RT Article
T1 Performing, Representing, and Archiving Belief: Religious Expressions among Jazz Musicians
JF Religions
VO 7
IS 8
SP 1
OP 18
A1 Booker, Vaughn A.
LA English
PB MDPI
YR 2016
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1586109073
AB The archives of African American jazz musicians demonstrate rich sites for studying expressions of religious belief and daily religious practice in public and private arenas, in professional and personal capacities. Highlighting print material from the archives of Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974) and Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981), this article examines the ways that these musicians worked to articulate their beliefs in print and to make meaning of their routine practices. Ellington and Williams produced written records of their aspirations for non-clerical religious authority and leadership, novel notions of religious community, and conceptions of quotidian writing tasks as practices with devotional value in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In preparation for his Sacred Concert tours of American and Western European religious congregations, Ellington theologized about the nature of God and the proper language to address God through private hotel stationery. Following her conversion to Roman Catholicism, Williams managed a Harlem thrift shop and worked to create the Bel Canto Foundation for musicians struggling with substance abuse and unemployment. This study of the religious subjectivity of African Americans with status as race representatives employs archival historical methods in the effort to vividly approximate complex religious interiority.
K1 African American religious history
K1 Duke Ellington
K1 Mary Lou Williams
K1 Religion in America
K1 Jazz
DO 10.3390/rel7080108