ABSTRACT
Among Professor John R. Rickford’s many significant scholarly accomplishments, Spoken Soul stands as his signature contribution to the study of African American Language in the United States. That work, winner of the American Book Award in 2000, and written with his son, historian Russell John Rickford, was published nearly two decades ago, and as one of us inscribed on the book’s cover, is still ‘da bomb.’ While Spoken Soul analyzes the full range of US Black English—its phonology, syntax, and semantics, as well as language issues in the education of Black children and youth—that work’s eloquent presentation and insightful analysis of the rhetorical style and discourse patterns of ‘preachers and prayers’ in the Traditional Black Church stands alone in the sociolinguistic literature on Black speech in America.
