Come Go With Me – Teddy Pendergrass and the Ecstatic Trajectories of Black Musical Performance

This paper explores the religious biography and musical career of acclaimed R&B singer and sex symbol Teddy Pendergrass as a means for articulating how the entanglement of black musical and religious performances gives shape to a mutual pursuit of feeling, affect, intimacy, and ecstasy. By way of his 1978 “For Women Only” concert series, I argue that Pendergrass enacts a contemporary reiteration of the black religious choreography indexed by W.E.B. Du Bois’ paradigmatic framing of the preacher, the music, and the frenzy. Through the synthesis of the spiritual and performative pedagogies of black Pentecostal experience and the sonic orchestration shaped by Philadelphia International Records, Pendergrass generates a material and ritual encounter that is at once sexual and spiritual. In this way, his performative repertoire can be interpreted as a vital repository and archive for the intersecting genealogies of black religious and musical invention.