The Spirit in the Sky
The Power of Music In Our Search for Graceland
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:1st Oct '26
£20.00
This title is due to be published on 1st October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Short bios of seventeen iconic musicians showing how popular music influences the search for spirituality and helps reveal the transcendent.
Spirit in the Sky explores a mosaic of influential artists as he constructs a spirituality of pop, rock, soul, and R&B music and guides readers to be attentive to their souls and questions by listening to music with an ear for the voice of God.
Short bios of seventeen iconic musicians–from Dylan to Van Morrison to Tracy Chapman–showing how popular music influences the search for spirituality and helps reveal the transcendent.
Drawing on more than five decades of attentive listening, Jeff Crosby explores how popular music has functioned as a form of “general revelation”—a way listeners encounter questions of God, purpose, justice, suffering, and hope beyond formal religious institutions. Through these engaging artist portraits, he examines how musicians across pop, rock, soul, folk, and R&B have articulated spiritual longing, wrestled with faith and doubt, and offered listeners imaginative resources for navigating their own interior lives. Equal parts memoir, popular music criticism, and spiritual inquiry, the book invites readers to practice “deep listening” as a formative discipline. Each chapter concludes with curated playlists and recommended records that extend the conversation beyond the page.
The artists range from globally celebrated figures, including Paul Simon, George Harrison, Marvin Gaye, Pink Floyd, Mavis Staples and the Staple Singers, to influential but less widely recognized voices such as Judee Sill, Mickey Newbury, Laura Nyro, Brooks Williams, and Chris Rea. Each chapter blends cultural history, lyrical interpretation, and personal reflection, showing how these artists’ work emerged from particular social, political, and religious contexts while continuing to speak powerfully to contemporary listeners. Crosby's deeply moving reflections suggest that soulful, attentive listening to music, whatever the genre, can open paths toward greater clarity, compassion, and grace.
Jeff Crosby's writing is spacious, inviting readers to recover from their own lives the times music helped them over rough spots, propelled them toward greater insights, led them toward joy. At another level, Crosby, by his own admission, is a spiritual seeker who struggles with doubt and ambiguity while also chafing at the certainties of religious dogma. Over and over he tells us how music has instead helped him to embrace mystery, to be a quester and questioner, to—in Van Morrison's words—be 'a soul in wonder', a 'dweller on the threshold'. Crosby helps us understand that thresholds are the leading edges of spiritual growth and are surrounded by the vibrations of music that both challenge and comfort us. -- Dr. Richard R. Guzman * author of Voices and Freedoms: A History of Jazz *
ISBN: 9781538188361
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
272 pages