King’s Vibrato: Modernism, Blackness and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr.
“In this ambitious and accomplished book, Maurice O. Wallace takes Martin Luther King Jr. as a point of departure into a textured analysis of the aural exorbitance of black cultural history. At once thoroughly researched and theoretically deft, King’s Vibrato offers a new vocabulary and a new set of questions for black sound studies. By engaging the social, cultural, and historical determinants that contributed to King’s way of sounding, Wallace’s treatment of King as exemplary and emblematic of general tendencies within post-Emancipation African American culture is a crowning achievement.”
–Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production
“In this personal, thoughtfully written, and deeply insightful book, Maurice O. Wallace helps us to further understand and appreciate Martin Luther King Jr.’s extraordinary contributions to American culture and black life. Off these pages leaps a version of King that kept on honing his craft to become both a trumpet of America’s conscience and a sonic tributary for black America. This field-changing work greatly adds to our knowing and hearing King, a voice that we still desperately need.”
“In this ambitious and accomplished book, Maurice O. Wallace takes Martin Luther King Jr. as a point of departure into a textured analysis of the aural exorbitance of black cultural history. At once thoroughly researched and theoretically deft, King’s Vibrato offers a new vocabulary and a new set of questions for black sound studies. By engaging the social, cultural, and historical determinants that contributed to King’s way of sounding, Wallace’s treatment of King as exemplary and emblematic of general tendencies within post-Emancipation African American culture is a crowning achievement.”
“King’s Vibrato provides the opportunity to listen to and hear black cultural history through the ears of Maurice O. Wallace.”
“King’s Vibrato is a commendable entry into the growing discourse around history, blackness, and aesthetics, and will be of particular interest to historians of American religion looking for ways to further develop the kinds of subjects available for this sort of inquiry—in this case, the sound of an individual’s voice. This book has relevance, too, for scholars of African American history interested in an innovative look at a familiar subject.”
“The achievement of Maurice O. Wallace’s superb King’s Vibrato is that it allows us to understand King’s epochal abilities beyond the singularity of King himself. . . . Wallace’s focus on sound lets us understand King’s celebrated orations as collaborations between King, his audiences, and the physical environments in which they met. King’s Vibrato goes into intricate detail about how various churches were designed and built with sonic effects in mind.”
“Wallace’s tome is a compelling distillation of the Black modern life that produced King’s sound. As he plumbs the depths of the spiritual, spatial, and sonic landscape of King’s vibrato, Wallace brings to bear a bevy of interdisciplinary modes of critique to make sense of Black modern life’s infrangible links to one of the world’s most recognizable voices.”
“Wallace’s work provides a transformative view of a twentieth-century Black modernism that sounds from even the photographs of the era. Wallace’s nuanced discussion of these aspects intervenes in conventional discourses of religion, rhetoric, and Black cultural history. . . .”