From Rubin Lacy and Elihue Brown to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesse Jackson, black preachers have drawn upon the intense emotional power of oral chanted sermons. Bruce Rosenberg explores the structure, themes, and expressive art of this uniquely American form of preaching. At the same time he illuminates its compositional kinship with other inspired oral-formulaic traditions, such as those that produced Beowulf and the Homeric epics.

For this revised edition of The Art of the American Folk Preacher, Rosenberg has added new material on the genre and aesthetics of the sermon and has refined his discussion of the oral-formulaic theory. The annotated transcriptions of selected sermons that he recorded in the South and Southwest in the late 1960s include two that appear here for the first time.