The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adopted the vocal and theatrical traditions of American musical theater as important theological tenets. As Church membership grew, leaders saw how the genre could help define the faith and wove musical theater into many aspects of Mormon life. Jake Johnson merges the study of belonging in America with scholarship on voice and popular music to explore the surprising yet profound link between two quintessentially American institutions. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mormons gravitated toward musicals as a common platform for transmitting political and theological ideas. Johnson sees Mormons using musical theater as a medium for theology of voice—a religious practice that suggests how vicariously voicing another person can bring one closer to godliness. This sounding, Johnson suggests, created new opportunities for living. Voice and the musical theater tradition provided a site for Mormons to negotiate their way into middle-class respectability. At the same time, musical theater became a unique expressive tool of Mormon culture.| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Prologue Introduction: Vicarious Voices 1. "Come, Listen to a Prophet's Voice, and Hear the Word of God": The Voice and Mormon Theatricality 2. Promised Valley, Integration, and the Singing Voice 3. Exoticized Voices, Racialized Bodies: Lineage and Whiteness on Stage 4. "I've Heard That Voice Before": Reprising the Voice in Sacred Time 5. Voice Interrupted: Book of Mormon and the Failed Voice of Correlated Mormonism Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index Back cover | Finalist: Best Book of Criticism, Association of Mormon Letters, 2019-2020 — Association of Mormon Letters
|Jake Johnson is an assistant professor of musicology in the Wanda L. Bass School of Music at Oklahoma City University.