• Latest
  • Trending
  • All
  • News
  • Politics
  • Lifestyle
R Kelly

Will the Black Church Continue to Sing R. Kelly’s ‘I Believe I Can Fly’?

October 1, 2021
Civil Rights March 1963

The Women Who Stood With Martin Luther King Jr. and Sustained a Movement for Social Change

March 16, 2023
creed III

‘Creed 3’ Is a Great Movie That Centers Family, Friendship and Forgiveness

March 3, 2023
Roz Ryan, Andrea Lewis, and Pooch Hall are seen in this still from A Nashville Legacy

‘A Nashville Legacy’ Is a Feel-Good Hallmark Mahogany Movie Celebrating Black Music History

February 22, 2023
pile of books

In New Jersey, School Segregation Didn’t End; It Evolved

February 18, 2023
Karen Abercrombie

After Award-Winning Role in Top-Grossing Christian Movie, Karen Abercrombie Is Leading Change From Within

February 14, 2023
black women group

‘Righteous and Ratchet’ Black Women of Faith Embraced on Jemele Hill’s ‘Sanctified’ Podcast

January 23, 2023
Martin Luther King Jr. Photo

How the Distortion of MLK’s Words Enables More, Not Less, Racial Division Within American Society

January 14, 2023
Shirley Chisholm book

Historian Connects Shirley Chisholm’s Life and Politics in New Biography

January 14, 2023
red apple fruit on four pyle books

Is White Supremacy a Bug or a Feature of Classical Christian Education?

January 14, 2023
bible gun Brazil

God and Guns Often Go Together In US History — This Course Examines Why

January 14, 2023
black news site

Kansas City Police Dismissed a Black News Site’s Reports of Missing Women. Then One Showed Up.

January 14, 2023
text

‘Thank You’ and a Look Back as We Look Forward to the New Year

December 31, 2022
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Thursday, March 30, 2023
  • Login
  • Register
Faithfully Magazine
  • About
    • Staff and Advisors
    • Write for Us
    • Advertise
    • Give Via PayPal
  • Exclusives
  • Q&As
  • Inspiration
  • Subscribe
  • Shop Faithfully
No Result
View All Result
Faithfully Magazine
No Result
View All Result
Home Opinion

Will the Black Church Continue to Sing R. Kelly’s ‘I Believe I Can Fly’?

by FM Editors
October 1, 2021
Reading Time: 4 mins read
R Kelly

R. Kelly, file. (Photo: Andrew Steinmetz, >CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

31
SHARES
ShareTweetPin It

By Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Religion News Service

(RNS) — The first time I heard R. Kelly’s song “I Believe I Can Fly,” I was spinning records for “The Uncloudy Day,” my weekly gospel music radio show at the radio station where I teach. An ivory tower academic, I was (and am) lax in my engagement with secular popular culture, and I knew little about Kelly, his stardom and his ugly ways. But I had recently emcee’d a concert by gospel great Dottie Peoples, and it was her version of “I Believe I Can Fly” that I played.

I knew it as a secular song that was being embraced by choirs and music educators. At the time I categorized it with a number of songs that echoed a favorite text from the Book of Isaiah: “They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles.”

It was years before I connected “I Believe I Can Fly” with R. Kelly and his crimes. When I did, I ceased to air it on my show.

RELATED POSTS

Free eBook: Conversations on White Evangelical Racism and Christian Nationalism (Subscribers)

Political Polarization Is Pushing Evangelicals to a Historic Breaking Point

Has The Black Church Evolved on Abortion?

If the #MeToo movement has taught us nothing, it has revealed how deeply embedded predatory sexuality, drugs and slavery-like exploitation are in the entertainment industry.

These predations are often visited on Black people, since entertainment, especially the recording industry, has traditionally been an alternative pathway to economic mobility for members of excluded and oppressed groups. These riches become force multipliers in the vulnerabilities and victimizations that seem to define the industry.

In light of his criminal conviction, some people now wonder if Black churches will stop singing “I Believe I Can Fly.” As church historian Anthea Butler pointed out recently, the Black church has maintained a relationship with Kelly despite the increasingly disturbing news about him. As a result, she wrote, “Kelly’s conviction is also a conviction of Black religious life and popular culture.”

Segments of the Black church have always been suspicious, uncomfortable and occasionally downright hostile to popular culture and the recording industry. Seeing it as “the world,” some parents have prevented their children from signing recording contracts. Some gospel singers, like Mahalia Jackson and Marian Williams, refused to sing worldly songs. Others, such as Kim Burrell, Clara Ward and the Ward Singers, and Mavis Staples have walked a fine line between the sacred space and popular culture.

Related: ‘When Sunday Comes’ Author Talks Gospel Music’s Impact on American Culture

Yet other popular singers, for instance Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston and Jennifer Hudson, insist they still maintain their relationship with the church. In the words of Jennifer Hudson, “I still sing in church.”

The entangled history of the recording industry and the Black church arises from music’s central place in the church culture. W.E.B. Du Bois called the spirituals created by enslaved Africans and their descendants “Sorrow Songs” and used them to frame his classic work, “The Souls of Black Folk.” He provided a foundational critical model of the African American Christian experience. The “Negro Church,” Du Bois said, comprised three vital elements: “the preacher, the music, and the frenzy.”

Du Bois’ categories require translation for us in the 21st century. It helps to think of those categories as the leadership, the music and the ecstatic worship tradition with its emphasis on the person of the Holy Spirit. Although one can view African American Christianity through the lenses of denominational bodies, there is a trans-denominational dimension that music does much to constitute and sustain.

