At Virginia State University (an HBCU), a student’s singing voice rarely stays the same from Sunday worship to Monday voice lesson. Faculty state classical technique “provides a foundation for all singing” and is necessary to “compete with students from Julliard” a framing that establishes an ideological hierarchy. Drawing on two years of ethnography, I examine how VSU music students use singing style to articulate individual identity, orient towards specific forms of Blackness, and navigate institutional pressures. Adopting approaches from linguistic anthropology (Harkness 2014; Lie 2022), I employ sociophonetic recordings and vowel mapping to analyze how students phonetically distinguish classical and gospel singing, and the social values attached to each. Through participant observation of students and interviews with faculty, I trace students’ deployment of singing style in day-to-day interactions as well as the institutional ideologies attached. Classical singing is framed as a professional pre-requisite, yet for many students it conflicts with gospel singing which enable their expression of faith. Students strategically shift between styles to access different social and professional opportunities. I contend this vocal flexibility, what I call vocalized style-shifting, is a form of embodied social navigation. Phonetic choice becomes a site of Black identity negotiation indexing competing orientations towards respectability, faith, and the HBCU community. Building on Newland’s “racialized vocality” (2014) and approaches from voice studies (Eidsheim 2019; Meizel 2020) this paper foregrounds an agential approach to students singing Blackness and answers the call within music studies (Hadley 2025; Kernodle 2025) to center HBCUs as sites of knowledge production.

Black musical traditions have long served as sites of resistance, community formation, and political expression. This paper examines the founding of the University of Virginia’s Black Voices Gospel Choir and its 50-year history to highlight its integral role in cultural placemaking during the University's era of racial integration. Founded in 1972 by Nehemiah Brown after he was denied entry into the University’s all-white glee club, Black Voices emerged amid campus hostility, racial exclusion, and limited institutional support for Black students. Using archival research and oral histories, this paper connects the choir to broader histories of Black student activism. It emphasizes the role of Charlottesville, Virginia, a small, urban-suburban Southern city often overlooked in gospel research, which typically focuses on metropolitan centers.

I argue that Black Voices was not only a vehicle for spiritual and cultural expression but also served as a mediator between the University and local Black community members, complicating traditional “town-gown” dynamics. The choir’s multiple roles give rise to what I theorize as a “church space,” an environment that evokes community and deep spiritual intensity without being confined to a church building or an exclusive Christian framework. This term provides insight into how relationships between students and the choir have evolved. Lastly, this paper highlights how Black people have utilized Black musical traditions to produce place, identity, and political meaning despite institutional structures that try to render them placeless.

The question of community, unity, and continuity in the context of ruptures experienced by Indigenous populations—such as oppression, genocide, forced displacement, and cultural erasure—has been widely debated across fields including ethnomusicology, musicology, sociology, and anthropology. Scholars have argued that inclusive music-making can contribute to the creation, maintenance, and sustenance of community (Perman and Fiol, 2024; Harris, 2020). However, the relationship between music and community within the Historically Black College and University (HBCU) marching band tradition has been underexplored. This paper, grounded in African and African American philosophy, offers a nuanced examination of how a sense of belonging, interconnectedness, and unity is manifested and reinforced through active participation in an important ritual of HBCU marching band culture, “The Tunnel.” How does one become fully human in a society that does not recognize them as fully human? How can African American youth culture express individual and collective “somebodyness” through movement and music-making in a marching band setting? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the “Magnificent Machine” of Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, this paper suggests that ways of learning and understanding what it means to be in community with others are embedded in the active processes of music and movement. Invoking the South African philosophy of “ubuntu,” which emphasizes the duality between the individual and the community, this paper considers the HBCU marching band tradition as a cultural phenomenon rooted in ancestral traditions and in the understanding of the self within and through a collective identity.