King's Vibrato

Maurice O. Wallace is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995, and coeditor of Pictures of Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, both also published by Duke University Press.

"King's Vibrato provides the opportunity to listen to and hear black cultural history through the ears of Maurice O. Wallace." - Diane Grams (Ethnic and Racial Studies) "King’s Vibrato is a commendable entry into the growing discourse around history, blackness, and aesthetics, and will be of particular interest to historians of American religion looking for ways to further develop the kinds of subjects available for this sort of inquiry-in this case, the sound of an individual’s voice. This book has relevance, too, for scholars of African American history interested in an innovative look at a familiar subject." - Adam Sweatman (Reading Religion) "The achievement of Maurice O. Wallace’s superb King’s Vibrato is that it allows us to understand King’s epochal abilities beyond the singularity of King himself. . . . Wallace’s focus on sound lets us understand King’s celebrated orations as collaborations between King, his audiences, and the physical environments in which they met. King’s Vibrato goes into intricate detail about how various churches were designed and built with sonic effects in mind." - David T. Smith (Journal of Religious History) "Wallace’s tome is a compelling distillation of the Black modern life that produced King’s sound. As he plumbs the depths of the spiritual, spatial, and sonic landscape of King’s vibrato, Wallace brings to bear a bevy of interdisciplinary modes of critique to make sense of Black modern life’s infrangible links to one of the world’s most recognizable voices." - Joshua Lawrence Lazard (Yale Journal of Music & Religion)

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction  1I. Architectures of the Incantatory1. Dying Words: The Aural Afterlife of Martin Luther King Jr.  212. Swinging the God Box: Modernism, Organology, and the Ebenezer Sound  433. The Cantor King: Reform Preaching, Cantorial Style, and Acoustic Memory in Chicago’s Black Belt  71II. Nettie’s Nocturne4. King’s Gospel Modernism: The Politics of Lament, the Politics of Loss  975. Four Women: Alberta, Coretta, Mahalia, Aretha  138III. Technologies of Freedom6. King’s Vibrato: Visual Oratory and the “Sound of the Photograph”  1857. Dream Variations: “I Have a Dream” and the Sonic Politics of Race and Place  229Epilogue. “It’s Moanin’ Time”: Black Grief and the End of Words  273Notes  281Bibliography  325Index  343