Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture

by Stephen A. Marini. University of Illinois Press, 440 pp., $34.95. The title of this volume might well have been "popular spiritual song in America," drawing a deserved wider readership. Given its detailed insights into an inclusive catalogue of American spiritual choral music and singing, including its organizational contexts, it is surely a necessary read for specialists and aficionados of religious history and culture. But its broad sweep of the remarkable kaleidoscope of the vast and deeply rooted American spiritual traditions offers much to the general reader as well.

Chapters are devoted to the spiritual music of Native Americans, Hispanic-Americans, African-Americans, Jewish Americans, Mormons, Roman Catholic charismatics, singing schools and the Sacred Harp movement, the classic Protestant church music tradition, "new-age to neo-pagan" spiritualism, a thorough analysis of changing tastes and social politics in the more mainstream protestant hymnals of American Baptists and the United Church of Christ, and the many forms of Gospel, perhaps today's most widely performed and commercial spiritual music.

Whether describing rehearsals of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, visits to religious retreats in the Ozarks, Dove Award performances at the Grand Ole Opry, or experiences of Pentecostal spirit possession, Marini's writing attempts to engage the reader in the actual experience of this music of the spirit. Though only specialists will want to plumb the extensive detail and the fascinating personal anecdotes the writer employs to enrich and validate his narrative, the overall message of this book is what Marini calls "the protean richness of popular religion" throughout American cultural life since its earliest beginnings. It is a unique and compelling contribution to American cultural history.

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