Music is so central to the Black church that Zora Neale Hurston termed the rise of new denominations in the early 20th century — the Holiness, Pentecostal, Apostolic and Deliverance churches that comprised “the Sanctified Church” — a “music making movement.”

That movement was a significant source of gospel music, a genre that from its beginnings had a strained and troubled relationship with commercial interests and secular artists. Gospel music’s foundations were inextricably linked with the Blues, a genre indigenous to African Americans and itself a source of the explosive growth of the recording industry.

The horrific behavior of R. Kelly, and the popularity of “I Believe I Can Fly” (long after his crimes were suspected), is now part of that history of the Black church and its music.

If people still sing “I Believe I Can Fly,” it’s important to note that long before there was an R. Kelly and his song, flight was a core theme of our sorrow songs: Transcendence from trauma was and remains deeply embedded in traditional African American culture.

African American folklore from slave traditions described people who could fly to escape slavery, a tradition Toni Morrison deploys in her novel “Song of Solomon.” In her book “The People Could Fly,” Virginia Hamilton memorializes stories of a shipload of West African Ibo people who landed along the southern U.S. coast and alternately walked on water or flew back to Africa. These tales are echoed in Paule Marshall’s “Praisesong for the Widow” and Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust.”

Poets Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni drew from these traditions — Angelou in her book, “Oh Pray My Wings Will Fit Me Well,” and Giovanni in her rapturous poem, “Ego Tripping,” which famously ends, “I mean I can fly like a bird in the sky!”

One famously important spiritual asks for “two wings to veil my feet, two wings to veil my face,” and, most importantly, “two wings to fly away where the world can’t do me no harm.” These spirituals demonstrated a deep kinship to the prophet Isaiah’s vision.

This rich, deep tradition of lyricism gives us many texts to draw upon to praise God and transcend trauma without making racist and sexist predators rich with royalties they do not deserve.

Will the Black church continue to sing “I Believe I Can Fly”? I sincerely hope not.

(Cheryl Townsend Gilkes is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur professor of African American studies and sociology at Colby College and assistant pastor for special projects at the Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of “If It Wasn’t for the Women: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community.”)


Help Keep Christian Media Diverse

In addition to partnering with advertisers, maintaining a subscription program, and exploring paid live events, we rely on the generosity of readers who see value in our work and in our mission. We invite you to join us, and keep walking with us, in our mission. Every amount, big or small, empowers us to stay the course. Here are a few ways you can join us:
  • Give via PayPal
  • Place an Ad
We are grateful for your support. Thank you!

Share This Post

Share via

Share This Post

  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • Flipboard
  • SMS
More
  • Report
31
SHARES
ShareTweetPin It
Tags: Black ChurchOpinionR. Kelly
FM Editors

FM Editors

Faithfully Magazine is a fresh, bold and exciting news and culture publication that covers issues, conversations and events impacting Christian communities of color.

Related Posts

Anthea Butler, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and Jemar Tisby

Free eBook: Conversations on White Evangelical Racism and Christian Nationalism (Subscribers)

by FM Editors
December 10, 2022
0

...

man preaching

Political Polarization Is Pushing Evangelicals to a Historic Breaking Point

by FM Editors
July 26, 2022
0

...

hands lifted at church

Has The Black Church Evolved on Abortion?

by FM Editors
July 23, 2022
0

...

marraige be hard

KevOnStage and Mrs. KevOnStage Rewrite Relationship Goals in ‘Marriage Be Hard’

by FM Editors
July 20, 2022
0

...

  • Trending
  • Comments
  • Latest
stream movies laptop

Free Christian Movies: How and Where to Watch Free Christian Movies Online

March 15, 2021
Jesus and John the Baptist

Are Jesus and John the Baptist Cousins or Related in Anyway?

June 2, 2019
paige and christopher hilken family

Paige Hilken, Wife of North Coast Church Pastor Christopher Hilken, Dies by Suicide

August 2, 2021
White Christian Dean and Faculty Pose as Gangsters in Controversial Photo

White Christian Dean and Faculty Pose as Gangsters in Controversial Photo

16
study on evangelical churches finds some apply race tests on people of color seeking to belong

White Evangelical Churches Use ‘Race Tests’ on People of Color, Study Claims

3
depression

Why African Christians Should Rethink Depression

3
Civil Rights March 1963

The Women Who Stood With Martin Luther King Jr. and Sustained a Movement for Social Change

March 16, 2023
creed III

‘Creed 3’ Is a Great Movie That Centers Family, Friendship and Forgiveness

March 3, 2023
Roz Ryan, Andrea Lewis, and Pooch Hall are seen in this still from A Nashville Legacy

‘A Nashville Legacy’ Is a Feel-Good Hallmark Mahogany Movie Celebrating Black Music History

February 22, 2023

Get the Newsletter

Loading

Listen to Exclusive Q&As on Faithfully Podcast

Faithfully Podcast · Faithfully Podcast Select
Advertisement
Advertisement
Mosaic Coffee
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Do Good. Obey God. Stay Woke.

Copyright © 2023 Faithfully Media, LLC. This website participates in affiliate programs.

No Result
View All Result
  • About
    • Staff and Advisors
    • Write for Us
    • Advertise
    • Give Via PayPal
  • Exclusives
  • Q&As
  • Inspiration
  • Subscribe
  • Shop Faithfully

Copyright © 2023 Faithfully Media, LLC. This website participates in affiliate programs.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms below to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
Share via

Share This Post

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Email
  • WhatsApp
  • Copy Link
  • Tumblr
  • Digg
  • Flipboard
  • SMS

Add New Playlist

Add to Collection

  • Public collection title

  • Private collection title

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.

Send this to a friend