Pop Conference 2025

This roundtable discussion centers on the profound and lasting influence of Teresa L. Reed’s
pathbreaking, award-winning book, The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music (2004).
Reed opens her text by questioning how “the black church, once the most vehement opponent of
secular indulgence, could spawn so many celebrated performers of ‘the Devil’s music’” (Reed
7). This curiosity, born of her experience growing up in Gary, Indiana’s Open Door Refuge
Church of God in Christ, launched a groundbreaking line of inquiry. Reed’s exploration of how
the Black church — often seen as a moral and spiritual authority, yet also a site of personal and
cultural tension for Black artists — became the foundation for a reimagining of sacred and
secular relationships. Her work calls attention to how Black musicians, while shaped by religious
influences, often engage with and challenge the strict boundaries placed upon them. Reed’s
insight provided a critical framework for understanding these artists’ lives and their navigation of
sacred and secular binaries, laying the foundation for scholarly explorations that, even two
decades later, continue to grow.

Our roundtable considers how Reed’s questions and insights have expanded the field,
particularly as they apply to notable Black artists whose music, performance, and public
personas complicate simplistic readings of religious and cultural affiliations. Ambre Dromgoole
examines the genre-bending religious performances of Black women artists like Sippie Wallace,
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Nina Simone, and Alice Coltrane, each of whom embodies Reed’s “holy
profane” dynamic. Ahmad Greene-Hayes explores the Black religious self-fashioning of Little
Richard, whose boldness in style and performance made him both a celebrated and polarizing
figure. Similarly, James Howard Hill, Jr. further extends the conversation to the contested legacy
of Michael Jackson, homing in on his complex relationship with Black religious traditions and
his own self-styled, genre-defying spirituality. These artists are not only musical innovators but
also figures who subverted expected norms. They have challenged misrepresentation and
misunderstanding, crafted a performance of interiority that melded personal and public devotion,
and negotiated complex histories of family, abuse, and trauma within Black (sacred) music.

Through this lens, we observe how each artist, while situated within or in proximity to
marginalized religious communities like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists,
and/or Pentecostals, wrestled with these traditions as sites of both inspiration and heartbreak.
Our inquiry builds on Reed’s legacy, emphasizing the “powerful connection between the holy
and the profane in the black-American psyche,” by paying close attention to these artists’ sonic,
sartorial, religious, and gendered performances. These musicians were rule breakers, genre-
benders, stylistic innovators, and culture bearers who engaged with religious traditions not only
as sources of theological meaning but as spaces where creativity flourished even under
constraint. Reed’s work, therefore, remains foundational to the field as we seek to further
examine how Black artists navigate and reframe their religious identities, thereby contributing to
a rich, ongoing dialogue about Black spirituality, culture, and self-expression.