139 3. “THIS MUST BE THE SINGLE”: VALUING THE LIVE RECORDING IN CONTEMPORARY GOSPEL PERFORMANCE BY Braxton D. Shelley In his 2003 book, Race Music: Black Music Cultures fom Bebop to Hiphop, Guthrie Ramsey proposes that a “self-conscious hybridity has marked the development of African American religious practices since their appearance in the New World.” 1 In Ramsey’s account, this syncretic impulse is especially evident in gospel music, which has, throughout its history, been in constant dialogue with a range of other musical traditions, most notably “Tomas Dorsey’s mix of blues and gospel in the 1920s and 1930s; Rosetta Tarpe’s blend of jazz and gospel during the 1940s; Edwin Hawkins’s and Andre Crouch’s pop-gospel of the late 1960s; and the Winanses’ smooth-soul gospel of the 1980s.” 2 Each admixture has generated a blend of criticism and praise, and this hybridity has been the subject of much scholarship on African American music. But Ramsey’s accurate account of gospel’s long-standing resourcefulness and the tensions it has produced manifest an even deeper 1 Guthrie P. Ramsey, Race Music: Black Music Cultures for Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 190. 2 Ibid., 191. form of hybridity: that is, gospel’s function as both a commercially disseminated musical genre and a primary liturgical resource for many expressions of African American Christian worship. In this chapter, I engage some of the frictions that result from the genre’s dual identity by examining the role(s) of live recordings in contemporary gospel performance. Focusing on Richard Smallwood’s recent live recording, Anthology, I argue that the live recording performs vital cultural work as a site of negotiation and ex- change. 3 Live recordings constitute a critical nexus through which music’s ft for worship is established in relation to its commercial appeal. Examining both critical discourse and ethnographic evidence concerning “Same God,” 4 the song whose ritual efcacy—its ability to elicit a range of embodied responses from the audience—led Smallwood’s audience to speculate about its commercial role as the lead single as early as the very night of the live recording, I argue that this response reveals 3 Anthology was recorded on August 23, 2014. 4 Richard Smallwood with Vision, “Same God,” Anthology, RCA Records, 2015, MP3.