"There's a Heaven Somewhere": Intimacy, Itinerancy, and Performance in the Lives of Gospel Blues Women, 1915-1973
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Religious Studies
First Advisor
Lofton, Kathryn
Abstract
My dissertation “There’s a Heaven Somewhere: Itinerancy, Intimacy, and Performance in the lives of Gospel Blues Women, 1915-1973” asks what the combined lived experiences, sonic performances, and working class consciousness of missionaries turned gospel blues progenitors can reveal about Black cultural hybridity, legibility, and plurality. My work occurs in the space where Africana religious studies scholarship meets that of Black feminist inquiry, in the space between Wallace Best’s and Anthea Butler’s focus on the sexual-social dynamics of esoteric Afro-Protestant traditions and the considerations and stories of wayward and experimental girl and womanhood that is the providence of scholars like Daphne Brooks, Hazel Carby, and Saidiya Hartman.The girls and women I engage constantly find themselves negotiating the spaces where the plain-clothed culture of Black Christian respectability encounters the space of sexual and musical social risk reflected in blues culture and the economy of sex. The former feared being marked as prostitutes, but the latter knew there was no evading those marks in a racist, sexist society; the musicians I track bandy in the borders between. In investigating the cultural production and contributions of gospel blues women, I position the friendships, micro- interactions, and collaborations of an intimate circle of Black women gospel musicians as untilled sites of critical Black feminist engagement, sociohistorical consideration, and nuanced religio-cultural analysis.
Recommended Citation
Dromgoole, Ambre Lynae Morgan, ""There's a Heaven Somewhere": Intimacy, Itinerancy, and Performance in the Lives of Gospel Blues Women, 1915-1973" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 973.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/973
