“Gotta Moan Sometime” A Sonic Exploration Of Earwitnesses

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Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

“Gotta Moan Sometime”: A Sonic Exploration of

Earwitnesses to Early Pentecostal Sound in

North America

David Douglas Daniels, III

McCormick T eological Seminary, 5460 S. University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60615, USA

ddaniels@mccormick.edu

Abstract

Sound as a historical frame provides a new historiographic turn for Pentecostal Theology and a complement to spatial and temporal studies of the Pentecostal past. This article explores how sound serves as a primary marker of early Pentecostal identity, as sound blended the sound of prayer, preaching, testifying, singing, music-making, and silence. Embedded in early Pentecostal sound are primal cries, speech, music, and ambient sound which, for early Pentecostals, func- tioned as a circular continuum that Pentecostal soundways traveled. Encompassing more than orality, early Pentecostal sound generated a way of knowing that challenged the orality-literacy binary, the hierarchy of senses that privileged sight, and the hierarchy of the races.

Keywords

Pentecostalism, soundscape, earwitness, soundways, worship, ambient sounds, acoustemology

Prelude

The opening phrase of the title of this presidential address comes from the lyrics of an African American chorus that exclaims:

Trouble in My Way (Trouble in My Way) You gotta cry sometime (You gotta cry sometime)

The song continues by noting that “I lay awake at night” and “That’s alright.” It concludes by testifying: “Jesus, he will ﬁx after while.” Then the song goes on to repeat that “you gotta moan sometime” and later “you gotta pray sometime.” This song encapsulates the three frames of history: the temporal, the spatial, and the sonic.1

http://joyfulvoices.org .

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

The temporal, or the duration of time or change over time, is registered by the lyrics referring to lying awake at night and the “after while” when Jesus will ﬁx it. The change over time, a historical transition, encompasses sleepless nights to Jesus ﬁxing it (the situation) and the return of sleep-ﬁlled nights. Within the song, time is structured by now and later, present and future. His- torians have been especially preoccupied with the change over time, the dura- tion of time, the transition from past to present as well as the change over time within the past itself. History is an eyewitness to the past, observing the past with an historical eye.

While space may be measured through time, in this song the spatial frame is highlighted by the description of trouble as an object that blocks my path and that can be ﬁxed or removed. Can’t you visualize it: “Trouble in my way.” The imaginative ﬂair of the lyrics nearly paints the picture of trouble as an obstacle or barrier that restricts movement down a path; this is spatial or geo- graphical. The focus is on what a person can see with his or her eyes. For a while, historians have engaged spatiality or space; historians must train their visual abilities. History becomes an eyewitness to the past; it entails seeing the past through an historical eye.

The third frame is sonic. It involves sound or sounds: the sound of crying and moaning; the sound of praying. Whether the cries are whimpers or shrieks, whether the moans are melodic or ached, whether the praying is silent or shouted, what is heard is what is central. The focus is on what can be heard. Recently, historians have begun to ﬁne-tune their listening skills to diﬀerentiate the audible sounds. In the words of Elias Canetti, history becomes an “earwit- ness,” an earwitness to the Pentecostal past, listening for echoes from that past with an historical ear.2

For centuries historical writing has employed the temporal frame: history as chronology; history as the interpretation of time-space events with its seg- ments of periodization and kronos as the substance of history. Historians of Pentecostalism have debated the changes over time within the Pentecostal past: the origins of Pentecostalism in the late nineteenth-century revival movement, or the white Holiness movement, or the black Holiness move- ment. Changes over time within the Pentecostal past can be observed in the development of Pentecostalism as a movement to tradition, the process in which certain Pentecostal denominations became fundamentalist, and the shift(s) in the Pentecostal Movement from being racially mixed to racially segregated or from being gender inclusive to being patriarchal.

Elias Canetti, Earwitness: Fifty Characters (New York: Seabury Press, 1979).

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

Now switch to history as an earwitness to the Pentecostal past; listen for echoes from that past with an historical ear. What does Pentecostalism sound like? What was the sound of William Seymour’s Apostolic Faith Mission? Or Abundio de Lopez’s Apostolic Faith Mission in Los Angeles? Of William Durham’s North Avenue mission in Chicago? Or Sturdevant’s Full Gospel of Holiness Mission in New York City? Or Charles Mason’s Saints Home in Memphis? Or Marie Burgess’s Glad Tidings Hall in New York City?

Earwitnesses to the Azusa Street Revival Era

The various earwitnesses to the Azusa Street Revival recollect diﬀerent sounds as a dimension of the Pentecostal sensorium. Sound, along with the senses of sight, taste, touch, and smell, produces the sensory experience. These early Pentecostals recalled the “sweet anthems” and “sweet Jesus,” the “laying on of hands” and being washed and cleansed, and seeing visions and having dreams. Metaphors of sight, taste, and touch shaped their experience and deﬁned their reality, just as did the acts of seeing, tasting, touching, and smelling. The early Pentecostals also heard sounds: the sounds of speak- ing in unknown tongues, diﬀerent languages, shouts, praises, singing in English, singing in tongues, gospel hymns, “heavenly anthems,” as well as laughter, shrieks, cries, moans, groans, and silence, along with the music of various instruments.

According to various authors who attended the Revival at the beginning, there were no instruments, only a cappella singing, because “no instruments of music are used, none are needed.” Many especially remembered the singing in the spirit. William Manley recalled:3

T ere was a most remarkable incident of the sweetest singing I ever heard by about a half a dozen women, all in unknown tongues, in which at intervals one voice would die away in very plaintive strains, while the others carried the song. T en the former would break out in rapid strong language, ﬁlled with unction, and others would give tones as of singing in the distance. This was most enchanting, and ﬁlled with tender love.

Others, such as Catley, commented that the revival was noisy and mentioned the use of “cow bone, etc.” A. C. Valdez, Sr., remembered one brother who “would boom a ‘Hallelujah’ that rattled the windows,” although, according

Cecil M. Robeck, Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Move- ment (Nashville: Nelson Reference & Electronic, 2006), 144-49.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

to Valdez, the “old-line churches frowned on the Azusa Street Mission’s. . . . ‘noisy meeting.’” He recalled that there were regular moments when silence was interrupted with a cacophony of sounds. He spoke of his ﬁrst time visit- ing the Revival in 1906 when, amidst the silence, he felt that “[s]omething unusual was happening” and he recognized that “the Spirit of God was there.” “Suddenly,” he recalled, “people rose to their feet,” and then “[b]ig, strong men began to cry out loud, then women. . . . It was as if ocean waves were moving from one end of the congregation to the other.”

Wave after wave of the Spirit went through the hall, like a breeze over a corn ﬁeld. Again the crowd settled back into their seats. And prayers began to buzz through the hall. . . . a black man with a shining face leaped to his feet. Out of his mouth poured words in some language I had never heard before. . . .

