Description
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2022 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, award by by the Council of Graduate SchoolsExplores the role of jazz celebrities like Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams as representatives of African American religion in the twentieth centuryBeginning in the 1920s, the Jazz Age propelled Black swing artists into national celebrity. Many took on the role of race representatives, and were able to leverage their popularity toward achieving social progress for other African Americans. In Lift Every Voice and Swing, Vaughn A. Booker argues that with the emergence of these popular jazz figures, who came from a culture shaped by Black Protestantism, religious authority for African Americans found a place and spokespeople outside of traditional Afro-Protestant institutions and religious life. Popular Black jazz professionalssuch as Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williamsinherited religious authority though they were not
Trade ReviewBooker offers a fresh and innovative perspective on twentieth-century African American religious history and culture by highlighting how Black jazz professionals functioned as “race representatives” in American public life and as agents in shaping and transforming the landscape of African American religious life. Mobilizing a host of unconventional sources for religious studies,
Lift Every Voice and Swing presents a fascinating and original portrait of the dynamic relationship between popular culture and Black religious life. -- Judith Weisenfeld, author of New World A Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration
In this vividly imagined, carefully researched, and musically written book, Vaughn Booker argues for jazz as the vector by which African American spiritual authority moved beyond black church life to saturate all of American culture, and from there to command the shape, feel, and sound of the long twentieth century. A book this fresh about religion in the lives and works of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams would by itself be a remarkable achievement. But
Lift Every Voice and Swing is more: a demonstration of the power of their artistry to move and change the world. -- Tracy Fessenden, Director of Strategic Initiatives in the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, Arizona State University
Lift Every Voice and Swing is entirely original and groundbreaking. By way of incisive archival research and superb cultural analysis, Vaughn A. Booker has shown that there was a religiosity to the creation of jazz music and that some jazz musicians, such as Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams, represented alternative sources of spiritual authority and religious ways of being throughout the long twentieth century. Convincingly overturning notions of the innate secularity of jazz, Booker has provoked a powerful rethinking of African American religious history and the means by which we tell that history. -- Wallace Best, Princeton University
While Booker is an unconventional music researcher, readers benefit from his lifting up of the unspoken, unsung, and unswung flows of multi-faceted, religious jazz lives…His expansive inclusion of various types of texts makes our reading of these great figures richer by amplifying the musical meaning found in their envoiced and religio-socially swinging lives. * American Religion *
Booker’s fluency in religious and music history is formidable. His book is dense with ideas expressed in prose that will reward both scholars and general readers with an interest in twentieth-century religion, American music, African American studies, and history. * The Journal of African American History *
