Island Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States

Review by Ray Allen

Writing about musical performance during the time of COVID-19 gives me pause, as it does, no doubt, for all of us who revel in live music. Whether we choose to raise our voices in praise of the deities or to drum and dance to the most sensual rhythms, the act of communal music making is, at its core, a celebration of our deepest humanity. Michael Butler’s Island Gospel is a keen reminder of this reality, and leaves us longing for the day when we can again gather in places of worship, dance halls, clubs, concert venues, and street fetes for the simple joy of making music together.

Island Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States
By Melvin L. Butler
University of Illinois Press, 2019
224 pages

The book is a provocative study of Pentecostal worship music in Jamaica and in the diaspora. A self-described “African-American scholar of faith,” Butler approaches his project from a unique perspective. Formally trained in Jazz Studies and Ethnomusicology, he is a practicing Pentecostal minister of music who on occasion has sidelined as a saxophonist with jazz, reggae, and kompas bands. He pursues his ethnography as not simply an objective chronicler and interpreter of ritual performance, but rather as a “participating participant observer” who, in his words, was “fully engaged with congregants in worship, joining with them to employ a range of sonic and bodily actions intended to facilitate spiritual transformation.” As an African American scholar studying Caribbean culture, and one who has performed on both sides of the sacred/secular divide, he finds himself constantly negotiating his insider/outsider position. And therein lies many of the book’s most enduring insights.

Island Gospel opens with Butler’s account serving as Minister of Music at Brooklyn’s Emanuel Temple, a Pentecostal church with a three-quarters African American and one quarter Jamaican American congregation. There, the music was heavily steeped in the Black American gospel tradition, but included a healthy dose of traditional Jamaican hymns and choruses. He and his fellow church-goers traveled regularly to nearby Wondrous Love, a small apostolic Pentecostal church where nearly all the congregants were originally from Jamaica and who consciously chose worship practices and musical styles more closely tied to their homeland. Butler’s fascination with the way music could serve as mediator of religious, ethnic, and national identity eventually led him back to Jamaica where the bulk of his research took place.

Once in the Caribbean, Butler explored the worship cultures of several small-town Pentecostal churches on Jamaica’s northern coast as well as two larger Kingston-based establishments. He encountered a wide variety of musical practices, ranging from standard hymnal-based songs to lively Jamaican choruses. The latter were marked by repetitive melodies and lyrics rendered in a ska-based (up-beat) rhythmic groove and driven by energetic hand clapping. In addition, some of the younger churchgoers favored more modern African-American gospel music, a style regarded with some trepidation by older congregants who were concerned with the incursion of inappropriate foreign and sensual popular expressions. Despite these tensions, old and new styles often existed side-by-side, leading Butler to observe that many Jamaican Pentecostals were “expert code switchers. They displayed expertise and fluency in styles of gospel [church] music that registered to me as distinctly Jamaican, as well as those that borrowed form church styles more characteristic of the United States.”

Butler’s middle two chapters are devoted to two small churches where he spent considerable time. He dives deep into their worship and musical practices, exploring how specific performance styles can demarcate boundaries between holiness and worldliness, and between local and the foreign. Here the waters often grew murky, marked by disagreements over the use of secular dance-hall rhythms for instrumental accompaniment to Jamaican chorus and gospel songs. Exactly which musical styles were best suited for bringing on the experience of the Holy Spirit, and which simply elicited sonic pleasure for worshipers, was an occasionally area of discord among his parishioners.

Later chapters explore the intertwining of testimony and song that foster a nostalgia for what elder congregants identify as the old-time religion, an ideal form of worship that some view as threatened by contemporary gospel from the United States. On the other side of a generational divide, many younger worshipers were drawn to gospel concerts and Black American artists such as Donnie McClurkin, a Pentecostal pastor and singer known for blending his contemporary gospel sound with reggae rhythms, patios, and Jamaican vocal inflections. For McClurkin and his followers in New York, London, and Jamaica, his hybrid music reflects a faith that “cuts across boundaries of denomination, ethnicity, race, and nationality.” These debates over the value of local traditions versus outside modern forces inform the construction of a religious ethnicity that, according to Butler, is in perpetual flux. The intermixing of grassroots Jamaican musical practices and mass-produced gospel recordings from the United States — both in tension and support of one another — exemplify the process of cultural “glocalization” as theorized by sociologist Roland Robertson.

There are moments where Butler’s work reads like a richly detailed ethnographic memoir, particularly where he recounts his personal interactions with a fascinating cast of pastors, musicians, and devoted church members. Here his reflexive writing comes to the forefront, as he grapples to make sense of the maze of nuanced theological beliefs, complex ritual practices, and varied musical tastes of his informants. He embraces much of what has become known in the fields of cultural studies as “reciprocal ethnography,” an approach that consciously foregrounds the views of those being studied and weaves those views into interpretations. Traditional hierarchies of scholar vs. informant and etic vs. emic are downplayed, favoring a more dialogic model for obtaining information and reading meaning. Although he does a commendable job of accentuating the voices of his fellow Pentecostal congregants and musicians, Butler’s final decision “that it is my own voice that is privileged” will surely raise a few eyebrows among those who insist that ethical field research be a totally egalitarian effort. Yet Butler’s unusual position as scholar/performer/believer imbues him with a high degree of authority. As a Pentecostal musician who is both inside and outside Jamaican church culture, he is able to empathize with his informant’s views while placing them in a broader intellectual context. He accomplishes this by deftly drawing on the works of critical thinkers ranging from the sacred/profane theorizing Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade to the cultural identity politics of Steward Hall and Simon Frith. His interpretations are always inclusive and respectful of local perspectives, yet he does not shy away from deconstructing what he perceives to be certain controversial and paradoxical aspects of his informants’ beliefs, worship practices, and musical choices.

While students of Caribbean culture and religion will find Island Gospel a fresh and informative read, Caribbean music specialists and the broader ethnomusicology audience may question the work’s degree of musical focus. One wishes for more in-depth descriptions of instrumentation, arrangements, vocal styles, and lyrics of exemplary performances. The treatments of the Mercy Tabernacle’s rendition of “One God Apostolic” and Donnie McClurkin’s London concert are useful, but overall, such examples are too few and far between. Surprisingly, Butler offers no audio documentation of the music he encountered during his time in Jamaica, and the only music recordings he references are commercial releases by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Singers and McClurkin (both of whom are United States-based gospel singers). Without specific musical examples from his Jamaican churches to listen to, some readers will have a difficult time sorting through the various genres and performance practices described in the book.

Despite this paucity of detailed musical description and the lack of references to recorded material, Island Gospel is an enormously valuable contribution to our understanding of grassroots music making in Jamaica and its interplay with international styles at home and in the diaspora. In a field dominated by studies of secular popular music — guilty as charged regarding my own writings on Caribbean music — more focus on sacred traditions is overdue and welcomed. We owe great thanks to Michael Butler for bringing us inside these Jamaican and Brooklyn churches to share the songs and stories of a community of worshipers who practice the complex interweaving of belief, ritual, and musical praxis.

Ray Allen is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His writings on Caribbean music include Island Sounds in the Global City: Caribbean Popular Music & Identity in New York, co-edited with Lois Wilcken (University of Illinois Press, 1998) and Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City (Oxford University Press, 2019).