The Origins of the "Apostle Voice"

How Music and the Spoken Word continues to shape the Mormon soundscape

illustration courtesy of Beck Seamons

So then, that Tabernacle, that singing, my ancestors welling up in me, my daddy beside me, that magnificent woman all combined with the organ and the man who played it and the man who had led her to it, and whatever passed between the organ and her passed on to me. I believed.

– Emma Lou Thayne 

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In his review of Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, Matt Wickman, a professor of English at Brigham Young University, praises the insight and intellectual force of Peter Coviello’s argument, but wonders too whether the author might have missed something vital about the lived experience of Mormonism. On Wickman’s reading, Coviello’s argument lacks a “feel for the substance of Christian experience—for any sense of what is sacred and holy and transformative and life-changing, of what compels conversion and substantive change.”

Wickman’s review came to mind because while Jared Farmer’s The Sound of Mormonism is a creative and convincing précis of the sonic history of Mormonism, it is insufficiently attentive to how amateur musicians and sentimental lyrics can nevertheless come together into something approaching holiness. Put differently, The Sound of Mormonism at times reads more like a sustained critique of Mormon history and culture than a full-bodied exploration of those things. 

Still, Farmer is a gifted scholar (his cultural and environmental history of Utah Valley, On Zion’s Mount, belongs on the bookshelf of every thoughtful Utahn), and many of his points are well-made. For instance, the book’s central insight, which is that “the international membership of the LDS Church inhabits a soundsphere defined by major network AM radio of the 1930s,” is as unexpected as it is persuasive. It turns out that the soft, simple, and sometimes cloying speech of general authorities, which Farmer aptly terms the “correlated priesthood voice,” has a precise historical origin: the Music and the Spoken Word radio program, and specifically the voice of Richard L. Evans, the program’s narrator for four decades. 

Hired at twenty-four, Evans quickly acquired a suitable voice for radio, and his knack for General American English, soft speech, and staying on script served as a model for church leaders who were born before the radio age. Previously, authority might have been communicated through a timely shout or an eye-catching gesticulation, but on the radio, such extra-rhetorical flourishes manifested as feedback or dead air. Pulpit-pounding oratory was out; ecumenical messaging delivered in the timbre of Mr. Rogers was in.

Jared Farmer argues that Richard L. Evans, the announcer for Music and the Spoken Word from 1929 to 1971, “pioneered the professional sound of prophecy.”

Evans’s radio voice paved the way for David O. McKay, the white-maned and amiable face of the faith who did so much to make Mormonism respectable, restrained, and American. And if President McKay was the visage of the faith’s successful rebranding as a bulwark of patriotism and family values, then the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was the voice. In the decades following World War II, Farmer writes, the choir was a “consensus symbol of Americanism.” The choir mourned the death of President Franklin Roosevelt via CBS broadcast, sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” all over the United States and Europe, and performed at the White House and on The Ed Sullivan Show; Life magazine called Music and the Spoken Word a “national institution.” 

But, as Farmer documents in one of the book’s most important chapters, the choir’s status as a red-white-and-blue institution was thrown into question by church leaders’ resistance to the civil rights movement, as well as by the choir’s well-earned reputation as a white choir. In 1967, a Black woman passed the choir’s audition but was told, falsely, that the choir was not accepting applications. The following year, when white supremacist George Wallace visited Salt Lake at the behest of Ezra Taft Benson, the choir serenaded him with patriotic anthems. Almost overnight, the choir had become a symbol not of Americanism, but of “white religious nationalism.” 

Such blots on Mormonism’s sonic record notwithstanding, Farmer’s analysis at times borders on the uncharitable, as I mentioned at the outset. To be clear, I agree with and even applaud his chapters on the silencing of Black, indigenous, and female voices; Latter-day Saints have perpetrated grave and unchristian injustices, and saying as much is necessary, salutary even. Still, it seems to me that there’s a poignancy and sincerity to Latter-day Saint faith—the “substance of Christian experience” alluded to by Professor Wickman—that Farmer fails to capture. 

For instance, it’s easy enough to snicker at dubious claims of the Tabernacle’s “perfect” acoustics or the strained profundity of General Conference addresses—Farmer suggests that general authorities pause so much to compensate for their “mundane” words—but such snickering doesn’t begin to grasp what the the sounds of Mormonism have meant to generations of church members. 

Visitors to the Tabernacle have likely heard all that Farmer imagines they have—a white and right-wing-coded choir with a penchant for patriotism and pablum—but more than a few of them have heard something else as well, something ineffable, electrifying, and reassuring. And sure, many General Conference addresses may lack rigor and authenticity, but a fair number strike me as wise, moving, and true.

So while Farmer, who is not a practicing Latter-day Saint, has no obligation to believe, as I do, that the sounds of Mormonism are, ultimately, the sounds of the gods, he does have a responsibility to make sense of why so many have found those sounds sacred, and in that task, I think, he comes up short.

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In other Utah news

• The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) has proposed a light-rail (TRAX) project to connect Draper and Lehi, also serving to connect future development in Bluffdale in and around the site of the old prison. UDOT and the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) have indicated that light rail is the preferred transit mode for this project, even though a bus rapid transit (BRT) project would have been significantly cheaper as UDOT and UTA believe light rail would attract higher ridership and better anchor long term growth. (KSL)

• Fast-tracked due to the Trump administration's “energy emergency” designation, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has accelerated the approval of an oil-loading facility in Utah’s Uinta Basin. The proposed expansion would increase the facility's capacity by 30,000 barrels per day, enabling drillers to produce more oil, and increasing the “size and frequency of oil-hauling trains through Colorado.” This project serves to illustrate that “energy dominance” really only means doubling down on environmentally and socially costly oil and gas projects. (The Land Desk)

• After the Senate Parliamentarian ruled against inclusion of a public lands sell-off provision in the reconciliation bill, Senator Mike Lee revised the provision to remove Forest Service land from possible sell-off and instead target BLM land within 5 miles of population centers (how “population center” is defined is unclear). In response to broad backlash to the proposal, Senator Lee said he is “just getting started.” (Salt Lake Tribune)

• UDOT is planning on spending $195 million to widen I-15 from two to three lanes along a three mile stretch in St. George as well as to elevate the highway to allow for two additional underpass road crossings. Although the underpasses seem beneficial and would lessen the barrier posed by I-15 on local cross-town trips (including pedestrian and bicycle trips—wait, do those exist in St. George?), the roadway widening projects begs the question—has UDOT heard of induced demand? (Salt Lake Tribune)