The Gospel in Black and White: Race and Popular Culture in American Hymns offers a history of the cultural origins of gospel music in the United States. Focusing on the years between 1875 and 1915, this book traces how gospel emerged in the aftermath of the Civil War as a distinct genre that blended religious song with popular culture. Drawing on African American spirituals, blackface minstrelsy, commercial hymnody, and the print networks of evangelical publishing, gospel hymns developed at the intersection of race, commerce, and revival fervor.

Moving beyond conventional narratives that segregate Black and white religious traditions, this book reveals how gospel has always existed in a space of cultural entanglement shaped by collaboration, appropriation, and shared performance. Through detailed examinations of revival meetings, religious education, and global missions, The Gospel in Black and White uncovers the social and commercial dynamics that fueled the creation of one of America’s most enduring and contested musical genres. Gospel was never purely sacred, never racially innocent, and never fixed. This book is a plea to hear gospel music not simply as sound but as history: a social archive of race and religion in American cultural imagination.

Under contract with the University of North Carolina Press.