Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago

Shared Possessions: Black Pentecostals, Afro-Caribbeans, and Sacred Music

Author(s): Teresa L. Reed
Source: Black Music Research Journal , Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 5-25
Published by: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University
of Illinois Press
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 Shared Possessions: Black Pentecostals,
Afro-Caribbeans, and Sacred Music
Teresa L. Reed

She was left undisturbed, allowed to continue her solitary dance to music
that had long since ceased. As she danced, the evening worship service
progressed in the usual manner—a few more testimonies, the offertory,
the beginning of the sermon. Soon after the start of the sermon, her dance
subsided, and the ladies in white went to her side to fan her, wipe the sweat
from her brow, and escort her back to real time. “The Lord is doing a work
in her,” the preacher observed in a momentary digression from his sermon.
The congregation responded with “amens” and other devotional affirma-
tions, grateful for this evidence of the Lord’s work, and unbothered by its
spontaneous interpolation into the normal unfolding of things.
This scene was one of many similar phenomena that I witnessed at Open
Door Church of God in Christ in Gary, Indiana, the black Pentecostal church
of my childhood from the late 1960s until the early 1980s. There were many
labels for this particular brand of the Lord’s work. The solitary dancer might
be described as “getting the Holy Ghost,” “doing the holy dance,” “shouting,”
“being filled,” “catching the Spirit,” “being purged,” or simply as someone
“getting a blessing.” Whatever the descriptor, the phenomenon was familiar
to all members of this religious culture. And it was understood that music—
not just any music, but certain music—could facilitate such manifestations.
While “getting the Holy Ghost” and “catching the Spirit,” the parishio-
ners at my urban, black-American church had no awareness of the many
parallels between our Spirit-driven modes of worship and those common
to our Afro-Caribbean counterparts. We were completely unaware, for ex-

Teresa Reed serves as Director of the School of Music at the University of Tulsa. Her first
book, The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music (2003), was a 2004 winner of the As-
sociation for Recorded Sound Collections’ Excellence Award. Her second book, The Jazz Life
of Dr. Billy Taylor: America’s Classical Musician, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.

Black Music Research Journal Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring 2012

© 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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 6 bmr journal

ample, that members of Trinidadian Spiritual Baptist communities, Haitian

Heavenly Army churches, and Jamaican Revival Zionist groups entertained
and embraced religious phenomena very similar to ours, and that they,
like us, used terms like “catching power” or “catching the spirit” or “being
filled” in reference to Holy Spirit manifestation. We were even less aware
of the threads that connected both black-American and Afro-Caribbean
religious expressions to their West African origins. And although the term
“spirit possession” was nowhere in the parlance of my particular church,
it aptly describes the divine encounters both in our congregation and in
the religious contexts of African diasporal groups around the world.
Spirit possession is a phenomenon common to nearly all African societ-
ies, one that underscores the boundless interchange between the physical
and the unseen in African consciousness. Some writers, such as Kenneth
Anthony Lum, distinguish between spirit possession and spirit manifestation.
While I use the term spirit possession primarily in reference to the phenom-
enon wherein an individual worshipper’s consciousness, emotional state,
and physical gestures are entirely subjugated to divine presence, I may use
this term somewhat interchangeably with spirit manifestation.
Spirit possession occurs when, through acts of worship involving ritu-
alistic drumming, dancing, and chanting, the divine agent temporarily,
yet dramatically, inhabits the body of the devotee. This divine incarnation
brings on a state of transcendence during which the worshipper serves as
conduit for the manifestation of the deity’s presence. Writing about the
ubiquity of spirit possession in Africa, Samuel Floyd (1995) states that
“ceremonial possession was brought about by rhythmic stimulation (drum-
ming and chanting), energetic and concentrated dancing, and controlled
emotional and mental concentration.” He contends, however, that “the
whole of the ritual experience,” which includes “dance, music, costumes,
and at times storytelling” makes the possession effective. Floyd states
further that while hallucinogens sometimes help to facilitate possession,
“these sacred, blissful, and altered states” are “brought on principally by
drumming” (20–21).
Spirit possession was as central to my black-American, Pentecostal up-
bringing as it is to religious cultures throughout Africa. In my church, we
believed that being filled with the Holy Ghost—literally inhabited by the
Spirit—was the necessary culmination of a tripartite conversion experience,
the prerequisites for which were, first, being “born again,” or “saved,” and
then being “sanctified,” or set apart for holy living. For us, being “filled
with” or possessed by the Holy Spirit could mean both the ongoing state
of having the Holy Ghost inside oneself, as well as specific, rather obvious
moments during which the Holy Ghost takes charge of the worshipper’s
gestures and expressions to the extent that he or she is no longer in con-

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 Reed  •  Shared Possessions 7

trol. In describing this phenomenon in its African context, Floyd suggests

that, rather than any one factor, the “whole of the ritual experience” is that
which allows for the conditions in which spirit possession might occur.
This was certainly true in my church background. Extremely rare was the
church service that concluded without the rapturous dance or outburst
of someone whose soul had, as it were, “caught afire.” And in our world,
spirit possession could even foil the boundaries between regular church
practice and other more sedate customs. Even at funerals, the right music,
the right words, the right synchrony between clapping hands, stomping
feet, and open hearts could lead to Holy Spirit manifestation. Although
Americanized in format and Christianized in content, spirit possession was
every bit as much the goal, the raison d’être, of our worship as for that of
our diasporal counterparts.
There is much to be said about spirit possession, and several insightful
scholars have explored this phenomenon much more fully elsewhere than
I intend to do here. I begin by citing this phenomenon, however, because it
is perhaps the most distinctive nexus between the function of black sacred
music in the United States and black sacred music in the Afro-Caribbean. By
considering the relationships between music and spirit possession in both
regions, I hope to underscore important musical and expressive parallels
between African Americans and their Caribbean kindred, parallels linked
at the root to a West African consciousness.
Certainly, these parallels are much informed by the experience of slav-
ery common to both the islands and the mainland. Whether deposited in
the archipelago or on the mainland to the north, African slaves and their
descendents were ever caught in the fallout between the collision of their
own culture with that of the dominant European culture to which they were
introduced. Where religion and music were concerned, the traditions and
practices of the Africans were so at odds with what Europeans considered
normal that the latter were usually at a loss for how to regard them. Ef-
forts to coexist with the Africans and their “strange” rituals ranged from
wholesale campaigns to expunge them through combinations of fervent
prohibition and rapid Christianization to quasi-humanitarian efforts at
multicultural tolerance. Evidence suggests that slaveholders in the Ca-
ribbean were more tolerant of these rituals, even if for reasons that were
ultimately motivated by the desire to control through the method of divide
and conquer. Writing about religious practices in Latin America and in the
Caribbean, Herbert S. Klein (1986) states,
By the 19th century, most of the Protestant societies had special churches de-
voted to preaching to the slaves and some even allowed blacks and mulattoes
to become lay preachers. But Catholic societies went even further and from

