Lift Every Voice and Swing

Winner of the 2022 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, award by by the Council of Graduate SchoolsExplores the role of jazz celebrities like Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams as representatives of African American religion in the twentieth centuryBeginning in the 1920s, the Jazz Age propelled Black swing artists into national celebrity. Many took on the role of race representatives, and were able to leverage their popularity toward achieving social progress for other African Americans. In Lift Every Voice and Swing, Vaughn A. Booker argues that with the emergence of these popular jazz figures, who came from a culture shaped by Black Protestantism, religious authority for African Americans found a place and spokespeople outside of traditional Afro-Protestant institutions and religious life. Popular Black jazz professionals—such as Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams—inherited religious authority though they were not official religious leaders. Some of these artists put forward a religious culture in the mid-twentieth century by releasing religious recordings and putting on religious concerts, and their work came to be seen as integral to the Black religious ethos. Booker documents this transformative era in religious expression, in which jazz musicians embodied religious beliefs and practices that echoed and diverged from the predominant African American religious culture. He draws on the heretofore unexamined private religious writings of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, and showcases the careers of female jazz artists alongside those of men, expanding our understanding of African American religious expression and decentering the Black church as the sole concept for understanding Black Protestant religiosity. Featuring gorgeous prose and insightful research, Lift Every Voice and Swing will change the way we understand the connections between jazz music and faith.

Booker offers a fresh and innovative perspective on twentieth-century African American religious history and culture by highlighting how Black jazz professionals functioned as “race representatives” in American public life and as agents in shaping and transforming the landscape of African American religious life. Mobilizing a host of unconventional sources for religious studies, Lift Every Voice and Swing presents a fascinating and original portrait of the dynamic relationship between popular culture and Black religious life., In this vividly imagined, carefully researched, and musically written book, Vaughn Booker argues for jazz as the vector by which African American spiritual authority moved beyond black church life to saturate all of American culture, and from there to command the shape, feel, and sound of the long twentieth century. A book this fresh about religion in the lives and works of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams would by itself be a remarkable achievement. But Lift Every Voice and Swing is more: a demonstration of the power of their artistry to move and change the world., Lift Every Voice and Swing is entirely original and groundbreaking. By way of incisive archival research and superb cultural analysis, Vaughn A. Booker has shown that there was a religiosity to the creation of jazz music and that some jazz musicians, such as Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams, represented alternative sources of spiritual authority and religious ways of being throughout the long twentieth century. Convincingly overturning notions of the innate secularity of jazz, Booker has provoked a powerful rethinking of African American religious history and the means by which we tell that history., While Booker is an unconventional music researcher, readers benefit from his lifting up of the unspoken, unsung, and unswung flows of multi-faceted, religious jazz lives…His expansive inclusion of various types of texts makes our reading of these great figures richer by amplifying the musical meaning found in their envoiced and religio-socially swinging lives., Booker’s fluency in religious and music history is formidable. His book is dense with ideas expressed in prose that will reward both scholars and general readers with an interest in twentieth-century religion, American music, African American studies, and history.

Vaughn A. Booker is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and the Program in African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College. He was selected as one of 10 early-career Religion faculty nationwide for the 2019-2020 Young Scholars in American Religion cohort. Vaughn hails from Lansdale, Pennsylvania.