Just when quiet settled over the hall, a white women came oﬀ the bench like a jack-in- the-box. “Oh, My blessed Jesus,” she cried in excitement.4

For the next three years, Valdez attended the Revival. He noted, “Sometimes after a wave of glory, a lot of people would speak in tongues. Then a holy quietness would come over the place, followed by a chorus of prayer in languages we had never before heard.” This wave of the Spirit, according to one author, occurred sometimes when the Holy Spirit came as “a rush- ing wind and everybody may speak that has the power.” Valdez testiﬁed, “How I enjoyed shouting and praising God. During the tarrying, we used to break out in songs about Jesus and the Holy Spirit, ‘Fill Me Now,’ ‘Joy Unspeakable,’ and ‘Love Lifted Me.’” He reported:5

Praise about the cleansing and precious blood of Jesus would just spring from our mouths. In between choruses, heavenly music would ﬁll the hall, and we would break into tears. Suddenly the crowd seemed to forget how to sing in English. Out of their mouths would come new languages and lovely harmony that no human being could have learned.

Silence and noise, chants and shouts, singing in the vernacular and in the spirit, instrumental and non-instrumental music, all were soundmarks of the Azusa Street Revival.

A. C. Valdez, Sr., “Fire on Azusa Street,” in Azusa Street: The True Believers Part 2: More Eye- witnesses Accounts, ed. Larry Martin (Joplin, MO: Christian Life Books, 1999), 55, 53, 49, 50.

Ibid., 51-52; Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles), vol. 1, no. 11, October to January 1908, 2:2.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

A journalist captured the theme of this presidential address in an account of the Pentecostal revival in Memphis, Tennessee during May of 1907 at Saints Home Church of God in Christ. In describing and interpreting Pentecostal exchanges between Charles Harrison Mason and his congregation, the jour- nalist wrote that Mason “would exclaim, ‘Hicks, hicks,’ and the congregation would answer back, ‘Sycamore, Sycamore, Sycamore,’ and such insigniﬁcant words, which lifted the congregation to the highest point of ecstasy, showing what has been contended for years that the Negro religion is sound instead of sense.” Other contemporaries of this journalist would have contended that early Pentecostalism like “Negro religion is sound instead of sense.” Scholarly interpretations would possibly describe early Pentecostalism (African Ameri- can Christianity) as religion that blends sound and sense.6

Sound as a Historical Frame

This presidential address proposes that historical writing on Pentecostalism should focus on the “sound and sense” that constitute early Pentecostalism between 1906 and 1932. Such a focus would supplement the attention given to time and space with sound. The history of time, space, and sound are complementary, for the most part. They each open up new sectors for inquiry. The historical writing on Pentecostalism and sound tends to be underdeveloped. This is remarkable, since throughout most of the twentieth century sound has been one of the factors distinguishing between Pentecostal churches and the others — the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Catholics, and Quakers. In the past, you could deﬁnitely identify Pentecostalism by its sound, a sound that encompasses singing, music-making, praying, preaching, and testifying in many quarters. As Daniel Albrecht contends, a “cacophony of sound” constitutes Pentecostal sound, a sound that includes musical and verbal “sounds that surround.”7

Historically, Pentecostalism was more often heard than experienced by peo- ple. The neighbors would hear Pentecostal voices and music; the radio listeners would have heard Pentecostal worship services and sermons; TV viewers would hear Pentecostal songs, sermons, and prayers. Even for some Pentecostal con- verts, the sound of Pentecostalism is what initially captured their attention.

“Fanatical Worship of Negroes Going on at Sanctiﬁed Church,” Commercial Appeal (Mem- phis) May 22, 1907, 5.

Daniel E. Albrecht, Rites in the Spirit: A Ritual Approach to Pentecostal/Charismatic Spiritual- ity (Sheﬃeld, UK: Sheﬃeld Academic Press, 1999), 143.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

The early Pentecostal soundscape incorporated Protestant sounds from the nineteenth century.

Attuning oneself to the cacophony of Pentecostal sound in the past becomes the task for the historian, who must attempt to sense the sound and detect the sounds. Maybe one can color sounds or soundways to diﬀerentiate them. Peo- ple say that sound can sound cold or hot. Music critics classify some sound as hot or cool. Sound has been noted for its texture. One could try to touch sound, feel its texture, or decide whether a particular sound is silky or gritty. Perhaps the temperature of a sound can be taken in order to determine whether a sound is feverish or not. Mixing metaphors, early Pentecostal sound would be probably colored red as a ﬂame of ﬁre, experienced as hot or cold, and tex- tured gritty; Pentecostal sound is a red, hot, gritty sound.8

Terminologies of Sound

Throughout this address, ﬁve terms will be used to pursue the history of sound: Sonic, soundscape, sound, soundways, and syntax. Barry Traux states that “‘sonic environment’ can be regarded as the aggregate of all sound energy in any given context,” while ‘soundscape’ is used “to put the emphasis on how that environment is understood by those living within it — the people who are in fact creating it.” ‘Sound’ in the singular refers to the ensemble of sounds, ‘soundways’ to the sonic paths. ‘Syntax’ refers to the ordering of sounds.9

Historians of sound study the whole sonic world; they attempt to “‘un-air’ sounds that have faded into the air’s atmosphere and catalogue them.” The historian would un-air Pentecostal sound by analyzing the sound. Musicolo- gists would speak of instrumentation, form, rhythms, vocalization, melody, and harmony. To un-air Pentecostal sound the historian would also catalogue these sounds. For Pentecostalism, that would encompass all kinds of sound: musical sound, prayer sound, sermonic sound, praise sound, and worship sound. In studying Pentecostal sound the scholar is attuned to the intonation,

For the studies in the history of sound see: Mark M. Smith, “Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects For Sensory History,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 841-58; R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (London: Random House, 1977); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing T ings, Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlight- enment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, 2d ed. (Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing, 2001), 11.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

the accent, and the melody along with the texture of the music, prayers, ser- mons, praise, and worship as a whole. The historian’s task is to identify and interpret which sounds “existed when and how they were produced and heard at certain moments in time.” The historicity of early Pentecostal sound requires investigation.10

A Pentecostal Syntax of Sound: Primal Cries and Other Initiatives

Early Pentecostals ordered “the sounds that they” made in particular ways and used “those sounds to position themselves in the world.” Establishing a syntax of sound became a primary way for early Pentecostals to order their sound. What was the syntax of early Pentecostal sound? Within the early Pentecostal soundscape, soundways traveled along a circular, not linear, continuum that began and ended with primal cries with the movement of speech-music-ambient sound in between: primal cries as eruptions from deep recesses; speech as vocalizations in words; ambient sound as the “human exclamations of ‘oh’, ‘ah’, ‘mmm’, and the like that take their place in the ambient sound of nature in the wind, thunder, and rushing water.”11

Rather than reducing Pentecostal sound to emotional outbursts or liminal experiences, a sonic interpretation provides an alternative explanation: Pente- costal sound as cultural borrowing from primal cries as well as ambient sounds drawn from nature along with speech. Resonating with the multidimensional- ity of early Pentecostalism, sonic discourse complements other forms of dis- course drawn from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics. The sonic discourse supplies an explanation of cultural borrowings that eludes dependence on functionalist theories of social deprivation, psychological dis- order, secularization, or globalization; Pentecostal religious activity as related to sound became more than reactive response. Sonic discourse emphasizes the agency of Pentecostals in participating in the production of their respective soundways and the construction of their soundscape.12

Bruce R. Smith, “Listening to the Wild Blue Yonder: The Challenges of Acoustic Ecology,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004), 22; Mark M. Smith, “Making Sense of Social History,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 171; Mark M. Smith draws from Alain Corbin, Time, Desire and Horror: Toward a History of the Senses, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995), 181-82, 183.

