Spencer Kimball's Record Collection: Essays on Mormon Music

Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2020. First paperback edition. Paperback. New. 232 pp including index. Octavo [22.8cm]. Pictorial paper wraps with light tan and black lettering. From Publisher: At times jubilant, at times elegiac, this set of ten essays by music historian Michael Hicks navigates topics that range from the inner musical life of Joseph Smith to the Mormon love of blackface musicals, from endless wrangling over hymnbooks to the compiling of Mormon folk and exotica albums in the 1960's. It also offers a brief memoir of what happened to LDS Church President Spencer Kimball's record collections and a lengthy, brooding piece on the elegant strife it takes to write about Mormon musical history in the first place. There are surprises and provocations, of course, alongside judicious sifting of sources and weighing of evidence. The prose is fresh, the research smart, and the result a welcome mixture of the careful and carefree from Mormonism's best-known scholar of musical life.