Seeking the Roots of Gospel Music in New England Architecture

This presentation will explain the pre-history of gospel music in a regionally specific way. In the presenter’s experience, most Anglo-American New Englanders are familiar with individual songs from the period that Stephen Shearon, et al., have termed “the Moody-Sankey era of Northern urban gospel music.” Nonetheless, gospel music is not generally associated with New England in either the academic literature or the popular regional consciousness. Musical examples used in the presentation will be sourced from the most regionally characteristic of gospel’s numerous stylistic precursors: the “vestry music” repertoire of the 1840s. This will also entail explaining the practices of the “vestry meetings” at which that repertoire was sung and the characteristics of “vestries” as spaces for sacred singing. Specific songs from the repertoire will illustrate the emergence of musico-textual characteristics that later became widespread in gospel, e.g., structurally integral refrains and “single-image” hymn texts; religious practices uncommon in contemporaneous church…