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 8 bmr journal

the beginnings of American settlement provided slaves with their own reli-
gious brotherhoods and special cult activity. Aside from the formal Church-
sponsored brotherhoods, civil authorities promoted voluntary associations of
slaves and free Africans based on their own national identities and encouraged
their civil-religious activity of mutual aid, cooperation, and social and religious
observance. The aim of this policy was both paternalistic, in the sense that they
wanted the Africans to accept their place in society, and political. In Cuba and
Brazil, where the slave trade was bringing in large number [sic] of Africans
up until the middle of the 19th century, the fear of African conspiracies was
constant. Long experience showed that by encouraging national self-identity
among the arriving Africans it became difficult for them to coordinate their
rebellions. (182–183)

Klein states further that “despite white fears of their autonomy, in the ma-
jority of cases, the black and mulatto brotherhoods were accepting of the
dominant culture and were primarily integrative in nature. They did foster
both self-pride and also legitimated African religious activity” (186).
Although, in this case, tolerance of African ritual in the Caribbean served
the purely pragmatic end of maintaining control of the slave population,
there is much evidence to underscore the fact that, throughout America in
general, the religious practices of the African slaves were regarded with
distaste. In the Massachusetts Colony, for example, a pamphlet titled The
Negro Christianized (Boston, 1706) presents a lengthy argument for the ne-
cessity of converting African slaves. That argument articulates the opinion
that “[v]ery many of them do with Devillish Rites [sic] actually worship
Devils, or maintain a magical conversation with Devils; And all of them
are more Slaves to Satan than they are to You, until a Faith in the Son of
God has made them Free indeed” (Green 1706, 15). The distaste for African
ritual expressed by Europeans in the mainland colonies was also seen in
the Caribbean islands. Klein writes that, by the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, the ad hoc mixture of African beliefs and rituals in
the French, Portuguese, and Spanish worlds had begun to develop into
complete religions. The most important of these to surface during slavery
were Candomblé, Voudoun, and Santería. Even though the Catholic Church
permitted a degree of African cult activity as a way of encouraging division
along lines of national identity, Klein (1986) writes that “[m]asters were
opposed to such formalized religious belief systems, which they held to
be antithetical to the Christian belief system which they accepted. Thus, all
such formal cults were ruthlessly attacked” (179–180).
On both the mainland and in the Caribbean islands, the dominant cul-
ture’s distaste for African religiosity was synonymous with its distaste for
the musical practices attendant to that religiosity. These “strange” practices
placed heavy emphasis on the production and manipulation of rhythm,

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 Reed  •  Shared Possessions 9

whether through the use of exotic percussion instruments or through the

employment of physical means such as dancing, stomping, and clapping.
From the European perspective, these musical and physical practices were
secular at best and demonic at worst, and there were fervent efforts to sup-
plant them with proper Christian behavior.
Describing the musical rituals of nineteenth-century blacks in Trinidad,
Charles W. Day wrote,
Every day there was a dance amongst the Negroes on the estate, to the banish-
ment of all peace and quiet. The horrible drumming began about seven in the
evening and, with the chorus was kept up until daybreak the next morning. . . .
The Trinidad negroes have a custom exceedingly annoying to their neighbors,
that of waking the dead, after the most approved Irish fashion, only that the
noisy blacks are Methodists. (Pollak-Eltz 1993, 13)

In describing missionary efforts in antebellum Jamaica, Dianne M. Stewart

(2005) writes that “the question of how to be African and Christian was
not up for debate in missionary circles. The decision was made before the
missionaries ever heard the sound of the abeng and the goombah drums: the
African instruments were the devil’s instruments” (91).
Larry Eugene Rivers (2000) writes,
Some surviving African practices seemed so remote or “foreign” to white wor-
shippers that they ascribed evil origins to the singing, drum beating, exhorta-
tions, and shouting. Ann Murray became one such person. She grew up on her
mother’s and stepfather’s plantation during the 1850s and 1860s. Her suspicions
of slave religious practices intensified over time. As of 1871 numerous of the
family’s former bond servants remained on the family lands. That year, she
penned the following words to her diary: “A drum [was] beating nearly all
night last night, kept the dogs barking so that we could not sleep until late.”
Murray observed: “Negroes like to do everything at night in the dark, showing
that their deeds are evil.” (117)

Early on, whites were outspoken against the evils of African ritual music,
but with time, blacks who identified more with the genteel classes sought to
distance themselves as much as possible from the practices that they consid-
ered barbaric. In the United States, Daniel Alexander Payne’s account of a
bush meeting that he observed on a plantation typifies the regard that both
European Americans and many conservative, well-heeled black Americans
had for the rhythmic rituals associated with African worship. Born free in
1811 and educated for the ministry, Payne left this condescending account
of slave worship:
After the sermon, they formed a ring, and with coats off sung, clapped their
hands and stamped their feet in a most ridiculous and heathenish way. I re-

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 10 bmr journal

quested the pastor to go and stop their dancing. At his request, they stopped
their dancing and clapping of hands, but remained singing and rocking their
bodies to and fro. This they did for about fifteen minutes. I then went, and tak-
ing their leader by the arm, requested him to desist and to sit down and sing in
a rational manner. I told him also that it was a heathenish way to worship and
disgraceful to themselves, the race, and the Christian name. (Southern 1971, 69)

