Conference Agenda

On April 4, 1888, guitarist Vernon Bridges set out from Carthage, Missouri, on a seven-month revival tour with evangelist and “converted gambler” Mason Long’s Pilgrim Quartet. Covering more than 2,300 miles across Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois, the ensemble performed gospel hymns, parlor songs, operatic excerpts, and minstrel sketches in over two hundred towns. Their performances took place in skating rinks, fairgrounds, churches, and opera houses—spaces equally familiar to popular music ensembles. Revivals were promoted through street singing, brass bands, and strategic alignment with public events, revealing a performance model oriented toward attracting crowds rather than religious formation. Long, an itinerant preacher and former minstrel manager, described his evangelistic troupe as a “company,” a term that captured how religious performance and commercial entertainment were deeply intertwined in the late nineteenth century.

This paper argues that gospel quartets like Long’s Pilgrim Quartet emerged alongside barbershop and vaudeville ensembles as part of a national culture of commercial entertainment. Rather than operating at the margins of popular culture, gospel quartets participated in the same performance circuits, ensemble aesthetics, and promotional strategies that shaped American popular music. Drawing on diaries, promotional ephemera, and printed music, I reconstruct the Pilgrim Quartet’s 1888 tour to show how gospel performance functioned simultaneously as missionization and show business. Situating Long’s quartet within the rise of small vocal ensembles as a dominant form of popular entertainment, I show that gospel performance shared key traits with barbershop and vaudeville acts, particularly emphasis on blend and novelty, modular programming, audience interaction, and constant touring. Departing from narratives that locate barbershop’s success primarily in secular leisure culture, I argue that religious performance traditions and gospel marketing strategies were central to shaping the quartet as a musical genre and to understanding popular religion as a site where music, commerce, and performance converged at the turn of the twentieth century.

With their 2021 album Pressure Machine, The Killers’ period of relative stealth Mormonism came to an end. The band’s religious affiliation had not been kept a complete secret though many secular fans were surprised as it became more widely known, a sentiment encapsulated by Audrey Vieira’s article “Fans Horrified to Learn The Killers Tricked Them Into Enjoying Mormon Rock,” (2022). Hailing from Las Vegas, Nevada in the early 2000s, their early and mid career albums featured upbeat tracks void of profanity while Pressure Machine alternatively, as a concept album, features graphic themes and spoken dialogue. The song “West Hills (III)” is melodically and harmonically analyzed in this paper, as it is a traditional SATB choral arrangement and features a melody akin to “If I Could Hie to Kolob;” one of the most popular hymns in the Latter-Day Saint’s hymnal. Traditional hymn arrangements are not often found on rock/alternative albums - concept or otherwise - and in many ways was how The Killers to lifted the veil metaphorically on their religious beliefs.

Mormonism is one of the fastest growing religious sects in America. The Utah Legislature consists primarily of Mormons with upwards of 86% of sitting members active in the church, while the state’s congressional seats and statewide political offices are 100% Mormon (Davidson, 2021). In a state where only 60% of the general population identify as Mormon these numbers represent how prominent and influential the Mormon church is with global population projections predicted of 265 million by the year 2080 (Stark, 2014).

Did The Killers intentionally deceive fans? Would their audiences have been as keen to support the group had they known a percentage of ticket and album sales would be given to a church with deeply entrenched views of bigotry, racism and misogyny through tithe? Incorporating Linden’s (2016) methodology of insistence for lyrical analysis this paper explores The Killers’ discography, examining the band’s use of LDS themes, the manner in which the band straddled secular and religious genres, and how the convergence of religion, political power and music led to their success.