Bruce R. Smith, “Tuning into London c. 1600,” in The Auditory Culture Reader , ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 131-32.

On various forms of discourse used to interpret Pentecostalism see the forthcoming book

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

Early Pentecostals participated in a “riot of sound” through their syntax. Early Pentecostal sound in many ways was subversive; it undermined the dominant sound of Protestantism. The syntax of early Pentecostal sound was challenged by the majority of their Protestant counterparts on the larger American religious soundscape. While Pentecostal soundways traveled along a circular continuum, most Protestant soundways travel along a linear contin- uum. Afterward the Protestant majority migrated from the use of primal cries within religious settings at least corporately during the Reformation; they never returned to primal cries within North America. The so-called First and Second Great Awakenings could be described as moments of return to primal cries and ambient sound. Most U.S. Protestants stopped along the continuum at speech and music, declining even to travel further to where ambient sounds could be utilized within worship. The Protestant majority sought a predictable and ordered sound with opportunities for silence and sounds conducive to contemplation and reﬂection.

The syntax of early Pentecostal sound contained “more non-verbal sounds” than its Protestant counterparts on the American religious soundscape. T ere was a place for “sporadic, unpredictable” sounds. The sound of glossalalia found a place in this syntax. The early Pentecostal syntax of sound disrupted the Protestant soundscape. Volume, a lot of it, was valued. Particular religious noise became acceptable as part of the early Pentecostal sound within the Pen- tecostal syntax. The syntax of early Pentecostal sound identiﬁed and rejected other sounds such as “demonic sounds,” however; these sounds signaled the need to exorcize the demons.

According to Grant Wacker, a key word used by contemporaries to describe early Pentecostal worship was “deafening.” External accounts from Kansas to California to Oregon to Alabama to Iowa to Connecticut identiﬁed the early Pentecostal sounds as “jabbering in a strange gibberish,” “howlings of wor- shippers,” “the rapid chattering of a frightened simian,” “hideous noise,” “moan, scream and speak unintelligible words,” “chatter, scream, gnash their teeth,” “laughing, high-trebled, piercing exclamations,” “barking like dogs, hooting like owls,” and “unearthly shrieks and groans.” Primal cries and ambi- ent sounds found a place within Pentecostal worship in North America and on various other continents.13

by Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2001), 100-102, 187.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

Europeans and Asians also drew from the Pentecostal repertoire of sounds. In Britain, according to Wacker, they made “sounds like ducks quacking, lambs bleating, and dogs barking”; newspaper accounts reported “ ‘sobs, sighs, groans, and table-thumping’ that resembled the ‘mourning chants’ of an Irish wake.” In Germany in 1907, Pentecostals ranked among the “manifestations of the Spirit” of 1 Corinthians 12. Further, “[s]ome cried with loud voice, oth- ers shouted Hallelujah!, clapped their hands, jumped or laughed with joy.” In India, adolescent women were described as “crying at the top of their lungs” and other people loudly confessed their sins. Tese Pentecostals exhibited “joy unspeakable” through “singing, clapping the hands, [and] shouting praises.” A sonic interpretation would catalogue these Pentecostal sounds as primal cries or ambient sounds.14

Among early Pentecostals, there were those who believe that the sound of the saints was interpretable. Interpretation was possible not just for unknown tongues and spiritual writing and drawing but for all spiritual utterances. Charles Harrison Mason reported that in early 1907 he left the Azusa Street Revival and returned to Memphis, where the Holy Spirit began to teach him “how and what to sing and all his songs were new.” He began to pray for the Holy Spirit to give him the gift of interpretation. Mason later testiﬁed that the Holy Spirit gave him “the gift of interpretation, that is, He would interpret sounds, groans and any kind of spiritual utterance.”15

The Pentecostal repertoire of sounds was reportedly drawn from various soundways. To dismiss the Azusa Street Revival, Charles Parham in his Apos- tolic Faith compiled the list of sounds associated with it — “jabbering, chat- tering, wind-sucking and giving vent to meaningless sounds and noises” — and attributed the sounds to southern black religious culture. Others associated a range of these sounds with the Shouting Methodist among Euro-Americans. As noted above, some British journalists associated certain sounds with an Irish wake.16

The syntax of early Pentecostalism was an inversion of the syntax of the Protestant majority. This was recognized by the society. Various local govern- ments would group certain Pentecostal sounds as noise and deem them a pub- lic nuisance if they were heard after a designated time in the evening. Noise

Ibid., 102; Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles), vol. 1, no. 11 (October to January 1908), 1:2; vol. 1, no. 9 (June to September 1907), 4:2.

Mary Mason, recompiler, The History and Life Work of Elder C. H. Mason, Chief Apostle, and His Co-Laborers (n.p., 1924), 30.

Wacker, Heaven Below, 235, 102.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

abatement or prohibition campaigns in a sense included certain Pentecostal sounds. The Pentecostal syntax of sound established its own rules.

The Generating Soundways: Shouting Methodist and Other Trajectories

Myriad soundways generated the early Pentecostal soundscape. As a collec- tion of various soundways that paralleled, countered, and overlapped each other as well as produced new soundways, the early Pentecostal soundscape was multivocal and polysonic. On the Pentecostal soundscape there are diﬀerent soundways constituted by a cluster of certain primal cries, words and phrases, and ambient sounds from nature and humans along with styles of music-making. Among the soundways that constituted the Pentecostal soundscape were sonic trajectories that ﬂowed out of the black and white Holiness movements of the late nineteenth century.

The late nineteenth-century Holiness soundscape was produced by various soundways with their respective cluster of certain primal cries, words and phrases, ambient sounds from humans but not nature, and music-making in various styles. Tese soundways ﬂowed out of white and African American Holiness streams and drew from various currents, such as the white centrist Wesleyan Holiness, the baptistic Holiness/the Keswickians, Shouting Meth- odist, Burning Bush, Fire-Baptized, Salvation Army, black Holiness Baptist, and black Union Holiness and Holy Churches. While each soundway had its own particular sound, many, if not all, of these soundways shared a common hymnody. Consequently, the Shouting Methodist, Burning Bush, and Fire- Baptized introduced more primal cries and ambient sounds than the white centrist Wesleyan Holiness.

Within the early Pentecostal soundscape, some of these sonic traditions remained distinct or embodied within individuals or groups while others over- lapped and engaged in cultural exchanges. The Shouting Methodist tradition, especially as promulgated by the Burning Bush enthusiasts, resonated with the African American camp meeting tradition while it would have clashed with the urban African Methodist Episcopal tradition. According to Robeck, the heavenly chorus or singing in the spiritual performed at the Azusa Street Revival possibly echoed the “Negro chant” of the prays/praise houses, although the shout songs and jubilees associated with African American religious folk music were absent; they would become a part of the certain currents within Afro-Pentecostalism.17

Robeck, Azusa Street Mission and Revival, 150.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

Within the Azusa Street Revival, there appears to have been times when diﬀer- ent soundways overlapped with the African-based and African American — deﬁned sonic world of the Revival. Yet even this sonic world had various trajectories, diﬀering according to instruments, clapping, and tunes. Possibly a distinction needs to be made either among sonic periods within the Revival or, simply, developments that occurred during the Revival era although not necessarily at Seymour’s Apostolic Faith Mission.

