of these sermons were made more widely available because of these establishments, leading Lerone to note that embracing the medium of the culture that they often critiqued was a way of extending the evangelical reach of these pastors. We conclude with some thoughts on what Prof. Martin learned over the course of his studies, and he shares his surprise that he developed a growing respect for these preachers seeing them as very nuanced actors in a changing environment. Recorded: Nov. 9, 2016.

Note: The audio clips used are freely available to the public on YouTube. Further links can be found below.

Bill Clark on an Academic’s Spiritual Journey

tonygill — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 08:00:04 +0000

In a personal interview that has a different flavor than many of our other episodes, we follow the spiritual journey of Prof. William Clark, a professor of political science at the Univeristy of Michigan, from his childhood years up until the present. While we have featured the personal stories of other guests on our show — such as cowboy preacher Dan Stiles and street preacher Jeff Rose — this discussion takes on a unique twist in that we ask Bill to use his own familiarity with the sociology of religion to reflect upon how his life informs us about the changing religious landscape more generally. Bill specializes in the study of international and comparative political economy, writing on such things as financial institutions, yet he nonetheless retains a close familiarity with what scholars who focus on religion are writing about.

We begin the journey with Bill growing up in New Jersey in a Catholic household. His close interaction with the Church has him considering the priesthood for a short time, though this is never realized. Instead, his interests in architecture and music take him along a different path in college. It is early in his college career, though, when he experiences a falling out with religion following the death of his father. This incident issues in a spiritual dry spell in his life and we follow the academic and professional trajectory of Bill through this period, which extends through his graduate training at Rutgers and first job down in Georgia. Despite his turn to a more secular life, he does marry a woman who remains more-or-less connected to her non-denominational religious roots and they begin a family together. The birth of their children draws Bill’s wife into weekly services with a desire to raise them with a moral foundation, while Bill admits to staying at home reading the New York Times on Sunday. Nonetheless, Bill does attend services on occasion and he admits to being rather argumentative with the pastors and their messages being that as an academic he was trained to disagree with somebody after a 40 minute sermon, irrespective what was being said. This academic personality trait becomes important later in his life as we see with his next move, which is northward to Princeton for a post-doc fellowship.

It is at Princeton where Bill’s spiritual journey takes an important turn. They connect to a Christian Missionary Alliance church and Bill, through a series of seemingly small but important events, begins engaging a small Bible study group and, after getting a job at NYU and making the long train commute, has a regular dinner discussion with the pastor of his church. These small group discussions and personal contact with the pastor play a much more important role in bringing Bill back to the faith than the large Sunday service experience, an interesting sociological observation that reveals a great deal about how people interact with faith and helps us to understand where Bill is today. He then discusses his conversion experience, which has both its small steps and its “brick wall” moment. Bill, at this point, makes a very intersting observation — it is the sociological factors that matter for the direction of one’s conversion, but there is still more to the process than just that.

We then move up to New York City. An exhaustive commute and the opportunity to get into NYU housing allows the Clark family to move to the Big Apple. It is here we discuss his involvement with the creation of a start-up church associated with the McManus bothers’ Mosaic Church in California. We delve into the experience of creating this church and what was unique about what he was doing. This portion of our conversation also recalls some of the insights provided in an earlier podcast with Tony Carnes about New York religion, namely that spirituality in New York is not always the typical Sunday service experience, but rather finds ways to work itself into some unusual cracks and corners of the city. This discussion leads us to reflect upon what the nature of our religious landscape looks like — not necessarily declining religiosity, but rather changing forms of religiosity that appears to many (incorrectly) to be a loss of faith.

The podcast closes with Bill’s most recent academic move to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Tony is given some academic advice on how to be more attractive to other schools (namely rely upon divine providence) and then we discuss how Bill’s spiritual life is again reshaped. Bill once again gets connected with what might be considered a more traditional-style of church, plugs into a small group format, and then eventually takes an interesting missional step outside of the church building, which is where he finds himself today. We conclude with Bill’s thoughts on the recent hubbub about the rise of “religious nones” in America and what he has learned on his academic and spiritual journey. Recorded: May 21, 2013.