Sonic Domination and the Politics of Race in Southern Antebellum Hymnody

Article published in Journal of the Society for American Music. 18 October 2023.

Religious music served a political function in the southern United States during the antebellum period. This article examines catechisms and hymnbooks used by white evangelical missionaries and slaveowners in the antebellum South, arguing that the planter elite deployed hymns as a medium to assert white supremacy. The term sonic domination identifies processes whereby sound functioned as a social tool to maintain discipline and order among the enslaved population. Black and white people sang hymns in church, at interracial revivals, and during civic services; they were also heard on bells and cited in poetry. English texts and tunes included in slave catechisms and white portrayals of Black singing highlight the role of evangelical hymns in maintaining plantation order in the Old South. At the same time, enslaved Black Christians found creative ways to circumvent the oppressive power of the white elite through song. African Americans employed English hymns in their own religious rituals and used them to convey hidden meanings on the plantation. Both genres, which interacted and influenced each other, contributed to an eventual codification of American evangelical hymnody.

Bamboula: Obsession and Race in the Piano Music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk

Paper read at the Fourth International Chopinological Congress during a session titled “Chopin and Nineteenth-Century Pathologies.” Warsaw, Poland. 3 December 2021.

The Hymns of Richard allen and the Contact Zones of American Revivalism Hymnody

Paper read at the Modern Language Association Annual Convention during a roundtable titled “Race, Religion and Justice in the Archives.” Virtual. 9 January 2022.

Christian Hymnody and Social Power

Hymns are more than devotional or catechetical. They are a uniquely social form of centuries-old Christian discourse, revised and expanded in circulation, but never shedding the truths that they have come to present throughout history.

Essay written for Earth & Altar. 27 July 2022.

“Hymns are more than devotional or catechetical. They are a uniquely social form of centuries-old Christian discourse, revised and expanded in circulation, but never shedding the truths that they have come to present throughout history.”