Gospel Codes in British Popular Music

Gospel Codes in British Popular Music explores how African American gospel music has been translated from sacred church settings into secular popular music across the Black Atlantic. Using semiotics and the model of call and response, Matthew A. Williams traces how gospel's core elements, or gospel codes, act as signifiers of Black sacred tradition, even when they appear in seemingly secular or commercial contexts. As Williams shows, artists like Edwin Hawkins, Aretha Franklin, and Andraé Crouch issued a call as gospel music became more recognisable within global popular culture during the long 1970s. Caribbean-British churches (with their own history of revival choruses and hymns) and Black British choirs then responded by adopting gospel music and stylisation, which eventually appeared in the work of artists such as Labi Siffre, Stormzy, and Dave. Many of these performances often blur or redefine the boundaries between sacred and secular. Rather than viewing the sacred and secular as oppositional, Gospel Codes in British Popular Music shows how gospel stylisation operates beyond this binary, conveying affective and cultural meaning. In performances ranging from royal events to NPR's Tiny Desk concerts, Williams demonstrates that gospel codes carry persistent associations with their origins even when their theological roots are deliberately muted. He thus reveals how the cultural logic of Afro-Protestantism is not lost in secular spaces but is rearticulated as an aesthetic and inherited memory within popular music and culture.