Coda

Abstract

This coda turns to “Total Praise,” the song for which Smallwood is best known, mining the first and the most recent recordings of this song in order to think about the category of song itself. Since its recording, “Total Praise” has acquired a vamp where there was not one before. The vamp that emerges during the first two lines of the song’s B section crystallizes both the sense of ecstatic possibility already present between this song’s chimerical conclusion and its well-known reprise, and the convention of the vamp itself. While on the night of its recording in 1996, the night with which the book begins, “Total Praise” was a musical extension of the choral prelude and the only song recorded without an extensive vamp, its current place at the end of most Smallwood concert sets, and of many more gospel services, makes its musical transformation an ideal site from which to reflect on the relationship between song and liturgy, and to theorize the ontological nexus of song, performance, and recording.