In the Caribbean, refined blacks were equally repulsed by the rhythmic

worship rituals of the African slaves. Barry Conyers Hart was a free man
of color who owned both land and slaves in Antigua in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. He had two daughters, Anne Hart Gilbert
and Elizabeth Hart Thwaites, whose letters provide detailed accounts of
Methodist evangelism in the Caribbean during that period. In these ac-
counts, the Hart sisters convey their distaste for African religious customs,
a distaste no doubt shaped by their close identification with the ruling class.
In a letter dated June 1st, 1804, Anne Hart Gilbert describes the rituals of
the slaves and her desire to see them transformed:
The slaves at this time were in a state of inconceivable darkness and diaboli-
cal superstition. The torch of Moral and Divine truth was carefully hid from
them, lest by it they should discover that they were Men, and Brethren, and
not Beasts. . . . Their Dead were carried to the grave attended by a numerous
concourse, some of them beating upon an instrument they call a “Shake Shake”
(This is a large round hollow Calabash fixed upon the end of a stick, with a few
pebbles in it) and all singing some heathenish account of the Live & Death of
the deceased; invoking a perpetuation of their friendship from the world of
Spirits with their Surviving friends and relations, & and praying them to deal
destruction among their enemies; especially if they thought their death had
been occasion’d by the power of Witchcraft; which was commonly transacted
among them. (Ferguson 1993, 58–59)

Her sister Elizabeth described how Methodist missionaries preached to

convict her of the evils of dancing (91).
As Samuel Floyd notes, drumming is the musical component most wide-
ly associated with spirit possession among Africans and African diasporal
groups, and this specific practice among the slaves, both in the Caribbean
and on the mainland, seems to have been particularly offensive to Euro-
pean observers. Where actual drums were prohibited or unavailable in
black worship settings, black American slaves used their bodies to create
the rhythms necessary to incite the spirit possession and the dance (often
called “the shout”) that accompanied it. Clearly, however, hand-clapping
and foot-stomping substituted for drums, which were outlawed in many
places because of their communicative power. Eileen Southern (1997) notes
that the South created laws against slaves using and keeping drums. She

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 Reed  •  Shared Possessions 11

states that “slaveholders were well aware of the African tradition for ‘talk-
ing instruments,’ and made every effort to eliminate the source of secret
communication among the slaves” (172). Similarly, drumming was also
restricted in some places in the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. Rafael
Ocasio (2005) writes that, in Cuba, “the governor of Cienfuegos, in 1843,
requested that they forbid drumming because they are noisy and in order
to prevent the slaves’ making use of drumbeats, which they know in order
to form a congregation or call a meeting, giving rise to some incident” (96).
While the denigration of African religious custom was commonplace in
both the United States and in the Caribbean, the practice of spirit posses-
sion and the music associated with it persisted. In present-day Caribbean
cultures, drumming and/or other types of rhythmic manipulation remain
vital to the achievement of spirit possession. In their description of the
orisha tradition in Cuba, for example, Margarite Fernández Olmos and
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (2003) write that “drum and vocal melodies and
phrases, executed exactly as prescribed, are integral to all ritual activity;
they will bring the orishas down from the heavens to possess their children
and commune with their devotees. In religious ceremonies music plays a
central role and drumming occasions (güemilere, bembé, or tambor) provide
an opportunity for initiates to communicate with the orishas” (69). They
write further that “a great number of different kinds of drums (tambores)
are utilized in the liturgy, though the drums which are most sacred in Regla
de Ocha worship are the consecrated batá. While unconsecrated drums
are frequently used to praise the orishas in most ceremonies, the rare, fun-
damental batá drums must be employed whenever possible in the most
important rites, and must be played in specific drumming patterns based
on Yoruba ritual practice” (69).
Rhythm in general, and drumming in particular, are equally central
to the rituals associated with Haitian Vodou. Fernández Olmos and
­Paravisini-Gebert write that Vodou is “first and foremost, a dance” (119).
They state further that the “surrender of the ‘horse’ to the lwa is induced
by the rhythms of the sacred Vodou drums. Drums are the most sacred
objects in the Vodou rites, so important that ‘beating the drum’ has come
to mean ‘celebrating the cult of the loa’—and the drummers are the lynch-
pins of the Vodou ceremony (120).
In lwa and orisha worship in the Afro-Caribbean, drumming patterns
and practices correspond to specific ritual functions. While there is no
black-American parallel to the detail and specificity of Caribbean ritual
drumming, the percussive aspect of black-American Pentecostalism is
nonetheless extremely significant. In the church of my upbringing, it was
impossible to have a truly effective service without the presence of a com-
petent drummer, someone both mechanically skilled and acutely sensitive

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 12 bmr journal

to the fluctuating temperature and tempos of the worship experience. As a

teenager at a national convocation of the Church of God in Christ, I once
witnessed then music director Dr. Mattie Moss Clark’s fury at the incom-
petence of one drummer and her immediate replacement of that drummer
with another one waiting in the wings. My church also favored other per-
cussion instruments. In addition to the drum set (including snare, high hat,
cymbals, and bass), bongos also provided another layer of percussion to
support the instrumental ensemble, which consisted of a Hammond organ,
a piano, lead and bass guitars, and myself on saxophone. Congregants
frequently played tambourines, a few of which were scattered among the
pews for community use, but the more expensive and impressive of which
were carried to services by their owners and played with particular vigor
and skill, especially when service was “high.”
In worship services at my church, percussionists relied on tradition and
intuition to choose their patterns and tempos. Generally speaking, slow-
to-moderate tempos were more appropriate for the prelude type of devo-
tional singing, and for interactive components of the service that were more
controlled, like the offertory, the altar call, communion, or baptismal or
foot-washing service. Faster tempos and more elaborate rhythmic patterns
were more common to the portions of worship that were more exuberant
and spirit-led.
Today, rhythmic vitality is taken for granted in the Pentecostal expression
of the black-American church. The incorporation of accentuated rhythm into
black-American sacred music met with less than unanimous approval, how-
ever, and was often the cause of tension and controversy. By the 1920s, the
black holiness/Pentecostal churches had developed a distinctive worship
style that preserved many elements of African-style ritual. To black non-
Pentecostals, however, the rhythmic vitality of this approach was viewed
to be secular and offensive rather than African. In his 1941 study of black
church music of the Mississippi Delta, John W. Work III wrote,
The holiness church has made the spiritual the core if its song service. And what
a core! It has intensified the rhythm of our dance bands in their most torrid
mode. The singers’ lusty voices are intensified by hundreds of hands clapping,
stamping of feet, tambourines, guitars, and a style of piano playing which
either imitates “boogie-woogie” at its “hottest” or started it. Many individuals
dance during the singing. This is no surprise. (Gordon and Nemerov 2005, 58)

