"Let The Church Sing!": Music And Worship In A Black Mississippi Community, By Thérèse Smith (Review)

As a black American born and raised in the Southeast and brought up in a Pentecostal church, I was immediately interested in Let the Church Sing!, an ethnographic study of a rural black Mississippi community, their styles of worship and music, and how their worldview influenced these styles. More than an academic interest, I wanted to know the similarities between that experience and mine. Just as Thérèse Smith, an Irish ethnomusicologist with a Brown University pedigree, acknowledges that this study is “inevitably coloured by [her] interpretations” (p. 207), so too are my impressions and judgments of her work informed by my experiences growing up in a black church in the South.