I grew up in Los Angeles, found my way to Chicago and London, spent a tough and beautiful decade in North Carolina, and then landed in, of all places, a small Kentucky town called Berea, where I taught happily at the college for more than a decade. I’ve moved once again, and these days you can find my family and me reveling in the glorious colors of our first western Massachusetts fall.
I tumbled into writing religious history on a summer day many years ago when I casually took a cassette off a shelf loaded down with them, a cassette that carried the voices of a clutch of old-time Baptists, voices I'd never heard before, voices whose singing in that unexpected moment struck me dead. That's how I remember it. Of course, a proper historian would explain that it didn't happen quite that way, that one might trace the roots of my interest in religious experience back in time, that it all had begun long before I pressed "play" on that summer day. That historian would be correct, of course, but they would miss something too, miss that ineffable moment when music floats in the air and changes the world.