The use of drums in Vodou, Santería, and other modes Afro-Caribbean

worship is far more systematized and more clearly tied to specific West Afri-
can practices than is the drumming and percussive activity of black-American
Pentecostalism. Despite this, however, the importance of drumming in par-

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 Reed  •  Shared Possessions 13

ticular, and of percussion in general, to worship in both diasporal groups

bespeaks a strong, common link to West African religious custom.
Although drumming is certainly a prominent feature of both Afro-Carib-
bean sacred ritual and the rituals that I recall from my own black-American
Pentecostal upbringing, two important points merit mention. The first
is that while drums may have been the preferred percussive instrument
among black Pentecostals, they may not have been in widespread use in
these churches before the turn of the twentieth century. While modern
Pentecostalism was not born in the United States until 1906, the worship
aesthetic that blacks appropriated for their own Pentecostal experience
was, to a large degree, retained directly from the bush-meeting and ring-
shout customs of slavery. And we know that for much of the antebellum
period and in many places throughout the South, drumming was spe-
cifically prohibited. Blacks, therefore, often resorted to other percussive
means—like clapping and stomping—to achieve the desired effect. Horace
Boyer (1995) notes that the gospel bands associated with black Pentecostal
churches did not appear until the 1920s, and these bands, which included
tambourines, drums, and cymbals, were distinctive in that they repre-
sented a stark contrast to the prevalent secular styles of the day (184–185).
In that these bands do not appear in black-American Pentecostal churches
prior to the 1920s, it seems highly plausible that, for a time at least, post-
bellum black worshippers depended, not on instruments, but primarily
upon their own bodies for percussive effect. If recordings of the McIntosh
County Shouters (1984) give us a glimpse into the way nineteenth-century
blacks really worshipped, then the fact that shout songs like “Jubilee in the
Morning” and “Blow Gabriel” feature hand-clapping and floor-stomping
but no instruments may indicate that perhaps decades separated the end
of slavery and the addition of drums and other “Pentecostal” instruments
to black-American sanctified ritual. This point is essential to underscore
since a comparative discussion of black-American and Afro-Caribbean
sacred ritual will show certain functional links to persist even where actual
drums may be used in one instance and alternative percussive means used
in the other.
The second point is that while drumming and/or alternate types of rhyth-
mic manipulation are indispensable to both Afro-Caribbean and black Pente-
costal worship, rhythmic devices—whether drumming, clapping, or stomp-
ing—are not ends unto themselves. Instead, they exist to serve the “whole of
the ritual experience,” which, when effective, exhibits the transition from low
to high, from cold to hot, or from calm to ecstasy. In an effective black wor-
ship experience, be it in the United States or in the Caribbean, these spiritual
crescendos may happen once or more than once, and they may happen to

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 14 bmr journal

varying degrees; but they do happen, and the rhythmic element, however
produced, is one of the ingredients that ripen the conditions necessary for
these climaxes to occur.
Along with percussion, singing also functions to incite spirit possession.
In their worship rituals, African diasporal groups use songs whose texts in-
vite the spirits or deities to manifest themselves. Throughout the Caribbean,
songs are used to invite the manifestation of deities. In their description
of music in Haitian Vodou ritual, Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert
(2003) write,
The beat of the sacred drums is invariably accompanied by song. It is the
hungenikons’s task to lead the singing. In her role as choirmaster she uses
her ceremonial rattle and sings the first bar of a new song when the flow of
the ceremony calls for it. The lyrics of Vodou songs are characterized by their
simplicity and repetitive nature. As such, they function more as ritualized
invocations, chants to summon or welcome the spirits. (121)

Similarly, in her analysis of a particular possession performance in Afro-

Cuban Santería, Katherine J. Hagedorn (2000) described the function of the
akpwón, or lead singer in the ritual ceremony:
The acts of singing and dancing are powerful within a Santería ceremony, and
often determine the course of events. The perfect combination of the predict-
able “stand-by” praise songs with spontaneously inspired praise songs “of the
moment” is likely to result in oricha possession. . . . It was when the tall, lanky
man started to get possessed that the akpwón (lead singer) focused his vocal
energy on the man, singing “onto” him the praises that he thought would
evoke or goad Eleguá into coming down. (105)

In the church of my upbringing, our repertoire of congregational songs

likewise included songs that referenced, celebrated, and facilitated spirit pos-
session. Learned and transmitted orally, they were always upbeat in tempo,
usually call-and-response in format, and always intended to engage every
worshipper present. Some of those songs and their texts are as follows:
“Catch on Fire”
[Call] I wish somebody’s soul would
[Response] Catch on fire, catch on fire,
catch on fire!!
[Call] I wish somebody’s soul would
[Response] Catch on fire, burnin’ with the
Holy Ghost!!
“Send It Down”
[Call] Send it on down, Lord, send it on down!!
[Response] Lord, let the Holy Ghost come on down!!

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 Reed  •  Shared Possessions 15

“Somethin’ Got a Hold of Me”

Somethin’ got a hold of me
Oh, yes it did I say
Somethin’ got a hold of me
I went to the meetin’ one night
And my heart wasn’t right
Somethin’ got a hold of me
[Call] It was the Holy Ghost
[Response] Holy Ghost
[Repeated of call/response chorus]
“Fire in My Bones”
[Call] Just like fire!!
[Response] In my bones!!
[Call] Just like fire!!
[Response] In my bones!!

