And Community: Religious Identity and Participatory Sing-Alongs

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Volume 6 Number 2 Sound and Secularity Article 3 2020 “Beer & Hymns” and Community: Religious Identity and Participatory Sing-alongs Andrew Mall Northeastern University Follow this and additional works at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr Part of the Christianity Commons, Ethnomusicology Commons, Musicology Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Mall, Andrew (2020) "“Beer & Hymns” and Community: Religious Identity and Participatory Sing-alongs," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 6: No. 2, Article 3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1178 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Music & Religion by an authorized editor of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “Beer & Hymns” and Community: Religious Identity and Participatory Sing-alongs Cover Page Footnote I am grateful to the staff of Wild Goose 2017 and the organizers of Beer & Hymns for welcoming my fieldwork inquiries. This article has benefitted from feedback at the Sound and Secularity symposium (Stony Brook, NY, 2019) and the Christian Congregational Music conference (Oxford, UK, 2019), and I thank the organizers for including me. I benefitted from the insights of this journal's anonymous reviewers. This article is available in Yale Journal of Music & Religion: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr/vol6/iss2/3 Beer & Hymns and Community Religious Identity and Participatory Sing-alongs Andrew Mall Beer & Hymns is a loose network of century.3 In contrast, Beer & Hymns is a local, participatory sing-along events relatively new phenomenon, only coalescing that are independently organized and run under that name in 2006, and thus reflects throughout the United Kingdom, the United twenty-first-century tensions surrounding States, and at festivals such as Greenbelt (in religious identity (in particular, evangelical the U.K.) and Wild Goose (in the U.S.). Christianity), as well as intersections Participants gather at bars, breweries, pubs, between sacred and secular domains in the and churches to sing Christian hymns, contemporary United Kingdom and United spirituals, and other songs together in a States. As such, while studies of Sacred group setting. Event leaders welcome both Harp and shape-note communities often regular churchgoers and those who do not emphasize their connectedness to tradition, attend church to Beer & Hymns, focusing not what distinguishes Beer & Hymns is its on the spiritual or worshipful dimensions divergence from tradition. of congregational singing but rather on its The tradition from which Beer & Hymns potential to form community—one that is, diverges is that of Christian congregational following Kay Shelemay, “a social entity, singing, which has become intertwined an outcome of a combination of social and (and conflated, as I discuss below) with musical processes, rendering those who worship practice during the late twentieth participate in making or listening to music and early twenty-first centuries. Aside aware of a connection among themselves.”1 from the music itself, Beer & Hymns events Like other participatory musical contexts, at lack other formal components common Beer & Hymns there is little to no emphasis to most Christian worship services: Bible on performing artists; instead, as Thomas readings, prayer, reflection, and a sermon or Turino notes, “the primary goal is to involve lesson. Furthermore, Beer & Hymns leaders, the maximum number of people in some most of whom are regular churchgoers performance role.”2 This characteristic themselves, frame the sing-alongs as events stands in stark contrast to the presentational other than or in addition to, but never instead performances that festival-goers typically of, worship services.4 Building on Monique encounter. Beer & Hymns, however, is not Ingalls’s definition of “congregation” as “a the only form of participatory singing rooted fluid, contingent social constellation that in religious repertoire that has deemphasized is actively performed into being through its religious connotations in favor of social a set of communal practices,” I argue and musical inclusion. Sacred Harp and that Beer & Hymns is best understood as shape-note singings in the United States, congregational singing for three reasons: for example, have welcomed participants (1) it is a participatory musical practice; from diverse religious and political (2) its repertoire is largely comprised of backgrounds to form community grounded religious hymns, spirituals, and praise and in musical practice since the mid-nineteenth worship songs (see Sidebar 1), and (3) Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 33 its practice and significance to individual within the context of Beer & Hymns events participants depend on their familiarity at Wild Goose Festival, an annual Christian with formal Christian worship, even if event that takes place in Hot Springs, North they are no longer practicing Christians.5 Carolina, and features music, speakers, In doing so I am not attempting to and workshops. In 2017, I conducted redefine congregations and congregational ethnographic fieldwork as a participant- singing as areligious phenomena; rather, observer at Wild Goose, where I also I am emphasizing their potential for an formally interviewed festival staff and Beer & ambivalent religiosity in postsecular Hymns leaders. I correlate my observations contexts.6 That is, I am more interested at Wild Goose with earlier ethnographic in describing and analyzing the shifting fieldwork at several Boston-area churches, norms of public culture within the secular whose branding and programming reflected than in addressing the transformation of an emphasis on experiencing community. religiosity and/or sacred spaces. My interpretations are grounded in these In this article I address three related necessarily subjective, qualitative data. I questions. First, how should we interpret address these questions through considering Beer & Hymns’ decoupling of congregational the goals of Beer & Hymns leaders and singing from Christian worship? Second, interpreting my observations of participants, how might these events contribute to the lived experience of this sing-along as a evolving definitions of congregation and participant myself, broader sociocultural congregating? Finally, in what ways does trends that have been accompanied by Beer & Hymns contribute to evangelical increasingly fractured social relations, and Christianity’s contested distinction between the event’s sonic environment—all situated the sacred and the secular, particularly in the within a context (the festival) that, by United States, where secularism has only ever definition, occurs outside the places and been aspirational? I turn to these questions routines of daily life and religious practice.7 Sidebar 1: Beer & Hymns Song Lists at Wild Goose 2017 At Wild Goose 2017, the Beer & Hymns indications are printed in the books; leaders provided songbooks for the to participate successfully, singers either participants. They were simple, consisting must be familiar with the songs already of lyrics to fifty-seven different songs or have a strong ear for the harmonic and printed double-sided on copy paper, melodic conventions of the genre(s). This collated, folded in half, and bound with a distinguishes the Beer & Hymns songbook single staple. The songbooks’ cover and from traditional hymnals used by many repertoire closely resemble those of the Protestant churches, but it would be familiar songbooks used by the Beer & Hymns to churchgoers who attend contemporary group that meets in Chicago’s western worship services that eschew hymnals in suburbs; Nate, one of Wild Goose’s Beer favor of lyrics projected on a screen at the & Hymns leaders, was an organizer of front of the church—a common practice Beer & Hymns Chicago at the time. No in the twenty-first century, both in the music notation, chord changes, or metrical mainline Protestant denominations and in continued on next page 34 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) Sidebar 1 continued nondenominational evangelical churches. primarily not as religious songs but The book’s song list is diverse, representing rather in secular popular culture. These several eras and genres, although songs by include Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, Hank white composers clearly outnumber those Williams’s I Saw the Light, The Beatles’ Let from Black origins, and a plurality date to It Be, and Wagon Wheel, first recorded by the nineteenth century. Old Crow Medicine Show (with verses Of the fifty-seven songs, over half written to an unreleased Bob Dylan consist of hymns, largely composed in the chorus) in 2004 and popularized by 1800s and early 1900s. A handful are older: Darius Rucker’s 2013 recorded version. Amazing Grace, for example, was written in Such songs are typically not sung in the late 1700s, and the origins of Be Thou worship services, and their inclusion in the My Vision can be traced to the sixth century songbook resists normative taxonomies or earlier. Five others are praise or praise of congregational repertoire. I attended and worship songs composed by white all three nights of Beer & Hymns at Wild songwriters, such as Bill and Gloria Gaither’s Goose 2017, noting the songs we sang on Because He Lives (written in

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