From Infinite World
The Sound of the Hammond Organ and the Tragedy of AIDS in the Black Church
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Pub Date Dec 1 2026 | Archive Date Nov 30 2026
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Description
An innovative work that explores the relationship between the Black Church, the Hammond organ, and the musicians that bring it to life.
The Hammond organ has long distinguished the Black Church. Masters of the instrument, often Blackqueer men, invented and advanced gospel music, pioneered new modes of worship, and helped define black life in the twentieth century. But when the AIDS crisis struck, churches vociferously rejected all forms of queerness, even as musicians grew ill, rumors spread, and people died. Drawing on years of experience as a preacher, choir director, and organist, award-winning visual artist and scholar Ashon Thomas Crawley combines personal history and cultural analysis to tell an urgent story about how AIDS fundamentally changed gospel music and the sound of the church.
From Infinite World immerses readers in the history of this pivotal instrument. Crawley profiles its inventor, a white supremacist named Laurens Hammond, and describes the vicious lawsuits fought over the organ’s unique sound. He also introduces little-known but foundational figures in the church and black life, such as Reverend Clarence Cobbs of Chicago and his First Church of Deliverance, where Black Gospel flourished alongside Blackqueer life in fascinating and complex ways. And he explores his own experience as a Blackqueer church musician learning the power of the Hammond organ even as a generation of elders perished in silence. A major work of scholarship and a deeply vulnerable performance of creative nonfiction, Crawley’s lyrical work offers a captivating new portrait of the Black church as a site of refuge and rejection for Blackqueer genius.
About the Author: Ashon Thomas Crawley is a professor of religious studies and African American and African studies at the University of Virginia. He is also a visual and sound artist, and an award-winning writer. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Advance Praise
"Through historical revisioning juxtaposed with his own personal story of sexuality and the church, Ashon Thomas Crawley redefines Black queer modernism as a social and musical force propelled by revolutionary coming together of holiness and electricity itself." -Sarah Schulman
"From Infinite World is a revelation. Made up of a collage of captivating and intersecting stories, this book offers a new vision of twentieth-century black life and music, one in which queerness necessarily moves from margin to center. It is brilliant and fascinating, gorgeously written, impeccably researched, and unforgettable. Each life, in Ashon Thomas Crawley’s capable hands, is both precious and instructive. He attends to the artistry, imagination, and hearts of his subjects, providing a kind of loving care in the memory work of historic writing that they often did not receive in life but deserve in abundance. Outstanding." -Imani Perry
"Meticulously researched and lovingly written, Ashon Thomas Crawley’s latest work blends the intimacy of memoir with the impact of a decades-spanning epic. An indispensable reckoning within the Black church and the larger culture lives in these pages, highlighting histories that are personal, collective, queer, and unsung." -Deesha Philyaw
"Singular. Incisive. . . . Ashon Thomas Crawley, both scholar and seer, takes us to the site of the Hammond organ and reveals it as a portal to Black queer grief, artistry, and defiance across history and in the shadows of the AIDS crisis. From Infinite World spares us neither intimacy nor rigor as we spiral down into the artifact that has so formed Black collective interiority, and meet at last the stories of the artists, the church, and the many patterns of homophobia and antiblackness that have sought to diminish us.”" -Cole Arthur Riley
"A searing, revelatory, and utterly captivating meditation on a century of queer leadership and ambivalence in the Black church. At once scholarly and bracingly personal, this book uncovers the profound contribution Black queer preachers, organists, and singers made to gospel music, and wrestles with the awful consequences of their rejection in the wake of AIDS." -George Chauncey
"There is nothing like this book. Ashon Thomas Crawley takes the genesis of an instrumen, and keeps digging and cracking and conjuring until we’re left with queer histories, celebratory eulogies, the brutal architecture of the AIDS crisis, the messy politics of a people’s faith practice—and does it with humor and joy and sadness and rigor and bone-rattling terror." -Damon Young
"From Infinite World will remind you why the destroyers never wanted us reading, writing, and theorizing. This book, and brain and imagination responsible for it, are absolutely staggering. Ashon Thomas Crawley is a wonder here. The work is clear, innovative, and booming, yet the prose is liquid enough to get into the intellectual cracks only Crawley can fill. This book will make you proud to be a reader." -Kiese Laymon
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781324036999 |
| PRICE | $35.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 512 |