While these songs were staples in our worship repertoire, I should point
out that any song that featured an upbeat tempo, call-and-response struc-
ture, hand-clapping, and foot-stomping, could potentially lead to spirit
possession in our congregation. By contrast, there were certain songs that,
in my memory, never led to spirit possession. It would have been highly
unusual, for example, for spirit possession to interrupt the congregational
singing for the offertory. Neither the congregation nor Holy Ghost wished
to impede the collection of funds!
In my church, a particular rite that relied heavily upon rhythmic wor-
ship and sung invitations to the Holy Spirit was the tarrying service. In this
rite, candidates who were ready to be filled with the Holy Ghost (the next
step after conversion and sanctification) would gather at the Saturday-
night prayer meeting designated specifically for this purpose. Typically,
the tarrying service would begin when a song leader initiated a repetitive,
call-and-response, congregational song, usually to the accompaniment of
hand-claps, foot-stomps, tambourines, drums, and keyboard instruments.
To the sound of this music, the “seekers” would be encircled and encour-
aged by helpers who assisted with prayer and praise until the achievement
of infilling became evident. Often, the text of the opening song would give
way to the rhythmic, continual repetition of the phrase “Thank you Jesus.”
After continuous repetition of the phrase, the evidence of the candidate’s
infilling (or possession) by the Holy Ghost was in whether or not he or she
spoke in tongues. At the conclusion of tarrying service (which usually lasted
for hours), candidates were asked to give their testimonies, and the leader
judged at that point which cases of infilling were genuine and which were
not. Those who had failed to become filled with the Spirit were admonished
to return for the next week’s tarrying service.

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 16 bmr journal

The ritual singing so prevalent in my own background is strikingly paral-

lel to that found in Afro-Caribbean Pentecostal traditions. Two of those are
the multifaceted Spiritual Baptist Tradition of Trinidad and the Heavenly
Army churches of Haiti. Like black-American Pentecostals, Trinidadian
Spiritual Baptists and Haitian Pentecostals have in common a history of
marginalization. Marked by worship rituals considered strange, members
of each tradition have been misunderstood by both more moderate blacks,
as well as by the larger Euro-American society. While North American black
Pentecostals suffered ridicule for their music and rituals, the Spiritual Bap-
tists of Trinidad suffered far worse. For a time, worship in the Spiritual
Baptist manner was actually outlawed, and the 1917 Shouters Prohibition
Ordinance remained in effect until 1951. This ordinance specifically forbade,
among other things, “violent shaking of the body and limbs” and “shouting
and grunting” (Lum 2000, 269). Pentecostal churches in Haiti were perse-
cuted by the Catholic Church and were briefly closed from 1941 until 1943
under the presidency of Elie Lescot (Butler 2002, 85). Despite marginaliza-
tion, however, these groups flourished and attracted followers hungry for
a tangible experience of the divine.
Each in its own way, both black-American religious communities and
those in the Caribbean have combined elements of the African worldview
with aspects of the dominant European culture to create religious traditions
that are entirely unique. One way in which this creativity can be seen most
vividly is in the process through which each has arrived at its own body
of sacred song. In the black-American Pentecostal tradition, the sources of
sacred song are numerous and varied. Certainly, black Pentecostals have
inherited the current body of sacred song from Colonial American psalm-
ody and hymnody, from the Negro spiritual (itself borrowing from certain
aspects of hymnody), from the nineteenth-century revival movements,
from the early-twentieth-century and more recent black sacred composers,
and from the spontaneous compositions of Holy Spirit inspiration. In ad-
dition to these oral and written sources, one must bear in mind the black
worshipper’s propensity for molding, stretching, bending, tweaking, and
otherwise revising existing songs to fit various expressive needs. In her
essay “The Sanctified Church” (ca. 1930), Zora Neale Hurston (1983) put
it succinctly when she stated that “these songs, even the printed ones, do
not remain long in their original form. Every congregation that takes it up
alters it considerably” (79).
Although the lineage of black-American Pentecostal song is anything
but tidy, there are some important comparisons to be made between the
way black-American Pentecostals and those in the Caribbean have adapted
the song literature of written hymn traditions to their primarily oral wor-
ship contexts. Both Hurston (writing in the 1930s) and John Wesley Work

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 Reed  •  Shared Possessions 17

III (writing in 1941) observed that black holiness churches were using the
“spiritual” as the core of sacred song. Furthermore, both acknowledged that
alongside the older spirituals, new ones were constantly being created. The
ongoing generation of new songs—songs both entirely original as well as
songs derived from preexisting tunes, lyrics, and/or themes—has been a
common practice of black Americans since their earliest arrival in the New
World, a practice in both black-American sacred written traditions, as well
as oral ones. Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal
Church, understood the black worshipper’s need for expressive and impro-
visational freedom. In 1801, he published a collection of hymns that he chose
specifically for use by his black congregation, the first such hymnal ever
compiled. Selected for their relevance to the black experience, the hymns
he chose were primarily drawn from those written by Dr. Isaac Watts and
the Wesley brothers. In deference to the black propensity for revision and
improvisation, Allen also included in his hymnal what has been called the
“wandering refrain,” a short, rhythmic phrase that singers could affix at
will to whatever hymn they chose.
The hymns of Isaac Watts and of the Wesleys were popular enough
throughout America in the 1800s that they were sung not only by whites
and free blacks, but were also heard, adapted, and revised by the slaves,
who were exposed to them through the singing of white congregations.
While the slaves welded, reworked, and simplified a good many of these
hymns into what we now call spirituals, postslavery black Pentecostals
enlivened many of the same hymns with upbeat tempos, vocal embellish-
ment, and instrumental complexity. A pointed reminder of the persistence
of these age-old hymns in the present-day black church is that, even in
the twenty-first century, many black Baptist congregations continue to
refer to the “line-out” tradition of singing as the singing of “Dr. Watts.”
The singing of Dr. Watts, or the slow, pensive, a capella “lining out” of
hymns, represented a fork in the road that, by the early twentieth century,
separated black Baptists from black Pentecostals, the latter of whom appar-
ently dispensed with the practice early on. Nevertheless, the hymns of Isaac
Watts and the Wesley brothers, not to mention those of Elisha Hoffman and
Fanny J. Crosby, are fixtures (however camouflaged) in the repertoires of
black Pentecostals. Following is a brief list of a few present-day sacred songs
in the black Pentecostal church—songs that were frequently and heartily
sung in the church of my upbringing—that were originally composed by
white sacred songwriters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:
Amazing Grace John Newton (1725–1807)
At the Cross Where I First Saw the Light Isaac Watts (1674–1748)
Blessed Assurance Fanny J. Crosby (1820–1915)
Close to Thee (Thou, My Everlasting Portion) Fanny J. Crosby (1820–1915)

