One More Valiant Soldier Here: Music, Masculinity, and Manhood in the Black Religious Imaginary

This dissertation examines the South Carolina Volunteers, the first colored regiment to be mustered into the Union Army of the Civil War. The prominent abolitionist and Harvard trained chaplain, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, served as the regiment's colonel and documented the soldiers' religious and musical activities in his diary Army Life in a Black Regiment, in 1870. Cited frequently in Black religious studies, Higginson's text preserves the lyrics to thirty-six "spirituals" and the soldiers' "singing and dancing" in the ritual called the "ring shout." Scholars have interpreted the ring shout and its music as an example of black religious expression, but have neglected to take into account the meanings of the music and its performance for the soldiers themselves. Given the specific military and masculine context of this particular ring shout, the dissertation takes as its central focus the following interconnected questions: who was performing in the ring shout, and what was being articulated through and in this specific performance? More explicitly, this project examines how the music-making practices of the South Carolina Volunteers constituted a black collective masculine subject within the dynamics of black religion.