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Together Let Us Sweetly Live: The Singing and Praying Bands. By Jonathan C. David. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. xxii + 238, preface, introduction, map, photographs, musical notation, notes, bibliography, index, CD recording. $80.00 cloth, $27.00 paper)
In a climate of shrinking budgets and endemically limited time for fieldwork projects, it is a joy to read a book that is the result of decades of fieldwork within one community. Jonathan C. David first learned about the Singing and Praying Bands of the Chesapeake Bay region in 1983 while doing contractual fieldwork in the area. He continued with the community after the initial project ended, conducting extensive fieldwork over twenty years. His long-term commitment has produced a book rich in detail and deeply respectful of the bands and their worship practices.
While not as well known as other African American sacred music traditions, the Singing and Praying Bands have a long history in the tidewater areas of Maryland and Delaware. Self-organized groups of singers who are members of African American Methodist (not A.M.E.) churches in the region, they are not "bands" in the modern sense of the word; the term "praying band" comes from nineteenth-century Methodism and describes the organization of prayer meetings within...