Will Boone, Ph.D. 2013

Advisor: Jocelyn Neal

Dissertation Title: Hearing Faith: Musical Practice and Spirit-Filled Worship in a Contemporary African American Church

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Dissertation Abstract:

Hearing Faith explores the intersection of faith and religious popular music in the lives of black spirit-filled Christians in the United States—a group of believers whose core religious identity centers on direct experiential knowledge of the Holy Spirit. It grows out of immersive ethnography with one independent African American congregation in Durham, North Carolina, and additional field research with African American spirit-filled Christians in central North Carolina and Houston, Texas. This study challenges representations of spirit-filled worshipers as theologically homogenous, and representations of their preference for commercial popular music as theologically shallow, by showing how local worship communities exert considerable creative theological agency through musical practice. 

The dissertation has three main sections. The first focuses on recordings, investigating the relationship between recording artists and those who adopt their recordings as worship repertoire. The success of this relationship is dependent upon shared experiential knowledge of spirit-filled worship. The second section focuses on sound. It discusses how recordings are adapted for worship by local congregations and analyzes how they become part of heterogeneous soundscapes that embody a complex spirit-filled acoustemology, or way of knowing the world through sound. The third section focuses on body, and analyzes the ways in which spirit-filled worshipers use dance and gesture to creatively interpret popular recordings with the goals of building and expressing faith. In this way, the dancing body becomes a site for both natural and supernatural hearing, as well as a site for re-sounding so that others might hear. 

Hearing Faith not only explores the unique role of hearing in black spirit-filled music and worship, it applies its findings to the lively and contentious debates about the contemporary black church. Conspicuously absent from recent criticisms of spirit-filled churches are the voices of believers themselves, particularly those voices that speak in musical and embodied languages. Hearing Faith provides the keystone for moving this impassioned dialogue toward more nuanced understandings based on careful listening to what worshipers themselves are saying with their songs and their bodies. 

Dr. Boone is currently a Part-Time Lecturer in Popular Music at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. His research focuses on contemporary African American music traditions, including gospel and blues. He is also a songwriter and guitarist who performs with numerous bands.