Between the first and last words of a black gospel song, musical
sound acquires spiritual power. During this unfolding, a variety of
techniques facilitate musical and physical transformation. The most
important of these is a repetitive musical cycle known by names
including the run, the drive, the special, and the vamp. Through
its combination of reiteration and intensification, the vamp turns
song lyrics into something more potent. While many musical
traditions use vamps to fill space, or occupy time in preparation
for another, more important event, in gospel, vamps are the main
event. Why is the vamp so central to the black gospel tradition?
What work-musical, cultural, and spiritual-does the gospel vamp do?
And what does the vamp reveal about the transformative power of
black gospel more broadly? This book explores the vamp's essential
place in black gospel song, arguing that these climactic musical
cycles turn worship services into transcendent events. A defining
feature of contemporary gospel, the vamp links individual
performances to their generic contexts. An exemplar of African
American musical practice, the vamp connects gospel songs to a
venerable lineage of black sacred expression. As it generates
emotive and physical intensity, the vamp helps believers access an
embodied experience of the invisible, moving between this world and
another in their musical practice of faith. The vamp, then, is a
musical, cultural, and religious interface, which gives vent to a
system of belief, performance, and reception that author Braxton D.
Shelley calls the Gospel Imagination. In the Gospel Imagination,
the vamp offers proof that musical sound can turn spiritual power
into a physical reality-a divine presence in human bodies.
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