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 18 bmr journal

Father, I Stretch My Hands to Thee Charles Wesley (1707–88)

Jesus Is All the World to Me Will L. Thompson (1847–1909)
Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross Fanny J. Crosby (1820–1915)
Is Your All on the Altar Elisha A. Hoffman (1839–1929)
Oh, Happy Day Philip Doddridge (1702–51)
Oh, How I Love Jesus Frederick Whitfield (1829–1904)
Pass Me Not, Oh Gentle Savior Fanny J. Crosby (1820–1915)
Plant My Feet on Higher Ground Johnson Oatman Jr. (1856–1922)
We’re Marching to Zion Isaac Watts (1674–1748) and
  Robert Lowry (1826–99)
When We All Get to Heaven Eliza E. Hewitt (1851–1920)

African Americans in the United States borrowed freely from white-

American hymnody, ever molding and shaping the hymns into songs ex-
pressively and aesthetically fit for use in the black church. By the early
twentieth century, as black-American Baptists lined out these hymns and
called them “Dr. Watts,” black-American Pentecostals were using many of
these same hymns both to set the general atmosphere for worship as well
as to literally bring down the Spirit. Whether as “Dr. Watts” or as fuel for
Pentecostal fire, the presence of early-American hymnody in black worship
in the United States is clearly seen.
Just as blacks in the United States rely heavily on the hymnody of the likes
of Dr. Watts, Trinidadian Spiritual Baptists have incorporated the hymns and
hymn compilations of Ira Sankey into their worship repertoire. Ira Sankey
(1840–1908) was an American evangelist, singer, hymn composer, and hymn
compiler. He was music director for well-known evangelist Dwight Moody,
and, together, the two ran revivals in which Moody preached and Sankey
led the congregational singing. Because the Sankey-Moody revivals were
intended to enlist converts through the preaching and singing of the gospel
message, Sankey’s songs came to be known as “gospel hymns.” Sankey dis-
seminated his music through publishing, and his Sacred Songs and Solos, first
published in London in 1873, included over 1,000 pieces and sold 80 million
copies. His Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs was published in 1875 in Cincin-
nati, and the six volumes of his Gospel Hymns were published in 1894.
The overwhelming popularity of both the evangelical movement and
of Sankey’s hymns in the late nineteenth century would have its affect in
the Caribbean, as well as in London and in the United States. For Spiritual
Baptists, the effect of Ira Sankey’s evangelical music is such that they refer
to hymns as “sankeys.” Kenneth Lum (2000) describes their use in Spiritual
Baptist worship:
Hymns are also called “sankeys,” from the Sankey and Moody hymnal. . . .
Every converted should have a personal hymnal as well as a Bible. . . . Most
of the hymns that I heard had at least two melodies, usually a slow and a fast
version. (55)

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 Reed  •  Shared Possessions 19

In his study of Haitian Pentecostal worship, Melvin L. Butler describes the

widespread use of “imported” hymnody by the organizational Pentecostal
churches. These congregations use a songbook called the Chan desperans,
which includes French and Creole-language hymns and choruses translated
mostly from Euro-American hymns. Although these songs are musically
and linguistically Haitianized, their textual content, in many cases, is iden-
tical to that found in black-American churches. For example, the Haitian
equivalent of the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” is included in
the Chan desperans as “Ala Bon Zanmi Se Jezu” (Butler 2002, 102).
Whereas organized Pentecostals in Haiti employ their own versions of
written-tradition hymnody, the independent Heavenly Army churches, by
contrast, use more improvisational singing appropriate to the spiritual work
that these congregations undertake. Heavenly Army churches use songs
as offensive tactics against evil spirits. One type of singing is that of the
chan pwen, which, as Butler notes, amounts to a verbal/musical assault on
forces that oppose God’s army. This type of singing is usually in call-and-
response format and is one of the Heavenly Army song types that “all tend
to revolve around the themes of prayer, praise, and worship as a means of
drawing on the power of God to combat evil spiritual forces” (91).
In describing his experience at a Heavenly Army worship service in Haiti,
Butler observed the use of music to transition from modes of low to high
intensity, or from cold to hot. He notes that the worship service started with
nearly an hour of “unaccompanied, slow and medium tempo singing,” after
which the pastor signaled that it was time to “heat up.” Butler states, “By
using the phrase ‘to heat up’ (chofe), Pastor Yves signaled the instrumen-
talists to take their places up front while the rest of us in the congregation
prepared for the more energetic singing and dancing that are part and parcel
of a livelier, more up-tempo period of musical worship” (94–95).
The “heating up” of the worship in Heavenly Army churches makes for
an atmosphere in which “members achieve a level of spiritual transcen-
dence in which they are outside of themselves. . . . Once this transcendent
level is reached, army members are able to work effectively in the super-
natural realm and may dance continuously for extended periods of time
without showing sings of fatigue” (93). The “work” in which Heavenly
Army members engage, and the singing used to facilitate it, are very similar
to the deliverance services that I witnessed almost weekly while growing
up. In order to set the atmosphere for deliverance, we’d sing endless rep-
etitions of songs like “Send It on Down, Lord Let the Holy Ghost Come
on Down!” At the moment when the spiritual crescendo was achieved,
the electrifying music then became a backdrop for the minister and altar
workers to pray for those in need of healing, salvation, provision, or Holy
Spirit infilling. As in Heavenly Army churches, ladies in white (we called