Various accounts by Rachel Sizelove, Ernest S. Williams, and Alexander Boddy note the absence of instruments. Non-instrumental music-making became the norm at the Revival during some periods, while other periods were marked by instrumental music-making. In describing the lively music heard during the Revival in 1907, Lawrence Catley recalled that there was musical “accompaniment with bones (‘cow ribs’) and a washboard and thimbles. Later a piano was added — then a violin.”18

Silence played a critical role in the Revival. Catley remembered that Sey- mour would intervene “when he thought the service was getting too loud or out of order.”

Rachel Sizelove recalled that during the ﬁrst nine months of the Revival the role of silence, especially tarrying, was evident in the worship:19

We felt all ﬂesh should keep silent before the Lord. . . . when some one would begin to pound the seat with their hand or ﬁst while they were praying, Brother Seymour would go to them gently and tap them on the shoulder, and say, “Brother that is the ﬂesh,” and a holy hush and quietness would settled upon those tarrying for the Holy Ghost.

According to some accounts the camp meeting tradition was missing from or evident at diﬀerent periods during the Revival. An early earwitness to the Revival described the ﬁrst four of months of the Revival as lacking in “shouting, clapping or jumping so often seen in campmeetings,” although “shaking” occurred. By the summer of 1906, more sounds were introduced; a journalist wrote: “Another negro started ‘I am washed in the blood,’ and a genuine camp-meeting time followed, with clapping of hands and stomp- ing of feet.” At the Azusa Street Revival, diﬀerent soundways apparently overlapped others at diﬀerent times.20

Russell Chandler, “Pasadena Cleric Recalls Mission,” in Larry Martin, Holy Ghost Revival

on Azusa Street: The True Believers, Part 2 (Joplin, MO: Christian Life Books, 1999), 135.

Rachel A. Sizelove, “Pentecost Has Come!” in Larry Martin, Holy Ghost Revival on Azusa

Street: The True Believers, Part 2 (Joplin, MO: Christian Life Books, 1999), 79.

Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles), vol. 1, no. 3, November 1906; Robeck, Azusa Street Mission

and Revival, 148.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

Joyful Noise and the Early Pentecostal Identity

Soundscapes embody history and shape identity. Diﬀerence, for instance, “embodies history in sound.” Although early Pentecostal sound diﬀered from Presbyterian sound, each sound embodied and expressed a sonic “histories — that is, histories lived” sonically and produced a diﬀerent identity. Sound enlarges the scale of expression and allows for broader emotional ranges, more textured vocabulary, tonal diction, aﬀective com- mitment, and fuller embodiment.

Sound serves as a “symbolic signiﬁer” of identity. T ere is a symbiotic rela- tionship between how “voice authorizes identities as identities authorize voice.” One way of identifying a Presbyterian or Pentecostal during the early twenti- eth century was through their sound. Early Pentecostals knew that “some sounds connote one’s own people and some connote the ‘other.’” You had an inkling of who was among the saints by the way they sounded. In certain ways, Pentecostals used “sound to make meaning of the world around” them.21 Noise, music, and silence as construed by early Pentecostals shaped their identity and had a place on the Pentecostal soundscape. Pentecostals deﬁned for themselves sounds that were noise or “sweet” rather than adopting uncriti- cally classiﬁcations from the middle class or some other group. Noise related to volume (decibel level), dissonance, being oﬀ-key musically, or atonality became for Pentecostals a matter of context. For Pentecostals, what outsiders called noise, even “unusual noise,” was simply the activity of “praising God and speaking in tongues.” Some noise is deemed inappropriate; other noise, catalogued as making a joyful noise, is deemed appropriate.22

Pentecostals operated in a religious soundscape in which the “meaning of religious sounds” was contested: the anthems of classical music versus the anthems of the heavenly chorus, the pipe organ versus the guitar, aﬀective speech versus rapid-ﬁre speech, solemn silence versus joyful noise. Regarding noise, Schmidt, registering a shift in the “threshold of hearing” during the late eighteen and nineteenth centuries, concluded:23

Noise was the category for sounds that the trained ear could not discriminate or appre- ciate, the sounds that caused it pain instead of pleasure, that disrupted hearing’s deli- cate harmonial balance. Noise very much acted as a social category as much as an aesthetic one. The evangelicals were not only deﬁned by their noises; they were noise.

Paul Moore, “Sectarian Sound and Cultural Identity in Northern Ireland,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 266-67.

Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles), vol. 1, no. 3, November 1906, 1:4.

Schmidt, Hearing T ings , 67.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

Like their evangelical forbears, early Pentecostals were probably noise, too. Many Pentecostals employed “making a joyful noise” to mark religious boundaries and construct their identity. In 1930 Elder Curry of Jackson, Mississippi, a pastor in the Church of God in Christ, oﬀered a bibli- cal support for “making a joyful noise,” taking his text from “the 149th Division of the Psalms” and the sixteenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark. He recited the key verse of that psalm, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” acknowledging, “now some people they don’t like that noise.” Whereas the elites, the literati, might use noise to construct otherness — the African, feminine, infantile, uncivilized, or insane — Pentecostals challenge these racialized and gendered constructions. Certain noises were deemed Christian; other noises were deemed demonic.24

Music and music-making become a serious task in the production of early Pentecostal sound, which ranged from sounds described as heavenly to those described as lively. Music-making became a debated topic as Pentecostals explored music-making with and without instruments; with sacred, home- made, and worldly instruments; with religious and worldly sounds. Sacred instruments included the piano and organ; homemade instruments included washboards, bones, jugs, and kazoos; and “worldly” or “the devil’s” instru- ments included the violin (ﬁddle), banjo, guitar, and drums. The religious sounds included tunes from Protestant hymnody as well as camp meeting songs and spirituals; the worldly sounds included certain kinds rhythms as well as chord progressions and notes associated with the nascent ragtime, honky-tonk, blues, and jazz idioms. According to various accounts the early Pentecostal soundscape privileged silence, especially in tarrying and other forms of prayer. Silence was more than a gap in worship; silence played a litur- gical role.

Musicality provided another language and a means of shaping Pentecostal sound and identity. Many scholars have noted the chanting style and “sing- song” texture of early Pentecostal speech. Whether in preaching, praying, tes- tifying, or public Scripture reading, various Pentecostals chanted their words, interjecting a musicality to their speech with a tune and melody.

At early Pentecostal prayer meetings and other occasions of communal prayers within the Pentecostal soundscape, primal cries and ambient sounds rang out. During prayer, one could hear whispers, cries, moanings, groanings, wailing, weeping, shrieks, and hollers. It was a setting in which a wide range

Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saint: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge, UK: Cam- bridge University Press, 1984), 174.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

of sounds was permitted rather than policed. Sounds of gratitude and des- peration could be heard. This was one of the few spaces in which every voice could be raised simultaneously in praise or petition. Prayer meetings were one of the few places within early Pentecostalism in which the shunning of silence rarely occurred. Silence, even stretches of silence, was welcomed.

The sounds heard in early Pentecostal prayer could be heard in preaching: these included whispers, cries, moans, weeping, and hollers, along with squalls, yelling, and whooping. In various early Pentecostal settings, preaching, like praying, permitted a wider range of sounds to be employed. In some settings, the preacher, in shifting registers, would commence “tuning-up.”

