There’s a Heaven Somewhere: Itinerancy, Intimacy, and Performance in the lives of Gospel Blues Women, 1915-1983

“In investigating the cultural production and contributions of Gospel blues women, I claim that the friendships, micro-interactions, and collaborations of an intimate circle of Black women gospel musicians offers us a site of critical religious inquiry and Black feminist consideration where we can analyze the moral and intellectual possibilities signified and sustained through their intimate bonds. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Ambre Dromgoole Yale University Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

My dissertation “There’s a Heaven Somewhere: Itinerancy, Intimacy, and Performance in the lives of Gospel Blues Women, 1915-1983” asks what the combined lived experiences, sonic performances, and working class consciousness of missionaries turned gospel blues progenitors can reveal about Black spirituality, religiosity, cultural hybridity, and legibility. My work occurs in the space where Africana religious studies scholarship meets that of Black feminist inquiry, in the space between Wallace Best’s and Anthea Butler’s focus on the sexual-social dynamics of esoteric Afro-Protestant traditions and the considerations and stories of wayward and experimental girl and womanhood that is the providence of scholars like Daphne Brooks, Hazel Carby, and Saidiya Hartman. The girls and women I engage constantly find themselves negotiating the spaces where the plain-clothed culture of Black Christian respectability encounters the space of sexual and musical social risk reflected in blues culture and the economy of sex. The former feared being marked as prostitutes, but the latter knew there was no evading those marks in a racist, sexist society; the musicians I track bandy in the borders between. In investigating the cultural production and contributions of gospel blues women, I position the friendships, micro- interactions, and collaborations of an intimate circle of Black women gospel musicians - Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Roxie Ann Moore, Ernestine Washington, and Marie Knight among them - as untilled sites of critical Black feminist engagement, sociohistorical consideration, and nuanced religio-cultural analysis.