#CECE WINANS NEVER HAVE TO BE ALONE SHEET MUSIC MOVIE#
After the golden age of moviemaking, media exposure allowed rock stars more political sway than Hollywood's studio stars, and rock stars gradually replaced movie stars as key cultural heroes. Shumway investigates the rock star as a particular kind of cultural construction, different from mere celebrity. Partly, that is the point: “rock star” is a familiar and desired category but also a contested one. Granted, there are many more names that fall into the rock icon category and that might rightfully appear on this list. Shumway looks at the careers and cultural legacies of seven rock stars in the context of popular music and culture-Elvis Presley, James Brown, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen.
This deceptively simple statement belies the complex definition and meaning of stardom and more specifically of rock icons. “All stars are celebrities, but not all celebrities are stars,” states David Shumway in the introduction to Rock Star, an informal history of rock stardom. © 2007 The University of North Carolina Press. More than just a community of church mothers, says Butler, COGIC women utilized their spiritual authority, power, and agency to further their contestation and negotiation of gender roles in the church and beyond. The Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement brought increased social and political involvement, and the Women’s Department worked to make the “sanctified world” of the church interact with the broader American society. Offering rich, lively accounts of the activities of the Women’s Department founders and other members, Butler shows that the COGIC women of the early decades were able to challenge gender roles and to transcend the limited responsibilities that otherwise would have been assigned to them both by churchmen and by white-dominated society. She finds that the sanctification, or spiritual purity, that these women sought earned them social power both in the church and in the black community. In this first major study of the church, Anthea Butler examines the religious and social lives of the women in the COGIC Women’s Department from its founding in 1911 through the mid-1960s. The Church of God in Christ (COGIC), an African American Pentecostal denomination founded in 1896, has become the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States today. This tradition of writing theologically on African-American music dates back at least to 1894 with Henry Hugh Proctor's "The Theology of the Songs of the Southern Slave", his Bachelor of Divinity degree thesis at the Yale School of Divinity. As shown in the references, many studies since the early 1980s have drawn a connection between religion and African-American religious music (Cone 1991Dett 1991DuBois 1969Graham 2018 Harvey 1986 Nelson 2018aNelson, 2018bPollard 2008 Spencer 1990), between religion and popular music (Gilmour 2005 Häger 2018), between religion and African-American popular music (DeSilva 1989 Dyson 1991a Jones 1989 Pollard 1989a Pollard 1989b Spencer 1993 Trulear 1989 Wimberley 1989), and between religion and rap music (Dyson 1991b Hodge 2010 Johnson 2013 Miller and Pinn 2015 Moody 2012 Nelson 1991 Royster 1991 Spencer 1991a Utley 2012). Scholarship on African-American music and the intersections of religion specifically concentrating on examining African-American music theologically is the most plentiful in the existing literature. Gospelwomen negotiate these components of stardom molding them into mechanisms that conform to their beliefs and needs. Gospelwomen and Gospel Music are impacted by the demands of stardom in America’s celebrity culture which includes achieved success and branding. The self-elected exile of Gospelwomen refers to their decision to live a life based on the values of the Kingdom of God while encountering and negotiating opposing values in American popular culture. Gospelwomen are 20th and 21st century urban African American Protestant Christian women who are paid for singing Gospel Music and who have recorded at least one Gospel album for national distribution. I argue that CeCe Winans and the marketing campaign for Winans’ album Let Them Fall in Love, is indicative of the encroachment of American popular music’s star system into self-elected “exiled” Gospel Music and into the lives of “exiled” Gospelwomen.
My paper addresses the intersections of the American popular music star system, Black female Gospel singers, Gospel Music, and the exilic consciousness of the Sanctified Church with special attention to life and music of Gospelwoman Priscilla Marie “CeCe” Winans Love.