At the core of Pentecostal musicality was the song. The sound of congrega- tional singing reverberated throughout most early Pentecostal sanctuaries. At the Azusa Street Revival, they sang songs such as “The Comforter Has Come,” “Are You Washed in the Blood,” “This is Like Heaven To Me,” “’Tis Heaven T ere,” “All I Need is Jesus,” “Where the Healing Waters Flow,”and “The Blood Done Signed My Name.” The sound of Pentecostal songs, with their origins in the gospel hymn of the nineteenth century and the African Ameri- can sound, included up-beat rhythmic sounds, hard-beat intoxicating sounds, mournful, dirge-like sounds, and soothing, mellow sounds. Hand-clapping, foot-stomping, and tambourine playing with an occasional horn or piano cre- ated this sonic world of early Pentecostalism. Early Pentecostals were known for rapid or fast-tempo music. Grant quotes Howard Goss to contrast, in Goss’s words, the “slow, dragging and listless” tunes preferred by mainline Protestants with the Pentecostals’ “fast music” and songs performed “at almost break-neck speed.” Many, with their rousing choruses, brought the leader and congregation into a sonic embrace.25

The rhythmic pulse of Pentecostal musicality was sustained by clapping. For some early Pentecostals the sound of clapping communicated praise to God. Sometimes this is called praising God with Psalm 47 (O clap your hands together”), a doxological form of clapping. For some early Pentecostals, clap- ping was a form of invocation; often accompanied with phrases such as “T ank you, Jesus,” clapping was a way of “calling on the Lord.” In a sense, for these Pentecostals certain clapping was also annunciatory; as they sensed the in- breaking or overﬂowing of God’s presence they began clapping, combining an annunciatory act with an anticipatory awareness.

Seymour participated in the construction of an alternative soundscape to segregation and institutional racism through the formation of the Apostolic

Wacker, Heaven Below, 135; Robeck, Azusa Street Mission and Revival, 144-49.

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Faith Mission (Los Angeles) as an interzone in which interracial and multira- cial sounds and interactions directly attacked white supremacy as a cultural phenomenon through its sound, space, and witness, thus undermining racial prejudice. An analysis of the racial rhetoric within the Apostolic Faith papers points to the construction of a Pentecostal sonic identity. T ere is the syntax. T ere is also the fact that while the concept of race informs the Apostolic Faith papers, the language of race escapes it. While nationalities, a key term of the early twentieth century, functioned as the term of choice, spoken sounds or language were pivotal.26

Within the Apostolic Faith papers, the world was organized sonically or lin- guistically. The Revival oﬀered an alternative to the trilogy of races (Cauca- soid, Mongoloid, Negroid), to the four European races (Alpine, Mediterranean, Nordic, Semitic), and to the four others (Ethiopian, Mongolian, Malay, Amer- ican). It also countered the competing categorization of nationalities grouped into forty races (Irish, Italians, Syrians, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, Serbo- Croatians, Japanese, Filipinos, Mexicans, Negroes, and so forth). The Revival focused on organizing the people of the world around the primary languages that they spoke. Tese languages included the languages of “India, China, Africa, Asia, Europe, and islands of the Sea as well as the learned languages of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Zulu. . . . Hindu and Bengali. . . . Chippewa. . . . ” Among the languages of Africa, they cited Cru (Kru), Zulu, and Ugandan. Tese languages were listed on a par with the languages of the world. The linguistic framework or the languages of the world provided a lens through which to view humanity in terms other than race.27

Possibly, the Azusa Street Revival under Seymour, through its sonic or lin- guistic organization of humanity, advanced nonracialism. The Revival down- played race as a marker of identity and stressed language. Nonracialism, then, would avow human commonality and “equality” and would serve as a new basis for Christian unity that bridges the racial divide and zones demarcated by the color line.

Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles), vol. 1, no. 5, 1, in Like as of Fire, collected by Fred T. Corum

and Rachel A. Harper Sizelove, republished by E. Myron Noble (Washington, DC: Middle Atlantic Regional Press, 2001), 17; see also David D. Daniels, III, “God Makes No Diﬀerences In Nationality: The Fashioning Of A New Racial/Nonracial Identity At The Azusa Street Revival,”

Enrichment Journal: A Journal for Pentecostal Ministry (Spring 2006) .

David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White

(New York: Basic Books, 2005), 50; Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles), vol. 1, no. 4, 1; vol. 1, no. 1,

1; vol. 1, no. 6, 1, 3, in Like As of Fire, 13, 1, 21, 23.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

Early Pentecostals employed noise, silence, music-making, musicality, and the sonic organization of humanity to construct their Christian identity, locate themselves in the society, engage in culture-crossing, and advance a nonracial- ism that countered the hierarchies of race advanced by the government and the majority society. Early Pentecostal sound became a means of constructing an alternative soundscape, social space, and religious culture.

Early Pentecostal Sound in the Post — Azusa Street Revival Era

Following the Azusa Street Revival Era in 1911, the syntax of Pentecostal sound changed. Here is where it might be important to acknowledge the multiple syntaxes within early Pentecostalism. We might become more attuned to how diﬀerent syntaxes become dominant within sectors or maybe even across sectors within Pentecostalism.

Historians of sound are regularly in search of the demarcating lines at which major transitions in sound occur, noting previous eras or lost eras in sound or lost sounds. For Pentecostalism, there is the era before the electrical ampliﬁcation of sound when naked voices or the accompaniment of hand- clapping and foot-stomping prevailed, or the parallel era in which an ensemble of scrub boards, tambourines, and perhaps a guitar would accompany the voices, clapping, and stomping, or the subsequent era in which a band with the piano, drum, guitar, and horns would blast its sound.

Pentecostal sound, in general, possesses a certain kind of historicity. I am not arguing for either a monolithic Pentecostal sound or an ahistorical sound. Pentecostal sound is made complex by the inﬂuence of region, generation, race, ethnicity, gender, class, culture, and Christian heritage. The historicity of Pentecostal sound demands a high level of speciﬁcity in exploring sound. The regionalization of early Pentecostal sound might expose an urban Northeast sound, Midwestern sound, rural Southern sound, and within the rural South- ern sound, an Appalachian sound. Possibly crossing regions, there exist the distinct Pentecostal sounds of Italian Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans; the racialization or ethnicization of Pentecostal sound is pivotal. To engage in a comparative study of the soundways along the Pente- costal soundscape could demonstrate the mixing between the various sound- ways. T is may even give voice to diﬀerent sectors within Pentecostalism, especially marginalized voices within Pentecostalism, as they shouted, hol- lered, screamed, moaned, and sang.

