| Contents |
Architectures of the Incantatory -- Dying Words: The Aural Afterlife of Martin Luther King Jr. -- Swinging the God-box: Modernism, Organology and the Ebenezer Sound -- The Cantor King: Reform Preaching, Cantorial Style and Acoustic Memory in Chicago's Black Belt -- Nettie's Nocturne -- The Poetics of Lament, the Politics of Loss -- Four Women: Alberta, Coretta, Mahalia, Aretha -- Technologies of Freedom -- King's Vibrato: Visual Oratory and "the Sound of the Photograph" -- Dream Variations: "I Have a Dream" and the Sonic Politics of Race and Place -- Epilogue. It's Moanin' Time: Black Grief and the End of Words. |
| Abstract |
"King's Vibrato explores the sonic power of preaching and speech-making in the life and career of Martin Luther King Jr. It offers up a cultural and historical reading of what regularly passes uncritically as the unique preaching power of one who "spoke with the tongues of men and of angels," but which depends (in both predictable and surprising ways) on an acoustic calculus involving, but not reducible to, architecture, instrumentation, audience, and technology in oratorical performativity. Together, the acoustical considerations of ecclesial architecture in the US since 1900, the regular furnishing of aspirational African American church buildings with pipe organry, and African Americans' special relationship to speech and song created the conditions for that unique vibrato effect in King's voice with which he moved the world. In more general terms, King's Vibrato is a cultural history and critical theory of the black modernist soundscapes, North and South, that helped produce the vocal timbre and time signature of the preacher King"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Issued in other form | Online version: Wallace, Maurice O. (Maurice Orlando), 1967- King's vibrato Durham : Duke University Press, 2022 9781478022992 |
| Genre/form | History. |
| LCCN | 2021044935 |
| ISBN | 9781478018407 |
| ISBN | 9781478015741 (hardcover) |
| ISBN | 1478015748 (hardcover) |
| ISBN | 1478018402 (paperback) |
| ISBN | (ebook) |
