**1. Introduction**

Music is vital in the services of African American Baptist churches. There are few moments in the service when music—either congregational or choral singing, or instrumental music of some sort—is not being performed; in fact, especially in southern churches, the whole service may be underpinned by a coherent tonal system (often, but not exclusively, predicated on 3rd and 5th relations of closely related tonal centres). Much of the "impromptu" music within a service—chanted prayers, lined hymns, or "called up" hymns, for example—is spontaneously introduced by a member of the congregation, one of the deacons, or a minister. Yet even when such music follows a relatively extended period devoid of any music, its tonal centre is not arbitrary, but is generally closely related to the preceding music. Thus one can argue, as I do here, when music is sustained in this way as an auditory or imagined presence, it functions as almost a timbral membrane for the presence of the Holy Spirit throughout the service. While this is not necessarily the case in all, or even most, African American churches, it is the case at Clear Creek Missionary Baptist Church (hereafter M.B.C.) in Mississippi, the community where I conducted my most intensive fieldwork in the 1980s and early 1990s, and to which I returned in the 2010s. It was also the case at services of the Tallahatchie-Oxford Missionary Baptist (hereafter T.O.M.B.) District Association in the 1980s and 1990s, when some twenty or so local churches came together on fifth Sundays. At the time, many of these small local churches had only part-time pastors (engaged for first and third Sundays, or alternately, second and fourth Sundays), and so lacked a pastor for the infrequent fifth Sundays in a month which occur about three or four times per year, depending on how the Sundays fall in a given calendar year. Thus the T.O.M.B. District Association churches would meet for services at the large Project Centre on the outskirts of Oxford, on the fifth Sundays.