Within early Pentecostalism, especially black and Latino/a Pentecostalism, a sonic trajectory arose within the Protestant music. Tese soundways charted

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

their own sonic paths. Among Latino/a Pentecostals, Antonio Castaneda Nava translated into Spanish the lyrics of some songs from Garﬁeld T. Haywood’s The Bridegroom’s Songs and rearranged the tunes by slowing down the quick 4/4 tempo. Among African American Pentecostals, there existed a trajectory that shaped the gospel music movement.28

In 1917, Aimee Semple McPherson recalled the Salvation Army Corps in St. Petersburg, Florida “bringing their drum and musical instruments” to the revival she held in that city. Later that year, African American Pentecostals in Miami, Florida “played their instruments” in a march through the city and “sang as only colored folk can” to advertise her revival meetings. Robert Clarence Lawson’s congregation in the Harlem community of New York City during 1919 was noted for making “sounds like a jazz orchestra.” The congre- gation’s neighbors “complained that the church people act like ‘holy rollers,’ judging from the weird sounds coming from the ediﬁce,” and the church music was “rendered with organs, drums, and tambourines, and sounds like a jazz orchestra.”29

According to historian Gayle Wald, “Sunday morning services at Fortieth Street [later Robert’s Temple COGIC, Chicago] in the mid-1920s featured loud voices singing to the raucous accompaniment of tambourines, drums, triangles, a piano, guitars, and even brass, if a trumpet or trombone was available.” The musicologist George Pullen Jackson in White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands described a biracial Pentecostal convention in Cleveland, Tennessee, during September 1929 as producing a “steady and almost terrify- ing rhythmic noise.” This noise was created by instrument strummers, a tam- bourine whacker, and a piano player along with those who “clapped hands to the time of the music” and those whose who shouted and spoke in unknown tongues.30

Arizona Dranes was a central ﬁgure in the production of this soundway during the late 1920s. Dranes was born in Austin, Texas around 1891; she was either born blind or became blind during her toddler years. From 1896 to 1910, she attended the Institute for Deaf, Dumb and Blind Colored Youths,

Daniel Ramirez, “Antonio Castaneda Nava: Charisma, Culture, and Caudillismo,” in Por- traits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders, ed. James R. Goﬀ, Jr. and Grant Wacker (Fayette- ville, AR: The University of Arkansas Press, 2002), 299-300.

Aimee Semple McPherson, This Is T at (1919, repr. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985), 137; “Complain of Church Noise: Pentecostal Pastor, Colored, Summoned on Com- plaint of Neighbors,” The New York Times , September 24, 1919.

Gayle F. Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta T arpe (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2007), 18; George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (1933, repr. 1965) .

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

where she studied music, and graduated in 1910. At some point prior to 1920 she joined the Church of God in Christ.31

The soundway that Dranes constructs circulates through the airways by radio and by records, gaining hearers and singers. The elements of this particu- lar Pentecostal soundway are the vocalization, piano sound, and the rhythm, producing a Pentecostal gospel voice, piano sound, and gospel beat. “Located in range between a soprano and an alto, [Dranes’s] voice was marked by nasal- ity, but with clarity of pitch, and was treated like a drum when, with emotion and fervor, she shouted out the lyrics of songs.” The shouting of the lyrics produced “a speech-like, sermonic delivery.” She overlapped this with the call and response technique. Her piano sound blended ragtime, barrelhouse tech- niques, and a bluesy quality. Her piano sound had “a somewhat raucous bar- relhouse or honky-tonk quality with the highly rhythmic and rapidly repeated percussive chords.” Her gospel rhythm “rendered songs in ¾ time” with a walking melodic bass line, anticipating the “boogie-woogie bass style” that would come later. Dranes utilized the syntax of Pentecostal sound with her chanting and shouting.32

Sound as More T an Orality: Investigating the Racial and Class Politics of Sound

During the emergence of Pentecostalism, diﬀerent cultural contexts thrived. In some cultural quarters, contesting modernity, the binary opposition of orality/aurality and literacy still existed; in other quarters, heralding moder- nity, orality/aurality was eclipsed by literacy; and, yet, in others, heralding folk sensibility, the binary failed to exist: sight complements sound. Engaging the historical study of sound, Pentecostal Theology could go beyond the employment of the binary of orality and literacy to explain Pentecostal diﬀerence. Studies of orality based on Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan fail to exhaust the study of sound. Focusing on orality alone misconstrues the past by characterizing premodern cultures as oral and juxtaposing them with mod- ern cultures which are characterized as literate/print-based because premod-

Michael Cochran, “First recorded gospel pianist got her start in Austin: A recent discovery rewrites what we know about Arizona Dranes,” American-Statesman Staﬀ , March 1, 2007. .

Horace Boyer, How Sweet the Song: The Golden Age of Gospel (Washington, DC: Elliot & Clark Publishing, 1995), 38; Uzee Brown, Jr. “Musical Comparisons of Five Gospel Songs.” Unpublished paper, 2006.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

erns experienced a wider range of sounds than speech. The narrow focus on orality is tied to a grand narrative in which, during the advent of modernity, literacy triumphs over orality, privileging sight over sound, producing the “devocalization of the universe.”33

The triumph of literacy over orality occurred in the West during the transi- tion between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “The sixteenth did not see ﬁrst,” observed Lucien Febvre, “it heard and smelled, it sniﬀed the air and caught sound.” In this ocularcentric narrative, the Enlightenment in its attack on sound as a source of religious authority sought to displace it with reason through the Enlightenment’s disenchantment with the world, especially by demystifying sound; sound, being a form of immediate revelation, was proven to be an untrustworthy sense or source of knowledge.34

The ocularcentric narrative is challenged by scholars such as Leigh Eric Schmidt and Richard Cullen Rath, who seek to complicate rather than repro- duce the “ocularcentric narrative about the Enlightenment and modernity.” For them, this grand narrative misses the complexity of the relationship between orality and literacy, sight and sound. Countering the “hierarchic, oppositional convention” of orality and literacy, Schmidt argues that sight and sound remained contestants during the Enlightenment and its aftermath; sound was reshaped through its response to modernity as it functioned in a counter-hegemonic manner in various quarters. Consequently, for Schmidt, sound has a history during modernity that should be excavated.35

Schmidt contends that the orality-literacy binary not only loses its explana- tory value, but it also relies heavily on “racialized constructions of Western rationality and ecstatic primitivism.” The orality-literacy binary plots the story of the triumph of literacy on “a hierarchy of the senses, with sight vastly enno- bled and hearing sharply diminished.” It also sets up “a marked dichotomy between eye and ear cultures” wherein “‘the African’ lived in ‘the magical world of the ear,’ while modern Western ‘typographic man’ lives in ‘the neutral visual world’ of the eye.” The world of vision produced historical progress while the world of sound was marked by magic. The historical challenge between the world of vision and the world of sound has been, as McLuhan puts it, “the inability of oral and intuitive oriental culture to meet with the

Schmidt, Hearing T ings , 7; Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

Schmidt, Hearing T ings , 18.

Ibid., 259, 22, 11, 8.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

rational, visual European patterns of experience.” What Schmidt deemed as “a larger racialized frame of comparison” would be a major problematic in the use of the orality-literacy binary in Pentecostal Theology, especially the histori- ography that recognizes the multicultural, multi-racial, and multi-national character of Pentecostalism as a movement.36

A comparative study will resist the temptation to write Pentecostal history in one voice; rather, it will be open to multiple voices and to the full range of those voices. This has been a perennial concern within the Pentecostal com- munity. A study of the Pentecostal soundscape reveals the lost soundways in such a way that the scholar is attuned to the dissonance between them and the present: they sound alien and clash with current Pentecostal sonic sensibilities. It helps the scholar to appreciate that certain past soundways may be unre- trievable because they are embedded in a diﬀerent syntax of Pentecostal sound. A sonic barrier condoned these soundways in the past. While earlier sound- ways might have traveled certain routes, the loss of their adjacent and inter- secting soundways leads to their being remixed.

