Session 5 (Unit 8): Communion: On Multi-sensory Rituals

COMMUNION: “Bad Blood” Stigmata and Remembrance

There is no power in the blood.

Delores S. Williams, 

Drawing from ethnography of openly gay Black men’s musical performance of gender and sexuality, this final chapter examines the gastromusical ritual and cultural semiotics of performing the covers that emphasizes the blood of Jesus. While doing fieldwork of Black male musicians, I observed a musical repertoire trend in their concerts of covering James Hall’s “Oh, the Blood of Jesus.” Hall’s musical style is often characterized as both a queer and distinct gospel sound, deploying a combination of minor modes and upbeat tempos, chromaticism, unconventional harmonic syntax, and incorporation of melodic material associated with requiemsor funeral masses. Singing about the body and blood of Jesus during communion is common. However, Black gay men are enacting an emerging performance practice that emphasizes that blood in a manner that conjures spiritual, sensuous, and same-sex meaning for the African American gay male experience. Blood musical repertoire illustrates the symbolic spiritual power with which imbued the blood of Christ is imbued. The performance of the repertoire enacts musical kinship, connecting gay men’s discourses of “bad blood” or tainted blood stemming from narratives of Tuskegee Syphilis experiments and HIV/AIDS transmission to the blood of Christ that is said to never lose its power.

Seasoning: A Course in Gastromusicology

Shortly after the term “soul food” was popularized on the heels of the “soul music” genre, culinary anthropologist and Sun Ra touring musician Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor published the cookbook-memoir Vibration Cooking or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970). In the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic research and Ms. Edna Lewis’ culinary culture-bearing, Vibration Cooking challenged the primacy of the “soul food” concept by centring on food as a source of pride, a site of sensuality, an art of multisensory storytelling, a validation of Black womanhood and Black consciousness-raising. Deeply rooted in her musical experiences, Smart-Grosvenor wrote, “When I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration.” Through her cultural anthropological writing, she pinned an intersection of music/sound, sensuality, and culinary perception that has yet to be explored through the lens of music or sound studies.

Probing that constellation of soulful, musical, sensual, and culinary perception, the textbook Seasoning: A Course in Gastromusicology is a ground-breaking critical investigation into the interconnectedness of African American embodiment, oral transmission, cultural production, wealth extraction, and consumption in the global marketplace as emblematic of what I coin as gastromusicophysics or multisensory “taste.”  Highly competent culture-bearers in the marketplace that I call “ultrasonic tastemakers” resonate with and register their talent, tapping into high vibrations, and frequencies of creative expressions, decision making and influencing what is, will be, and their products endure as en vogue, succulent, and mellifluous.

Units Covered

Unit 1 -- Basic Gastromusicology Research Methods   

Unit 2 -- GOODNESS: An Introduction to Critical Gastromusicology    

Unit 3 -- The Vagina Dentata: The Unutterable Confluence of Diet, Discordance, and Black Sexual Purity in Gospel Music.   

Unit 4 -- On Soundness, Despite Seasoning: Tortured Lullabies as Work Songs 

Unit 5 -- The Sound of Wise Women: The Poetics of Smoky Sizzling Inventiveness and Preservation in Kitchen Beauty Salons  

Unit 6 -- “I Don’t Want No Peanut Butter and Jelly”: Indulgence Management and the Loss of Appetite for the “Wrong Food”       

Unit 7 --  Global Tastemakers: Touring Musicians Cooking Food that Makes You Want to Sing  

Unit 8 -- COMMUNION: “Bad Blood” Stigmata and Remembrance

Session Dates:

*All Sessions are First Saturdays from 10 am - Noon 

**Sesssion 1: Units 1 and 2 **

3 Feb, 2024 

Session 2: Units 3 and 4 

2 March, 2024

Session 3:  Units 4 and 5

6 April

Session4: Units 6 and 7 

4 May 

Session 5:  Unit 8 

1 June 

Fee Schedule 

Session 1 (Units 1-2)** $150 Mandatory Session (Live and Recorded)

All Sessions Package: $772.10

Individual Sessions: $108.88