ABSTRACT

While scholars of Black sacred music often attend to the implications of race on making meaning through musical practice, race is rarely discussed in white congregational musicking. In this chapter, I challenge the presumed race-neutrality of musical activities in predominantly white congregations, especially in communities whose repertoire represents many axes of cultural and racial difference. Rather than conceiving of these practices through the frequently used frameworks of cultural appropriation or dialogic performance, in narrowing my investigation to the act of congregational singing, I suggest that the congregational voice is a contested site for negotiating racial difference.

Congregational voicing is a participatory practice with a many-bodied source, whose produced sound and content vary depending on those gathered. Building on Nina Eidsheim’s work on race and timbre, I argue that white congregations identify differences in sonic, bodily, and idiomatic language as inherent to Black voicing, aspects that are deemed impossible to replicate with their own white voices and bodies. As I show through a case study based in my ethnographic work, the white vocalization of Black sacred music therefore complicates the idealistic universal “body of Christ” that Christian congregational voicing is meant to promote, by revealing widely held assumptions regarding racial essentialism and musical performance. On the other hand, this attempt to voice “the other” while voicing themselves also can catalyze critical reflection about the complicity of white Christians in structural inequalities that perpetuate such assumptions. Ultimately, this chapter provides a new way to consider the intersections of race and power in congregational voicing.