Comparing Shifts in Sound to Shifts in Early Pentecostal Practice

What are the developments in Pentecostal sound? What are the transitions in the history of Pentecostal sound? Early Pentecostalism constructed a soundscape characterized by the “interpenetration” of European, African, and Hispanic soundways. The early Pentecostal soundscape really was constructed out of the “interplay” of these various soundways in which each soundway shaped and was shaped by the other. The early Pentecostal soundscape was the overlapping over sonic vibes. The sonic changes in the mid- and late twentieth century set up new sonic barriers; while the elements of the early soundways persisted, the coherence of this soundway and the past sonic world itself was lost. Pressing to hear this lost soundway opens space for us to the dissonances, exposing the ways in which elements of this lost sonic world have been absorbed into our contemporary Pentecostal soundways. If Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., is correct, at the core of this lost sonic world of the Azusa Street Revival, and perhaps of Pentecostalism, is an African sound. “Many of the expressions approved at Azusa Street could also be found within traditional African American centers of folk worship,” Robeck contends. He

Mark M. Smith, “Making Sense of Social History,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 169, 171; Schmidt, Hearing T ings , 21-22, 20, 21.

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approvingly quotes historian Eileen Southern in claiming that “all Pentecostal worship in the United States is in some sense the direct” heir to the religious culture of the enslaved Africans. Pentecostal sound is “heir to the shouts, hand-clapping and foot-stomping, jubilee songs, and ecstatic seizures of the plantation ‘praise houses.’” The African sound was later suppressed or mini- mized or expunged. Interestingly, James Goﬀ contends that the African sound would re-enter white Pentecostal sound in the 1950s through the quartets of the southern gospel movement.37

The early Pentecostal soundscape was initially constructed with porous sonic borders. Yet, the ecclesial borders became less porous due to the denom- inationalization campaigns of the second generation. Did the sonic borders remain porous? Maybe some sectors had less porous ecclesial and sonic bor- ders. The fundamentalization or evangelicalization of certain forms of Pente- costalism introduced new soundways and theologies, producing modiﬁcations in doctrine, ecclesiology, and liturgy.

Which came ﬁrst? One could argue that the adoption of fundamentalist soundways preceded the theological and ecclesial fundamentalization or evan- gelization of certain Pentecostal sectors. By their sound, did these Pentecostal sectors switch from a Pentecostal to an evangelical soundscape between the 1940s and 1960s? Perhaps some Pentecostal soundways migrated to other soundscapes.

This transformation within certain sectors within Pentecostalism led to a change in the syntax of Pentecostal sound and possibly a rupture with the past. Was this change really an inversion? Recalling the circular continuum of sound discussed earlier, have various sectors of Pentecostalism adopted a more linear continuum? In contrast to other Protestants, they encompass speech, music, and ambient sound, yet discard primal cries. The more evangelicalized Pente- costal sectors might limit the embrace of ambient sound. Does the move of these Pentecostal sectors widen the sonic gulf between the various Pentecostal soundways because of diﬀerences in syntax, sensibilities, and perhaps even soundscape? Nowadays, diﬀerent Pentecostal sectors do not even travel in the same sonic world.

The shift in some Pentecostal sectors from a circular to a more linear con- tinuum transfers primal cries from the public to private soundways, stripping primal cries of their liturgical context. Overall Pentecostal soundways are

Robeck, Azusa Street Mission and Revival, 137; James R.Goﬀ, Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2002).

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modulated. T is again impacts the range of Pentecostal sound: praying, preaching, singing, testifying, music-making, and other sonic activities. Investigating the Pentecostal soundscape exposes certain deserted regions, power struggles in speciﬁc sectors between the circular and the linear continu- ums, but other issues are muted, such as women’s ordination, women’s access to the bishopric or the superintendency, as well as the access of racial or ethnic minorities within various denominations to the chambers of power. We often attribute the diﬀerences between racialized forms of Pentecostal- ism to their respective origins. If African sounds have profoundly shaped the Pentecostal soundscape, the diﬀerence in racialized forms of Pentecostalism may be due less to their origins than to the sonic and ecclesial segregation that occurred later; this was further complicated by the denominationalization that isolated even these racialized forms within their racial groups. Yet, it appears that the sonic separation along racial lines possibly occurred decades after the ecclesial segregation of the races in most Pentecostal sectors.

On the other hand, is there a way of identifying the points at which raciali- zation takes place on the Pentecostal soundscape and equally those aspects of the soundscape that are open to cultural diﬀerence and diversity? Do melodies of inclusion or harmony exist?

Sound as a Way of Knowing

Sound functions as a way of knowing, hearing, experiencing, and being in the world. Sound becomes a medium for expressing theology in song, speech, primal cries, ambient sounds, and music-making. Through the choreography of sound, meaning is internalized. Sound becomes a hermeneutic and its generation of knowledge supplements epistemology with acoustemology as a sonic way of knowing. Michael Bull ponders:38

If the world is for hearing, as Attali suggests, then there exists an unexplored gulf between the world according to sound and the world according to sight. Sound has its own distinctive relational qualities; as Berkeley observed, “sounds are as close to us as our thoughts”. . . . Sound is essentially non-spatial in character, or rather sound engulfs the spatial, thus making the relation between subject and object problematic. Sound inhabits the subject just as the subject might be said to inhabit sound, whereas vision,

Michael Bull, “Soundscapes of the Car: A Critical Study of Automobile Habitation” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 361.

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in contrast to sound, represents distance, the singular, the objectifying. . . . T erefore aural relational experience might well diﬀer from a more visually orientated one. T is is not to suggest that they are mutually exclusive but merely to suggest that the rela- tional nature of a technologically auditory experience diﬀers epistemologically from an explanation that prioritizes the visual.

“Hearing has its own relation to truth: to testimony, to spoken evidence, to placing trust in words rather than in images, to accepting things that are promised, even if they cannot be shown. Hearing likewise involves a special relationship to remembering. And also knowing; admitting that something sounds credible.” Pentecostals engage in “acts of making and hearing sounds” that make a world. This “world of local knowledge” “is articulated as vocal knowledge.” For Pentecostals hearing is believing and seeing is believing; as Paul’s letter to the Romans says, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”39

Early Pentecostals, like eighteenth-century evangelicals, adopted “religious ways of knowing that emphasize the aliveness of sounds, the power of scrip- tures to speak, the capacity of music to heal or inspire ecstasy.” Like their evangelical predecessors, they “cultivated an especially ﬁne-tuned ear for the voices, sounds and noises of the divine world” as well as the created order. Being called by God to perform certain activities and to prophesy became a soundmark on the Pentecostal soundscape. For early Pentecostals, the divine sound opened itself to the Pentecostal soundscape.40

According to some early Pentecostals, the Holy Spirit let them eavesdrop on divine sound: “bands of angels have been heard by some in the spirit.” Pente- costal soundways occasionally echoed biblical and heavenly soundscapes. Pen- tecostals referred to a certain form of singing in the spirit as a heavenly choir or chorus. References to an ensemble singing in the Spirit as a “heavenly cho- rus” occurs in accounts written by Rachel Sizelove, William Durham, A. W. Orwing, and A. W. Frodsham. T ey called singing in the Spirit the singing of heavenly anthems. Tese anthems were considered to be “music that is being sung by angels”: the “heavenly choir” at the Azusa Street Revival sang simulta- neously with the band of angels so that both were “singing the same heavenly song in harmony.”41

Fran Tonkiss, “Aural Postcards: Sound, Memory and the City,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 307.

