Contemporary scholarship on the Sacred Harp tradition focuses on two aspects: 1) the community singers experience through music making; and 2) the pseudo-religiosity of it all. While these aspects are crucial to the experience of modern singers globally, they are inadequate to explain the revival of Sacred Harp in New England in the 1970s through the efforts of the late Larry Gordon, a figure whose primary motivations were political. In this paper, I will describe how Gordon engaged Sacred Harp’s peculiar performance practice with New Left social politics to create the unique flavor of singing in New England. Far from a Northern coastal elite appropriation of rural Southern culture, Gordon’s style of Sacred Harp enacted the Marxist principles that he worked for as a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on his early band of singers. Though Gordon’s overt political activism diminished as he aged, Sacred Harp singing in New England has continued to support political activism, especially for LGBTQ+ activists. In the debate between New England Sacred Harp’s status as a transplanted versus revived musical tradition, its political dimension provides a third option: that it is a product of the New Left political movements in the particular culture of New England. This tension explains the incompatibility New England singers often experience when encountering singers from other regions of the United States better than explanations centered around revivalism, tradition, or religiosity.

This study investigates how local song genres function within ethnolinguistic communities, asking: What different roles do songs play globally and how do they vary across communities? To answer these questions, R, an open-source programming language and environment designed for statistical computing, data analysis, and visualization, was used to analyze data from the Song Genre Dataset, composed of more than 100 song genres (with 90 attributes each) from communities across more than 20 countries. Differing from previous efforts such as Cantometrics (Wood et al. 2022) and the Natural History of Song (S. Mehr et al. 2018), this newly created dataset prioritizes semantic (referential) and pragmatic (social meaning) categories—purpose, transmission paths, vitality, and societal functions—rather than musical form, which often requires specialized training to evaluate. The Song Genre Dataset is built from a survey that community members complete, naming and describing song genres they perceive as significant. This approach allows them to document and preserve their musical traditions while promoting inclusivity and local agency in musical research. It also allows minoritized communities to see their artistic communication genres (Schrag 2018, 10) represented alongside those of larger groups. Participants have enjoyed the survey process, finding it a link to cherished memories and shared identities. This presentation will reveal preliminary findings and emerging patterns. It will also introduce the Song Genre Dataset and its associated Song Genre Survey, now available in eight languages, inviting broader participation to deepen our global understanding of music’s diverse functions across cultures.

Studies of popular music often rely on Billboard Magazine’s data to quantify the success of an artist or song. For Latin American and Latinx popular music, the key source has been Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs (HLS) chart. Established in 1986, the HLS chart initially relied on airplay from Spanish-language radio stations in the United States. Since 2012, its methodology has expanded to include digital sales, radio airplay, and online streaming. While other Billboard charts, particularly the Hot 100, have been the object of many studies, to the best of our knowledge the Hot Latin Songs chart has not been an object of academic inquiry.

Our study aims to address this gap by developing a publicly-available dataset of the HLS chart between 1986 and 2024. This dataset enables us to explore several key questions regarding the changing nature of “Latin Music” and “latinidad”: How does Billboard’s definition of “Latin Music” sound like and how has that sound changed since 1986? Are patterns in Latino migration reflected in the chart? Are trends in interaction among different Latino communities reflected in “inter-latino” song collaborations (Party 2012)? How does the representation of women in the HLS chart compare with the one in other Billboard charts (LaFrance et al 2018; Watson 2019)? Ultimately, this study will help us better understand the ways in which the music industry has contributed to the construction of the idea of Latin Music, and it will provide a counterpoint to recent ethnomusicological explorations of the concept (Byrd 2015; Moreno 2023).

This paper examines the rich yet underexplored gospel and soul music practices in a small town in California. It focuses on how cultural identity, resilience, and intergenerational storytelling impact women of color. Although analyses of Black gospel and soul music typically focus on urban centers such as Los Angeles and Oakland, this research redirects attention to the semi-urban region of Merced, California. By analyzing media and collecting oral histories, I reveal how gospel and soul music in these communities mirrors the migration experiences of African Americans who came during the Great Migration and continued establishing themselves in California's agricultural core.

This project adopts an interdisciplinary framework from sound studies, voice studies, and performance studies to examine how gospel and soul practices serve as acts of cultural preservation in contexts often overlooked by mainstream narratives of Black musical production. This investigation aims to amplify women's voices within this community, illustrating how musical traditions are shaped by regional influences, economic challenges, and a profound spiritual commitment to their heritage. These practices act not only as modes of worship but also as forms of resistance against cultural erasure, fostering a sense of belonging and continuity amid systemic marginalization.