Andrew Mall 9/15/21 Andrew Mall 9/15/21

Oral History Interviews as Primary Sources

While conducting the research for God Rock, Inc., I was fortunate to interview many current and former Christian music industry executives and musicians. I also used the archives at MTSU’s Center for Popular Music, and I was thrilled to find several relevant interview transcripts available through Baylor’s Institute for Oral History. In this post I discuss these components of my research methodology and approach to oral history interviews.

Andrew Mall 3/1/20 Andrew Mall 3/1/20

“As For Me and My House”: Christian Music Executives Roundtable

Journal of Popular Music Studies (2020). At the 2018 IASPM-US conference in Nashville, I organized a roundtable of Christian music executives. This was a unique opportunity to hear Christian music executives discussing the unique challenges and issues they face in a popular music market for which religious identity is necessarily a core component. Roundtable participants have worked in A&R, executive leadership, higher education, music ministry, music super- vision, production, publishing, radio promotions, and recording, among other roles, and represent more than 100 years of cumulative experience as music industry professionals.

Andrew Mall 11/11/18 Andrew Mall 11/11/18

Worship Capital: On the Political Economy of Worship Music

American Music (2018). Scholars and scholar-practitioners from a wide variety of disciplinary and faith backgrounds have enriched our understandings of the ways in which music functions in worship contexts around the world. Yet, the political economy of worship music remains underexamined and undertheorized. In this article, I develop the theory of ‘worship capital’ as a corrective.

Andrew Mall 10/12/18 Andrew Mall 10/12/18

Archival Research Methods and Music Industry Pedagogy

Proceedings of the 2018 MEIEA International Summit (2018). In this article, I discuss the value of archival research and primary document sources to pedagogy in music industry education. I describe the archival methods I have employed in a research project documenting contemporaneous discourse about the corporate consolidation of Christian record labels within (secular) major record labels in the early 1990s.

Andrew Mall 3/9/18 Andrew Mall 3/9/18

“As for me and my house”: Nashville, the Home of Christian Music

IASPM-US roundtable (2018). For this roundtable, current and former Christian music professionals who have worked in A&R, executive leadership, higher education, music ministry, publishing, and radio promotions, among other roles, address the unique challenges that face Christian music. With many combined decades of experience in organizations large and small, our panelists are well-attuned to the city’s centeredness to the Christian music industries. We consider how Christian music has impacted Nashville, address the difficulties of maintaining a profitable business while conducting a ministry, and consider the boundaries of Christian music—increasingly porous as they are—in the broader contexts of globalized entertainment.

Andrew Mall 2/12/16 Andrew Mall 2/12/16

Worship Capital, Evangelicalism, and the Political Economy of Congregational Music

SCSM conference presentation (2016). Building upon the works of Pierre Bourdieu, analyses of music industries, and contemporary discourses of intellectual property, this paper outlines a theoretical framework for the political economy of worship music and considers barriers to integrating this framework into our scholarship and practice. This research emerges from several years of ethnographic fieldwork at the Anchor Fellowship, a non-denominational evangelical church in Nashville, Tennessee, and advances the concept of “worship capital” to capture the various ways in which individuals and institutions invest in worship.

Andrew Mall 11/5/15 Andrew Mall 11/5/15

Studying Worship Capital: Cultural Insiderness, Religious Outsiderness, and Political Economy in Evangelical Worship

Yale ISM Fellows’ Lunch presentation (2015). The presence of capital in Christian worship is unmistakable, enabling individuals and institutions to participate in the production, distribution, mediation, and consumption of worship music. Performing artists, songwriters, and ministers operate in markets that shape the aesthetics of songs that congregations sing every Sunday morning. This worship economy, however, remains undertheorized in congregational music studies.

Andrew Mall 8/20/15 Andrew Mall 8/20/15

“We Can Be Renewed”: Resistance, Renewal, and Worship at the Anchor Fellowship

The Spirit of Praise, Penn State University Press (2015). Live music is integral to worship services, where aesthetics of charismatic worship and rock concerts often overlap. This chapter examines the ways in which the Anchor Fellowship’s theology, worship practices, and congregational music are co-constitutive. This work participates in a growing literature on contemporary Christian worship music practices and contributes to scholarship that addresses peripheral musical activities.

Andrew Mall 8/6/15 Andrew Mall 8/6/15

Capital, Class, and Congregational Matters: The Political Economy of Worship Music

Christian Congregational Music conference presentation (2015). Building upon the works of Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1986, 1993), Jacques Attali (1985), and contemporary discourses of intellectual property, how might we consider the ways in which other forms of capital (cultural, intellectual, religious, social, etc.) are implicated in these markets? How do markets mediate between distinct congregations and globalized worship industries? This paper outlines a theoretical framework for the political economy of worship music, considering the roles of capital(s) in its production, distribution, mediation, and consumption.

Andrew Mall 10/20/13 Andrew Mall 10/20/13

Christian Popular Music, U.S.A.

The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, Canterbury Press (2013). Christian popular music is an umbrella category for a sonically diverse repertoire of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century evangelical Protestant commercial popular music. It encompasses several distinct subcategories based on musical genre, industrial context, or function including, but not limited to, Jesus Music, Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), Praise & Worship music, and Christian rock.

Andrew Mall 10/20/13 Andrew Mall 10/20/13

Billy Ray Hearn

The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, Canterbury Press (2013). A visionary and innovator in the Christian music industry, Hearn is primarily known as the founder of Sparrow Records, currently a part of the Capitol Christian Music Group family of record labels and distributors owned by Universal Music Group, a subsidiary of media conglomerate Vivendi.

Andrew Mall 11/4/12 Andrew Mall 11/4/12

“We Are Called Here to Worship Together”: Ethnographic Outsiderness and Insiderness in Religious and Popular Culture

SEM conference presentation (2012). In this paper, based on several years of ethnographic research at the Anchor Fellowship, I address the challenges of fieldwork as a religious outsider and cultural insider. In constructing a rich description of an Anchor worship service based on my observations, those of church-goers, and formal interviews of Anchor pastors, this paper confronts the multivalence of experience and the interpretation thereof, demonstrating the importance of phenomenology to ethnography of religious and popular cultures.

Andrew Mall 5/10/12 Andrew Mall 5/10/12

Christian Rock

Encyclopedia of Popular Musics of the World, Continuum (2012). the emergence of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) in the early 1970s as the dominant category of popular music marketed to white evangelical Christians, there have been Christian recording artists whose music has failed to meet the aesthetic, contextual, economic, ideological, lyrical, stylistic or theological requirements of the US CCM recording industry. Early ‘Christian rock’ artists’ theological message located them on the periphery of the secular popular music recording industry, while their aggressive sound—heavily influenced by contemporary rock music—located them on the periphery of the existing Christian music recording industry, which focused primarily on sacred music and hymnody.