The Religious Studies Speaker Series Presents: Braxton Shelley, Ph.D. 

The Gospel Imagination.

Between the first and last words of a Black Gospel song, musical sound acquires spiritual power. During this unfolding, a variety of techniques facilitate musical and physical transformation. The most important of these is a repetitive musical cycle known by names including the run, the drive, the special, and the vamp. Through its combination of reiteration and intensification, the vamp turns song lyrics into something more potent. While many musical traditions use vamps to fill space or occupy time in preparation for another, more important event, in gospel, vamps are the main event. This talk explores the reasons why the vamp is so central to the Black Gospel tradition. We will discover the work—musical, cultural, and spiritual—that the gospel vamp does and the transformative power of Black Gospel more broadly.

Braxton Shelley, Ph.D., is a Professor of Music, Sacred Music, and Divinity at the Yale Divinity School. A partial list of his publications can be at braxtonshelley.com. Shelley’s lauded musicological analysis of Gospel music, “Analyzing Gospel,” can be read freely on the UC Press website and will be especially helpful for students or anyone attending the talk with a limited background in the study of African American Religious Traditions and Black Church music. 

Please register to attend this virtual event.

The Religious Studies Speaker Series is made possible by a grant from Oakton’s Educational Foundation.