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 20 bmr journal

them mothers, missionaries, and in the case of those who actually wore
the traditional uniform, we called them nurses) served as intermediaries
to help worshippers achieve the deliverance they desired.
While both black Americans and Caribbean Pentecostals feature com-
posed hymnody in their worship, none of these groups are slaves to those
written forms. Because spirit manifestation is the goal of both types of wor-
ship endeavors, music—whatever its source—is adjusted to serve this func-
tion. Although hymns were sung heartily and frequently in my childhood
church, no one in the congregation—neither the pastor, who was barely
literate, nor the organist—actually read music. I do not recall ever seeing
a single hymnal or note of written music at Open Door Church of God in
Christ in all of the years that I attended. (Similarly, none of the hymns in
the Haitian Pentecostal Chan desperans contains any notated music; only the
texts are printed.) All of the musicians in my church played by ear, and all of
the songs in our repertoire were learned and taught through oral transmis-
sion. After many years of learning songs by rote, however, I was fascinated
to find—once I could read music and get my hands on a hymnal—that
much of what we sang was true to the original composer’s published text.
Although we usually sang no more than the first verse of anything (I was
shocked when, as an adult, I learned that “Amazing Grace” had a whop-
ping four verses!), we somehow managed, all of our other manipulations
notwithstanding, to leave the texts themselves untouched.
The music, however, was an entirely different matter! Take, for example,
the hymn “He Lives,” composed by Alfred H. Ackley (1887–1960). The text
of the first verse and the refrain are as follows:
Verse: I serve a risen Savior, He’s in the world today
  I know that He is living whatever men may say
  I see His hand of mercy, I hear His voice of cheer
  And just the time I need Him, He’s always near
Refrain: He lives, He lives, Christ Jesus lives today!
  He walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way
  He lives, He lives, salvation to impart
  You ask me how I know He lives, He lives within my heart!

Ackley composed this hymn in 6/8 and although hymnals containing it

may or may not include a specific metronome or tempo marking, this hymn
is usually sung in a cheery moderato and is a regular feature of Protestant
worship on Easter Sunday mornings.
Black-American Pentecostals, however, have transformed Ackley’s “He
Lives” into something that he certainly never imagined. This Easter song
holds special significance for black Pentecostals because it celebrates, not
only the Resurrection, not only the fact that Jesus lives, but the fact that He

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 Reed  •  Shared Possessions 21

lives inside of me—literally lives inside, dwells inside my physical body.

Said another way, He possesses me, is tangible and real to me in the here
and now, at this very moment! So the blacks of my childhood denomination
took Ackley’s hymn and liberated it from the confines of the Easter Sunday
program. They transposed it from compound meter to a lightening-fast
duple meter with heavy offbeat accents. And they arranged it into a leader-
chorus format both with Ackley’s refrain and with another section tailored
specifically for hand-clapping, foot-stomping, and call-and-response, or,
to put it more succinctly, for heating up. This additional section is a vamp
sung by the choir/congregation, around which a leader improvises:
Leader [call] Improvisation
Choir [response] “I know He lives!”
Leader [call] Improvisation
Choir [response] “I know He lives!”

In the leader’s improvisation are woven bits and pieces of personal testi-
mony (“He healed my body!” “He brought me out!” “He made a way!”) and
as the hand-clapping and foot-stomping of the choir and congregation grow
higher, louder, and faster to the repeated “I know He lives!” the atmosphere
becomes charged with holy electricity. Dancing and tongue-speaking erupt
throughout the congregation, and the drummer, now sweating profusely
and playing with inspired intensity, carries the primary responsibility for
providing musical support for the possessed dancers. (If the drummer him-
or herself is overtaken by the Holy Spirit, the clappers and stompers fill in
any rhythmic gaps.)
Black-American Pentecostals have adapted written hymnody to their wor-
ship, and so have Caribbean Pentecostals. In a baptismal rite documented in
Anthology of Music and Dance of the Americas (Smithsonian Folkways 1995),
Spiritual Baptist worshippers are shown performing various types of music.
The first is a kind of rhythmic, congregational, background humming that
accompanies the preacher’s spoken words. The second musical performance
shows the congregation singing “Through All the Changing Scenes of Life,”
which was originally penned by Nicholas Brady (1659–1726) and Nahum Tate
(1652–1713). Brady and Tate actually wrote this metered version of the 34th
Psalm at a time when psalmody was still the prevalent mode of Protestant
sacred singing in the West. When psalmody gave way to hymnody in the
eighteenth century, this song found its way into numerous hymnals published
in English-speaking Protestant communities, including the hymnals used in
the Caribbean by Spiritual Baptists. The congregation is shown singing this
hymn as they process to the baptismal site. While they sing at a tempo suited
to their march to the water, the sound is much more rubato than metered,
and their voices are unaccompanied except for a ringing bell.

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 22 bmr journal

It is interesting that Lum (2000) notes that Trinidadian Spiritual Baptists

usually have both a slow version and a fast version of the hymns that they
sing. The hymns, or “sankeys” are understood to be the slow versions, while
the faster hymns are called “trumpets.” Lum points out several features
of the Spiritual Baptist trumpets that are strikingly similar to the songs
sung in my childhood church. Trumpets usually feature two lines repeated
continually; they often last for long periods, “depending on the occasion
and how ‘hot’ the church is”; they are usually accompanied by “marching,
and tambourines”; they are usually known from memory and sung in a
format where “one person would sing the first line of the . . . trumpet and
the rest of the congregation would join in.” Trumpets are also accompanied
by hand-clapping and vocal improvisation (56).
When considering the black-American Pentecostal aesthetic, drums seem
conspicuously absent in the Spiritual Baptist tradition. Yet, these Caribbean
counterparts manipulate and intensify rhythm in other ways, including the
use of rhythmic vocalization, the use of handheld percussion instruments,
and of course, clapping. Although hand-clapping is a regular feature of both
Afro-Caribbean and black-American Pentecostal singing, Lum points out
an interesting and important distinction between this practice in the two
traditions. Black-American Pentecostals nearly always clap on beats 2 and
4, on the so-called offbeats. In my church, any accidental miscommunica-
tion between the drummer and the congregation that resulted in claps on
beats 1 and 3 was quickly corrected. No one knew exactly why 2 and 4 were
preferred; we just understood that it was the norm in our tradition. With
Spiritual Baptists, by contrast, the clapping that accompanies the trumpets
is always on beats 1 and 3. Additionally, Butler (2002) notes that, during
fast-tempo songs, Haitian Pentecostals “often clap on beats one and three,
especially if the ‘march’ rhythm is being played by the drummer” (104). In
the case of Spiritual Baptists, placing the accents on beats 1 and 3 instead
of on beats 2 and 4 is quite deliberate, since, as Lum explains, “clapping on
the offbeat was associated with Orisha Work.” Lum (2000) notes that “on
one occasion at a Spiritual Baptist ceremony a young girl started clapping
on the off beats. An older woman immediately told her to stop, which she
did. The young girl started clapping on the beats again” (56). Although the
older woman found the offbeat clapping to be offensive in that she related
it to Orisha Work, the young girl may well have innocently replicated the
offbeat patterns from some secular or African American source to which
she had been exposed.
The fact that these Spiritual Baptists recognize an association between
offbeat accents and Orisha Work may offer an explanation after all for why
present-day black-American Pentecostals are heirs to a preference for drum-
beats, hand claps, and other percussive accents on beats 2 and 4. Millions

