Holy Brotherhood

Challenging the idea of Eastern Europe as an isolated haven for folk culture, this is the first book to look at the musical results of conversions that Romani (Gypsy) people are making worldwide to the Pentecostal religion. Centering on a group of congregations in Hungary, Barbara Rose Lange details how a unique genre of Gypsy gospel music has developed, and how it coexists with music promoted by missionaries past and present. Hungarian Protestants created multiple ideologies and texts, around Anglo-American gospel hymn tunes, but Gypsy song addresses the divine more intimately. Lange describes how believers inflect the songs with personal meaning in performance, and how as a result, they resist the pressures of Christian missions and their music.

Demonstrating how Pentecostal and Evangelical religion, along with its music, illustrates a larger transnational relationship with the U.S. that spans at least a century, Lange argues that Pentecostals adopted the multiethnic character of the early U.S. religion; their inclusiveness from a social and a musical standpoint has become a basis for civil rights advocacy.