The Musical Betts, a husband-and-wife duo comprised of Reverend Clarence Betts and Florence Betts, specialized in instrumental covers of “old beloved hymns and Gospel songs.” For more than fifty years, they traveled internationally as musical evangelists, becoming known for their distinctive instrumentation and expressive renditions of Southern Gospel classics. Their album The Golden Bells offers a snapshot of their efforts to extend their ministry beyond live mission work and into the homes of listeners, situating the duo within the broader commercial evolution of twentieth-century gospel music. Grounded in a deep commitment to evangelical mission work, the Betts’s recordings functioned as deliberate extensions of their spiritual calling. This study employs a three-pronged approach to reconstruct their history and interpret their recorded output. First, I establish a historical framework using digital archival sources, including blogs, obituaries, and mission records, to assemble a working timeline of their itinerant ministry. Second, I analyze three contrasting tracks from The Golden Bells, “When They Ring Those Golden Bells,” “Grumblers,” and “Jesus Paid It All,” treating them as archival missiological artifacts that illuminate an increasingly overlooked tradition of traveling musical evangelism. Finally, drawing on William Moylan’s analytical framework, I examine the intentionality of the recording process and the role of recorded sound in expanding the Betts’s missionary reach. By placing this case study in dialogue with scholarship on mediation, circulation, and commercialization in gospel music, this project demonstrates how recording technologies reshaped evangelical musical practice and devotional listening.

This paper examines how Black Protestant communities enact lived theology through the circulation of gospel “sounds” on TikTok, asking how sacred meaning is produced when worship vamps are algorithmically detached from their source and recontextualized through remix, performance, and comment-thread discourse. I argue that TikTok’s sound-library and remix affordances do not merely redistribute gospel music as entertainment; they enable a platform-specific form of theological production in which circulation itself becomes interpretive labor, extending Black sacred aesthetics of call-and-response, repetition-with-a-difference, and communal memory into a hypermediated digital space. In conversation with practical theology’s lived-theology framework and ethnomusicological/media scholarship on mediated voice, displaced sound, and relational listening, I show that TikTok’s enforced acousmatic condition is routinely recontextualized by users through visual framing, embodied gesture, and vernacular commentary that reattach the sound to shared histories of worship and church life. Methodologically, the paper combines digital ethnography with close multimodal analysis of high-engagement TikToks that reuse a prominent gospel vamp, triangulating (1) audiovisual performance and affect, (2) comment sections as sites of communal meaning-making, and (3) reuse patterns across recognizable genres (devotional lip-syncs, comedic reenactments, nostalgia slideshows, etc.). I demonstrate that the sound functions as a portable liturgical fragment: across humor, critique, and devotion, users articulate divine presence, negotiate church authority and “church hurt,” and reaffirm Black Christian belonging through participatory, antiphonal interaction. For ethnomusicology, this reframes viral audio as a contemporary archive of Black sacred epistemologies, where listening, remix, and circulation are themselves ethnographically legible sites of musical-theological knowledge.

Discussions of increased religious revival and social media’s role in propelling this phenomenon figure prominently in current academic and popular discourse. In this paper, I bring a musicological dimension to existing scholarship on contemporary Catholicism and digital media. Through digital and traditional modes of ethnography, as well as engagement with the writings of Katherine Schmidt, Alp Arat, and Marta Kolodziejska, my paper examines how online transmission of Catholic sacred music impacts the lived experience of Catholics in a variety of locations throughout the United States, encompassing parishioners, choristers, parish music directors, and choral groups of monks and nuns within monasteries and convents. Additionally, through dialogue with the writings of contemporary scholars studying disenchantment, modernity, and secularity, such as Akeel Bilgrami, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Philip Bohlman, and supported through my own fieldwork, I argue that the explosion of digital transmission of Catholic sacred music marks a definite turn towards re-enchantment in the American Catholic cultural sphere, with themes of nostalgia and communal memory driving this shift. This topic holds broader implications for ethnomusicology — as Catholic religiosity occupies an increasingly prominent niche in American culture, particularly with the recent election of the first-ever pope from the United States, it is vitally important to understand the musical dimensions of the full spectrum of American Catholic identity and lived experience, and in particular, how these musical dimensions are shaped by and disseminated through social media and other online modalities.