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 Reed  •  Shared Possessions 23

of Africans who were shipped to America during the slave trade brought
their Yoruba religious heritage with them. Although both American and
Caribbean African slave groups each developed new religious paradigms,
each group also retained strong ties to elements of their Yoruban religious
ancestry. In the United States, the pressure to conform to “proper” Chris-
tianity was more severe, and the practice of native African ritual was far
less tolerated than in the Caribbean. Consequently, with time, those distinc-
tively Yoruban traits of black-American ritual became more diluted and less
conspicuous than those same traits that may be observed in the religious
cultures of the Afro-Caribbean. And even where those distinctively African
traits are conspicuous (as in black-American Southern folklore, folkways,
and in the spirit possession of the black-American church), what has been
lost, to a large degree, is a specific and detailed understanding of why certain
practices persist in our culture. We know, for example, that we black Pente-
costals prefer to clap on beats 2 and 4, but the reason for this preference is
not widely known.
The Trinidadian Spiritual Baptist woman associated offbeat accents with
Orisha Work, which itself is based upon traditional Yoruban religion. It is
reasonable to imagine a time when our black-American ancestors likewise
associated these offbeat accents with certain African rituals of empower-
ment, specifically, perhaps, with calling upon the orisha to take possession
of their otherwise weary bodies. And perhaps this association between
offbeat accents and spirit empowerment was preserved in the clandestine
bush meetings of the antebellum period, only to emerge in the context of
black Pentecostalism, where spirit possession remains the most distinctive
phenomenon of worship. This, of course, is all pure conjecture, as I have
no evidence to support any connection between my offbeat clapping today
and the use of offbeat accents by my orisha-possessed, Yoruban ancestors.
But even as an avowedly tenuous hypothesis, this seems to suggest that
our offbeat clapping is somehow more African than happenstance.
As I observed the Spiritual Baptists continue with their baptismal rite, I
found their rituals to be strikingly similar to church scenes that I witnessed
as a child. After marching to the beach to “Through All the Changing Scenes
of Life,” the congregants changed their music for the next portion of the wor-
ship service. They shifted gears and sang the very up-tempo revival song
“Going Down, Jordan,” which they accompanied with hand-clapping and
maracas. It is in this and in the final segment of the rite where the baptismal
candidate is shown to have entered a state of spirit possession. The congre-
gation encircles the possessed candidate and continues to provide her with
musical support for her spiritual dance. As they clap and sing, she continues
to dance in a kneeling posture, which those encircling her assume.
As I watched this scene unfold, I could not help but be transported back

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 24 bmr journal

to Open Door Church, where I can recall seeing many women throughout
my young life in a remarkably similar state of possession. In one of those
many moments where a congregational song sparked a holy fire of clapping,
shouting, and speaking in tongues, one woman in particular erupted in a
dance so intense that three or four others immediately encircled her to pre-
vent her from harming herself or others. This poor, black single mother was
so possessed, so empowered by the Holy Spirit’s presence, so transported
to a place beyond her normal existence, that she kept right on dancing even
after the music subsided.
For me, this avowedly brief consideration of Afro-Caribbean sacred music
was a twofold experience. On one hand, I was moved beyond the boundar-
ies of my own religious tradition—a tradition in which only the sinful or the
ignorant or the foolhardy would dare posit the validity of “other” modes
of worship. My church tradition drew a very tiny circle of circumscrip-
tion, on the inside of which was our particular reality and on the outside
of which remained all other realities. Perhaps furthest from the center of
our circle were those African-derived traditions—like Voduo, Santeria, and
Obeah—which we assumed to be satanic by their very nature. On the other
hand, however, this brief study has reacquainted me with the value of that
which I treasure in my religious background. To this day, I crave that spirit
crescendo, and I continue to clap, sing, and shout my way into that blissful,
transcendent, empowering, and life-affirming contact with a Holy Spirit
who condescends to fill me now and then.

references

Allen, Richard. 1801. A collection of spiritual songs and hymns: Selected from various
authors. Philadelphia: Printed by John Ormrod. Published in Early American
Imprints, 2nd ser., no. 39. Chester, Vt.: Readex. http://www.readex.com/
readex/product.cfm?product=5
Boyer, Horace. 1995. How sweet the sound: The golden age of gospel. Washington,
D.C.: Elliott Clark.
Butler, Melvin L. 2002. “Nou kwe nan Sentespri” (We believe in the Holy Spirit):
Music, ecstasy, and identity in Haitian Pentecostal worship. Black Music
Research Journal 22, no. 1: 85–125.
Ferguson, Moira, ed. 1993. The Hart sisters: Early African Caribbean writers, evangeli-
cals, and radicals. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Floyd, Samuel. 1995. The power of black music. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, Robert, and Bruce Nemerov, eds. 2005. Lost Delta found: Rediscovering the
Fisk University–Library of Congress Coahoma County study, 1941–42. Nashville,
Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press.

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 Reed  •  Shared Possessions 25

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