In my religion, music plays a huge part in our worship services. Although I was raised a Baptist, my mother was raised a Catholic and my dad was raised an Episcopal. When both of them went away to boarding school, they got introduced to gospel music and then converted to Baptist. Why? Because of the music. My mother often tells me that after being introduced to the joys of gospel music in a Baptist atmosphere, there was no way she could go back to a regular Catholic church service.

  In my church, we have specific times for singing. However, if the spirit hits someone on the choir, they start to sing and the whole church follows. Gospel music has come from times of slavery, when the slaves would pick cotton and sing songs of how the Lord would come and save them. In order to sing gospel, no particular voice type is required, but a particular style is definitely employed. The singing style is either dramatically loud or quiet and the enunciation of words puts more emphasis on the words themselves.

  I guess gospel is used to express how you really feel about your religion. It’s hard to put all of your emotion into something that you don’t have emotion for. At most of the Baptist churches that I have attended, during or after a song, screaming, shouting, crying, and speaking in tongues happens, and that seems to just be a result of how gospel music represents religion.

  In Charlotte, Christianity is definitely the prevailing religion. There seems to be an equal amount of Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopalian churches. Each church community seems to have a different idea of what is beautiful in their music. When I go to Liberian churches, the branch of Christianity is either Catholic or Episcopalian and the singing style is more Baptist, but I think that represents how we as Liberians interact with each other rather than the religion.   

   I am a member of the Charlotte Chapter of a nationally renowned choir called the Gospel Music Workshop of America. When we have rehearsals and performances, we bring people to their feet because of the way that we sing. I know that in the black Baptist community, our music is especially touching because we have rhythms under our music but we have meaningful words as well. This type of style is considered beautiful and typical of a predominantly black, Baptist church.