Monique Ingalls Ph. Published in the fields of ethnomusicology, popular music studies, hymnology, and religious studies, her research explores the effects of recent social, cultural, and technological change on Christian popular music worldwide. In the latter part of the twentieth century gospel music expanded from its origins as a North American religious popular music to become one of the most widely audible, commercially successful and culturally influential forms of popular music in the world.
While the turn of the millennium found gospel and Christian popular music the sixth best-selling genre of popular music in the USA Taylor , a comparison to world markets makes this commercial success seem moderate. Despite the general worldwide surge in local gospel and Christian music production, the amount of scholarship on gospel music outside North America is vastly disproportionate to its prominence and cultural influence.
At the time of writing , there are two regional exceptions to the vastly under-researched state of international gospel music. The early twenty-first century has seen several significant studies of gospel and Christian popular styles in sub-Saharan Africa Atiemo ; Barz , ; Brennan ; Carl , ; Chitando , ; Gwekwerere ; Kidula , , ; Lamont ; Ojo ; Sanga and the Caribbean Best ; Butler , a, ; Rommen , Drawing from the available literature on local gospel and Christian popular music traditions and supplementing them with internet primary sources, personal interviews and selected non-English language sources, this article constructs a series of broad regional narratives.
Shearon identifies four broad sub-categories of gospel music in North America: northern urban gospel music, southern gospel music, African-American gospel music, and country and bluegrass gospel music. There has always been some degree of overlap in the music of black and white US Protestants. However, over the course of the first half of the twentieth century separate publishing and recording industries developed to promote artists, songwriters and their music Burnim ; Goff As a result, in the contemporary United States, the genre terms for Christian popular music reflect a racial divide between performers and audiences.
However, there is a third musical category that cuts across these distinctions defined along lines of race and stylistic origin. At once a congregational song repertory and a mass-mediated popular music genre, praise and worship music is performed in a variety of styles in North American churches across lines of race, ethnicity and region see Ingalls ; Johnson , ; Nekola ; Smith Pollard , Although African-American gospel music, CCM and praise and worship music each have their own distinct histories, they share many commonalities.
