Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T09:22:32.176Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

‘Play the Rain Down’: Prince, Paul Morton, and the Idea of Black Ecstasy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2022

Abstract

This article grapples with ‘Let It Rain’, the title track of Bishop Paul S. Morton and the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship's 2003 release, which revises Michael Farren's contemporary Christian ballad by braiding it together with Prince's ‘Purple Rain’ and the formal logic of Black gospel tradition. As the Full Gospel version of this song commingles these seemingly discordant components, Morton, choir, and band turn a sung prayer into an assertion of interworldly presence. Building on its received musical materials, this gospel power ballad performs the Black gospel tradition's characteristic inflection – an arresting turn from one level of musicking to a heightened, ecstatic frame. In so doing, this song brings rain near, illuminating the links between performances of musical ecstasy and musical Blackness.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank Alex Cowan for preparing the transcriptions in this article.

References

Bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Coleman, Lisa. “How We Made Prince's Purple Rain’. Interview by Michael Hann. The Guardian, 24 July 2017. www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jul/24/how-we-made-princes-purple-rain-interview (accessed 8 September 2021).Google Scholar
Crawley, Ashon. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, James Q. ‘Voice Belongs’. Journal of American Musicological Society (special issue: Colloquy: Why Voice Now ?) 68/3 (2015), 677–80.Google Scholar
Dixie, Quinton Hosford. ‘How Firm a Foundation? The Institutional Origins of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.’, in Church, Identity, and Change: Theology and Denominational Structures in Unsettling Times, ed. Roozen, David A. and Nieman, James R.. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdman's Publishing, 2005. 327–35.Google Scholar
Downing, Jonathan. ‘”Take Me Away!” Prince, the Bible, and the End of the World as Sexual Liberation’. Paper presented at the conference Bible, Critical Theory and Reception Seminar, September 2011. www.academia.edu/8315626/_Take_Me_Away_Prince_the_Bible_and_the_End_of_the_World_as_Sexual_Liberation (accessed 11 December 2021).Google Scholar
Gallope, Michael. Deep Refrains: Music and the Ineffable. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2018.Google Scholar
Ingalls, Monique. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Birgittia. ‘Back to the Heart of Worship: Praise and Worship Music in a Los Angeles African-American Megachurch’., Black Music Research Journal 31/1 (2011), 105–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Alisha Lola. Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis -Giggets, Tracey M. ‘When Faith and Music Intersect: The Spiritual Evolution of a Musical Genius’. Journal of African American Studies 21 (2017), 533–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Morris, Aldon D. and Lee, Shayne. ‘The National Baptist Convention: Traditions and Contemporary Challenges’, in Church, Identity, and Change: Theology and Denominational Structures in Unsettling Times, ed. Roozen, David A. and Nieman, James R.. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdman's Publishing, 2005. 336–79.Google Scholar
Moten, Fred. Black and Blur: Consent Not to Be a Single Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Muñoz, Jose Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Nolan, Bruce. ‘Their Spirit is Catching: Baptist Fellowship Drops Tradition, Gains a Following’. Washington Post, 22 July 1995.Google Scholar
Ramsey, Guthrie. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Reckson, Lindsay V. Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reed, Teresa. The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003.Google Scholar
Shelley, Braxton. Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shelley, Braxton. ‘Sounding Belief: “Tuning Up” and “the Gospel Imagination”‘, in Exploring Christian Song, ed. Bloxam, M. Jennifer and Shelton, Andrew D.. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017, 173–94.Google Scholar
Touré. I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.Google Scholar
Tjrussell, Jacqueline. ‘The Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship: Giving Baptists a Choice’, Black and Christian.com, 11 December 2021. www.blackandchristian.com/articles/academy/trussell-12-00.shtml (accessed 22 September 2019).Google Scholar
Walser, Robert. ‘Prince as Queer Poststructuralist’. Popular Music and Society 18/2 (1994), 7989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walton, Jonathan. Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism. New York: New York University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Wilbourne, Emily. ‘Demo's Stutter, Subjectivity, and the Virtuosity of Vocal Failure’. Journal of American Musicological Society (special issue: Colloquy: Why Voice Now ?) 68/3 (2015), 659–62.Google Scholar
Williams, Justin. Rhymin’ and Stealin’: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Zak, Albin J. ‘Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and Transformation, “All Along the Watchtower”‘. Journal of the American Musicological Society 57/3 (Fall 2004), 599–644.Google Scholar
Morton, Bishop Paul S. and the Full Gospel Baptist Fellowship Mass Choir. ‘Let It Rain’, on Let It Rain. Waco, TX: Light Records, 2003. CD.Google Scholar
Prince and the Revolution. ‘Purple Rain, on Purple Rain. Los Angeles: Warner Brothers, 1984. CD.Google Scholar
Smith, Michael W. ‘Let It Rain’, on Worship. Brentwood, TN: Reunion Records, 2001. CD.Google Scholar
Morton, Bishop Paul S. and the Full Gospel Baptist Fellowship Mass Choir. ‘Let It Rain’, on Let It Rain. Waco, TX: Light Records, 2003. CD.Google Scholar
Prince and the Revolution. ‘Purple Rain, on Purple Rain. Los Angeles: Warner Brothers, 1984. CD.Google Scholar
Smith, Michael W. ‘Let It Rain’, on Worship. Brentwood, TN: Reunion Records, 2001. CD.Google Scholar