Schmidt, Hearing T ings , 35, 5.

Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles), vol. 1, no. 1, September 1906, 1:4.

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Tese observers classiﬁed certain sounds as sounds associated with the Pen- tecost event. In 1908 Charles Harrison Mason recalled his Spirit baptism a year earlier: “I sat there a while and I heard a sound just like the sound of wind, a great wind. I heard the sound like in the Pentecost. I heard it just as real. . . . The anthem of Heaven seemed to rise then.” Mason also recalled the sound of the Cruciﬁxion event. In the Apostolic Faith paper, he reported that at one moment it seemed as if he “was standing at the cross and heard Him as He groaned, the dying groans of Jesus, and I groaned.” Early Pentecostal sound became a way to voice moans of sorrows, groans of agony, and the cries of pain — in other words, a way for letting suﬀering speak.42

As Samuel Solivan proposes in the pneumatology of his Hispanic Pentecos- tal T eology project, “It is the Holy Spirit who is the transformer of the suﬀerer and the suﬀerer’s circumstances into liberating orthopathos.” He adds that “the Holy Spirit can liberate one’s life, can turn one’s suﬀering and oppression into hope and faith in spite of the evil social structures and, at times, even in spite of us.” Solivan argues that orthopathos resonates with the pathos of God wherein ortho- refers to the liberating, redemptive, empowering character of pathos (as suﬀering). One might also describe it as a redemptive capacity of suﬀering enabled by the Holy Spirit. Consequently. Pentecostal soundings — primal cries, speech, ambient sounds, music-making — become a way to sound out suﬀering in the community whereby the Holy Spirit redeems the suﬀering by transforming the suﬀerers and their circumstances.43

In this sonic orbit, doctrines were deemed sound or unsound; they either sounded right or wrong. The task of discernment entailed sounding out the truth. Knowledge of silence in Pentecostal sound equally produces knowledge. Walter Benjamin stated: “all sounds and things still have their silences.” How “do we hear silence” in Pentecostal sound? Is silence heard diﬀerently within Pentecostal sound over against Quaker sound? Somehow it diﬀers from the deep soundlessness of the Quaker meeting. What does it mean or what are the implications that in Pentecostal sound silence is rarely broken? Is silence in Pentecostal sound not fragile enough to break?44

Deposition of Defendant, C. H. Mason, taken on April 27, 1908, case number 14770, Chancery Court of Shelby County, Tennessee, Frank Avant v. C. H. Mason, 99-101; Apostolic Faith paper, February-March, 1907 in Holy Ghost Revival on Azusa Street: The True Believers, Part 2, ed. Larry Martin (Joplin, MO: Christian Life Books, 1999), 29; James Hal Cone, “‘Let Suﬀering Speak:’ The Vocation of a Black Intellectual,” in Cornel West: A Critical Reader , ed. George Yancy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 105-14.

Samuel Solivan, The Spirit, Pathos and Liberation: Toward an Hispanic Pentecostal T eology (Sheﬃeld, UK: Sheﬃeld Academic Press, 1998), 62, 148, 61.

Tonkiss, “Aural Postcards,” 308.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

Early Pentecostal soundscape was shaped by and reshaped the Pentecostal sensorium. The sense of touch was redeﬁned by the advent of “the gift of play- ing on instruments” without instruction on playing an instrument or practic- ing on it; the Holy Spirit gifts with the right touch in playing an instrument. The sense of sight was refocused through the gift of drawing in the Spirit, reordering the relationship between sight and touch, as well as through the seeing of visions. The sound of speaking and singing in unknown tongues found its “literary” equivalent in the “gift of writing in unknown languages.” Certain Pentecostals were given the “literary” gift of reading these “writings.” Included among these “writings” were poetry and Scripture. Within the Pen- tecostal sensorium, the orality-literacy binary of the Enlightenment was recast in ways that challenged the coupling of reason and literacy and the hierarchy of the senses that privilege sight. Early Pentecostals produced new ways of knowing about God and reality.45

To explore the early Pentecostal ways of knowing, a theological method focusing on orality would have to expand to focus on sound or the total sen- sory experience of early Pentecostals. Tese studies would complement the theological analysis of Pentecostal literary production such as tracts, lyrics, prayers, testimonies, biographies and autobiographies, sermons, religious cur- ricula, doctrinal statements, theological essays, and theology books. Early Pen- tecostal ways of knowing challenge the Enlightenment preoccupation with the intellectual production of the elite and elite literary texts.

Postlude

In the writing of Pentecostal history, those who complement the history of time and space with the history of sound may well illumine the inability of most Pentecostal historians to reconstruct Pentecostal origins in such a way that the white religious experience, speciﬁcally the Holiness and baptistic experience, loses its normative status within early Pentecostalism and its place as the context from which the Pentecostal soundscape emerges. Since most narratives still introduce African Americans or Latino/as as individu- als, often isolated individuals, a narrative that focuses on the emerging Pentecostal soundscape might provide a communal framework in which to discuss African American and Latino/a religious movements. When they are

Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles), vol. 1, no. 1, September 1906, 1:3; Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 3, November 1906, 4:4.

D. D. Daniels, III / Pneuma 30 (2008) 5-32

included they become a minority in the mix with the white Pentecostal majority or they are segregated into a separate chapter. Others provide dis- cussions of the black church in general or they present portraits of African American religious culture, especially its orality, spontaneity, and bodily involvement. Will a study of Pentecostal sound produce a paradigm shift in Pentecostal historiography where the history of time and space failed? I await the results with interest.

First, perhaps a study of early Pentecostal sound will result in a reinvestiga- tion of the relationship between Pentecostalism on one hand and other Prot- estant movements and modernity on the other. Early Pentecostal sound uncovers ways of knowing, acoustemology, that counters the trajectory of the Enlightenment with its orality-literacy binary, its hierarchy of the senses that privileges sight, and its hierarchy of the races that privileges Europeans. Second, perhaps a study of early Pentecostal sound will expose multiple soundways that constructed the Pentecostal soundscape. Since the racial and gender composition of the early Pentecostal Movement is so pivotal in mount- ing the movement and constructing the Pentecostal phenomenon, a racialized and gendered examination of Pentecostal sound would be essential. T ird, it may be necessary for the historian of Pentecostal sound to investi- gate the various soundways that were present in the study of early Pentecostal- ism as a movement. Before investigating these soundways, the historian must learn how the study of Latino/a Pentecostal sound as a topic is lodged within Latino religious studies; how the study of African American Pentecostal sound as a topic is lodged within black religious studies; and how the study of white Pentecostal sound could be a topic within evangelical, Wesleyan, or American folk studies. After these discourses are mastered, then the investigation can begin, as the historian combs these multiple and possibly contradictory stud- ies for angles from which to explore the construction of the early Pentecostal soundscape.

I decline to oﬀer any guarantees as to whether a study of early Pentecostal sound can produce a conceptual framework that will steer us away from our current conceptual restrictions, but I contend that such a study, as a comple- ment to history of time and space, oﬀers an opportunity to make new histo- riographic advances.

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