Sharlet: An essay of mine from last year’s Oxford American Southern Music Annual, “The People’s Singer,” made the cut for Da Capo Best Music Writing 2008, to be released in the beginning of October. My piece, about the forgotten folk singer Lee Hays — he wrote the words to “If I Had a Hammer” and adapted lyrics to “Goodnight, Irene” and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” — is shaped by an undercurrent of religion, the sound of the spirituals Hays secularized. I’m not sure what else in this issue touches on music and religion, but the Idolator blog has done us all a favor by tracking down the online versions of 40 of the “Honorable Mention” essays listed in the back of the book; and I’ve sifted through them to see which, for the sake of Revealerreaders, touch on the role of religion in popular music. Here’s what I found:

–The NYT‘s Bill Friskics-Warren writes on a new CD collection revealing the hidden contributions of black folklorists to the Alan Lomax canon.

Where Mr. Lomax tended to treat black vernacular music as an artifact in need of preservation, [black folklorist John Work] sought to document it as it was unfolding. Thus on “Recording Black Culture,” instead of spirituals harking back to the 19th century, we hear febrile gospel shouting set to the cadences of what soon would become rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll. Robert Gordon, who edited “Lost Delta Found” with Bruce Nemerov, cites the hot, driving piano on Mr. Work’s recording of a group of Primitive Baptist women singing a song called “I Am His, He Is Mine” as an example. “There’s nascent boogie-woogie in that music,” said Mr. Gordon.

–Apparently, Siouxsie Sioux had a new album out last year! With a gospel number! But don’t think she’s gone soft. Here’s her response to Radar‘s news that Michael Vick has found God in prison:

They ought to let Siouxsie at him. Here’s what I’d do. First, I’d shove a football up his ass. Then I’d put a very angry pussy in his underwear. And lastly I would baste him in peanut butter and throw him in a room with rabid, hungry pit bulls! Ugh, I swear I’d fucking kill him. Bastard!

–Ernest Hardy’s LA Weekly review of R&B singer Donnie’s The Daily News inspired me to buy the album, but it didn’t mention that Donnie draws deep from the gospel well for this secular soul about the social ills of America.

It’s an album meant to push Donnie beyond the throwback-soul brigade, that crowd of new-wave/old-wave R&B singers who replicate the singing and production styles of folks like Donny Hathaway (to whom Donnie sounds eerily similar, in voice and songwriting perspective), Stevie, Curtis and Marvin. Most who’ve aped the aesthetics of these icons have had no greater goal than cooking up heat-and-eat nostalgia as proof of authentic soulfulness. The irony is that by burrowing deeper into the role of social commentator, Donnie not only pulls ahead of the pack, but edges even closer to the icons.