Healing for the Soul Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination

"The depth of the author's knowledge of gospel music, the vamp in particular, is evident throughout ... Gospel music is more than a formula, and Shelley shows how the music is a channel to a worship experience. This is a valuable book for students of composition and for worship leaders, music therapists, gospel singers, and composers." -- V. S. Xenakis, CHOICE "Braxton D. Shelley's Healing for the Soul is, beyond any doubt, the best book written on gospel music. It is the most theoretically sophisticated and existentially grounded analysis of how sonic vamps and tuning ups turn spiritual power from another world into physical reality and material effects. Shelley engages the profound works of the great Richard Smallwood as a way into the complex dynamics of time, space, sound, reception and belief in the enactment and embodiment of the gospel imagination. This instant classic forever changes modern scholarship in contemporary music and Black cultural performance!" -- Cornel West, Harvard University "The 'New Gospel Music Studies' is here to stay, and Healing for the Soul is a shining example of why. With it, Braxton Shelley emerges as a leading and incisive voice of this exciting movement. This profound and illuminating book could only have been written by someone who's spent years on the cultural frontline: in the pulpit, behind a Hammond B-3 organ, and immersed in the archives of gospel music's history and lived experiences. If you're looking for a musical, theological, and sociological explanation of the technology of gospel music's preoccupation with transcendence, search no further. Healing for the Soul will 'take you higher." -- Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania