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“To Speak As an Oracle of Christ”: Bishop G. E. Patterson and the Afterlives of Ecstasy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2022

Braxton Shelley
Braxton Shelley*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article attends to the musical afterlife of the late Bishop Gilbert Earl Patterson, a Pentecostal minister who, at the time of his death, served as presiding bishop of the largest African American Pentecostal denomination, the Church of God in Christ. In it, I theorize the nexus of faith, media, and sound that lifted Bishop Patterson to the heights of ecclesial power during his lifetime, while laying the groundwork for a pervasive posthumous presence: broadcast religion. Placing Patterson's life-long preoccupation with various modes of technical mediation in conversation with his extremely musical approach to preaching, I will show that Bishop Patterson's technophilic Pentecostalism takes an enchanted view of devices like microphones, radios, televisions, and cameras, understanding each as a channel through which spiritual power can flow. As Patterson's voice and broadcasting infrastructure produce intimacy with countless scriptural scenes, they commingle mediation and immediacy, cultivating an enduring affect that I refer to as afterliveness. Transcending any single homiletic event, afterliveness depends on sermonic sound reproduction, effected by Patterson through both the practice of recording and through ecstatic acts of musical repetition, a set of recurring musical procedures that endow the bishop's ministry with an eternal pitch.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 131 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music

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References

References

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Walton, Jonathan. Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism. New York and London: New York University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
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White, Bobby. “BISHOP G.E. PATTERSON SHARES A MESSAGE ON THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC…,” Video posted on Facebook, March 23, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/bobbywhitememphis/videos/10218865727967930/.Google Scholar
Williams-Jones, Pearl. “The Musical Quality of Religious Folk Ritual.” Spirit 1, no. 1 (1977): 21–31.Google Scholar
Dr. Mattie McGlothen Library and Museum, Richmond, California, USA, Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Archive, University of Southern California Digital Library, https://digitallibrary.usc.edu/Archive/Dr--Mattie-McGlothen-Library-and-Museum--Richmond--California--USA-2A3BF1OFVPB?Flat=1.Google Scholar
62nd Annual Holy Convocation of COGIC, Souvenir Book and Official Program, November 4–14, 1969, Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Archive, University of Southern California Digital Library, https://digitallibrary.usc.edu/asset-management/2A3BF1O3SDR60?WS=SearchResults.Google Scholar
66th International Youth Congress of the COGIC, Souvenir Book and Official Program, June 30–July 4, 1966, Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Archive, University of Southern California Digital Library, https://digitallibrary.usc.edu/asset-management/2A3BF1O3M9IVN.Google Scholar
Abbate, Carolyn. Unsung Voices; Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.Google Scholar
Brubaker, Jed R., Hayes, Gillian R., and Dourish, Paul. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as an Expansion of the Site of Death and Mourning.” The Information Society 29, no. 3 (2013): 152–163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Mark J. Playing with Something that Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chism, Jonathan. Saints in the Struggle: Church of God in Christ Activists in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019.Google Scholar
Chude-Sokei, Louis. The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Crawley, Ashon. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Fisher, Daniel. “Radio.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by Novak, David and Sakakeeny, Matt, 151–164. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frederick, Marla. Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper Collins, 1962.Google Scholar
Martin, Lerone A. Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion. New York: New York University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.Google Scholar
Meyer, Birgit. “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies, and the Question of the Medium.” Social Anthropology 19, no. 1 (2011): 23–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Metheun Ltd., 1982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reckson, Lindsay V. Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in African American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Redmond, Shana. Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Reed, Anthony. Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Sanden, Paul. “Rethinking Liveness in the Digital Age.” In Cambridge Companion to Music and Digital Culture, edited by Cook, Nicholas, Ingalls, Monique, and Trippett, David, 178–192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Sterne, Jonathan. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Temperley, David. The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Walton, Jonathan. Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism. New York and London: New York University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Weheliye, Alexander. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
White, Bobby. “BISHOP G.E. PATTERSON SHARES A MESSAGE ON THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC…,” Video posted on Facebook, March 23, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/bobbywhitememphis/videos/10218865727967930/.Google Scholar
Williams-Jones, Pearl. “The Musical Quality of Religious Folk Ritual.” Spirit 1, no. 1 (1977): 21–31.Google Scholar
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