Review
Title: Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays on Mormon Music
Author: Michael Hicks
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Essay collection
Year of Publication: 2020
Number of Pages: 232
Binding: Paper
ISBN13: 978-1-560852865
Price: $17.95
Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters
Any reviewer of this book worth her salt must begin with the words Hicks himself laments, in his very last sentence, that he never heard from those who should certainly have said to them: Thank you. Thank you, Michael Hicks, for your work in Mormon/American/ music history. The tone, content, organization, and fun in this collection are nothing if not gratitude-worthy. Let me enthuse.
I’ve written here before about the place of the personal essay in Mormon letters (see Patrick Madden, Disparates, reviewed by Julie J. Nichols). Michael Hicks is not a personal essayist per se, the way Eugene England and Patrick Madden are. He’s a historian of music. As he makes clear in this book, he joined the church largely because its music interested him, its doctrines, and their attendant tunes so much more intriguing than those of the Southern Evangelical church he and his friends and family frequented as he was growing up. He received a DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts) from the University of Illinois and recently retired from 35 years as a professor of music at BYU. His first book, entitled Mormonism and Music: A History (1989), received awards from both the Mormon History Association and the Association of Mormon Letters, but as the final essay in the current volume makes clear, it also left a bad taste in his mouth (perhaps we should say a dissonant tune), so that his next several publications stayed clear of things Mormon, focusing on music history in America until 2015 when he dipped his toes—no, immersed himself–in these waters again with The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography, a highly acclaimed contribution to the University of Illinois Press’s “Music in America” series.
Now he has given us “a handpicked anthology of shorter pieces on music in Mormondom” (vii) that travel a chronological but idiosyncratic line from “Joseph Smith’s Favorite Songs (or Not)” to the making of the present volume itself. The tone is, by his own account, “breezy,” the content is academic—well-researched, informative, surprisingly meaty—and the fun is pervasive.
Also persuasive. It’s really only the final essay I would call “personal,” dealing as it does with the difficulties of writing about the vagaries of church topics for a church that likes its stories orthodox. But the other nine essays give a convincing overview of the multivarious roles and cross-cultural development of music enjoyment and creation in the history of our religion. It’s not just one monolithic story, by any means.
What Joseph Smith might have heard and sung…what the Brethren did to push Emma Smith’s hymnbook out of first place…how Mormons heard and saw minstrel shows…an in-depth review of the Book of Mormon musical –each of these, and the other six, individually and together make the argument that we are not a homogeneous, or perfectly harmonious, people.
Some examples:
- Contrary to Mormon mythology, Joseph did not request that John Taylor sing “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief” six times before his martyrdom at Carthage Jail.
- Contrary to Mormon mythology, Joseph “worked behind the scenes to pick hymns” with Brigham Young, Parley P. Pratt, and John Taylor for a hymnbook for the Saints in Europe even as he’d seemed to endorse Emma’s at home.
- Just like the rest of the United States, audiences in Salt Lake City greatly enjoyed minstrel shows during the mid- to late 1800s, although Hicks reports that Brigham Young objected to white performers blackening their faces because it “suggested to Young a mockery of God since dark skin was God’s curse on blacks” (83).
- And the Book of Mormon musical “scolds no one so much as those who dismiss Mormon zeal”; we should “savor this public ordeal-fest, however gritty it feels on the tongue. Because, I believe, this is sort of what God is going for” (186).
What’s “this,” you ask, in the last sentence? “…[That] truth (big ‘T’ or little ‘t’) is more than accuracy and niceness. It is, rather, what this musical so ferociously asserts about its alleged targets: ‘They tried, didn’t they? At least they did that’” (186). It’s refreshing to read these unorthodox tidbits of Mormon musical reality. Again, a hearty thank you, Michael Hicks!
Referencing and interpreting innumerable documents from throughout Mormon history—diaries, newspaper clippings, histories official and unofficial as well as musicological—other essays in this collection divulge the genealogy of both words and music to our most rousing anthem, “The Spirit of God”; discuss in depth a couple of little-known records from Mormon music history; provide insight into the complicated process of making the 1985 hymnbook (remember when it came out? Remember how you looked for old favorites on their usual pages, and they just weren’t there? Thanks, Michael Hicks, for telling us why!); and recount the amusing, human story of the eponymous record collection.
And now you can breathe after that long, convoluted sentence. But don’t breathe too long—don’t wait too many minutes—to enjoy the rhythms and beats of this breezy but ebullient book. You’ll learn things about Mormonism, music, and Mormon music you hadn’t realized you needed to know. And, as the Tab Choir, its members, and its bosses never did, you’ll thank Hicks for it. He deserves it.