Religion in Culture
Lunchtime Discussion

The first Religion in Culture lunch discussion of 2008 took place on Wednesday, January 30, hosted this time by the local chapter of Theta Alpha Kappa, the national honors society in the study of religion. Our guest was Prof. DoVeanna Fulton, the recently appointed Director of African American Studies at the University of Alabama and a faculty member in the Department of American Studies.

In preparation for the discussion, students read a draft of Prof. Fulton's forthcoming book chapter, "'Come Through the Water, Come Through the Water': Black Women Creating Representative Gospel to Remember the Mississippi Flood of 1927" (available on the secure server here).

Prof. Fulton, who previously worked at Arizona State University, has recently been working on finding African American Gospel recordings, from the late 1920s and 1930s, that provide evidence of the manner in which people used the Biblical theme of the "Great flood" to interpret and present their experience of the Mississippi flood of the Spring of 1927--easily comparable to the more recent Mississippi flood of 1993 and even the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Among those attending the lunch were (left to right): Harrison Graydon, Keke Pounds, Sean Beadore, and Tanesha Brown (far right).

Although the 1927 flood's impact on Blues music of the era is already well known, Prof. Fulton argued that its equally important place in Gospel music of that era is largely under-studied. For example, consider the lyric from the 1928 song, "The 1927 Flood" (a sample of which Prof. Fulton played):

He sent a flood to the land
And it killed both beast and man
'Cause people got so wicked
Wouldn't obey God's command
They was a prayin', welcome to deal
But God didn't have no deal
So He pour down His flood upon the land.

Pictured above with Prof. Fulton are Prof. Russell McCutcheon (far left) and Prof. Maha Marouan (who is affiliated with the African American Studies program).

(For those inquiring minds who visit this website, you can now rest easy because Keke got her vegetarian sandwich!)

Keke Pounds, the current President of Theta Alpha Kappa, introduced our speaker and joined in on the question and answer session that followed Prof. Fulton's presentation--interested in how one goes about obtaining evidence from that era, when few such songs would have been recorded.

Prof. Fulton's paper was not only about the place of the 1927 flood in Gospel music; it also argued that performing songs that included themes of justice and injustice, endurance, judgment, and punishment, enabled otherwise silenced African American women of that era to have a voice they otherwise would not have had.

Prof. Fulton, who began work at the University of Alabama last Fall, is now well on her way to reinventing the University's African American Studies program--a program which draws upon faculty and students from all across the College of Arts & Sciences.

Interested in seeing a 1927 silent film documenting the flood?

Interested in a review of John Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America?

Thanks to Jaci "Keen Eye" Gresham for capturing the lunch on celluloid.