Teddy Burgh Blog

Hello everyone! I’m excited to let you know that my new book, Is God Funky or What? has dropped! It’s available at Peter Lang Publishing and Amazon.com.

Check out some of the reviews:

“Anyone who loves black popular music will find this work to be a masterful blend of
scholarship, memoir, and nostalgia. Told with warmth and humor, Theodore W. Burgh cites
his own musical coming-of-age to argue that secular forms, including jazz, R&B, soul, and hiphop,
have the capacity to trigger experiential outcomes that are decidedly spiritual in nature.
He shows how this ostensibly secular music functions as sacred ritual, embellishing and
intensifying the kinds of moments that, for many, shape and articulate black identity. Is God
Funky or What? is another fine example of black music scholarship boldly situated within the
telling of first-person narrative.”
—Teresa L. Reed, Professor of Music at the University of Tulsa and
author of The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music
and The Jazz Life of Dr. Billy Taylor

“Theodore W. Burgh gets down into an idea we’ve all had some kind of intuition about: the
notion that the sacred and secular elements of black music are branches from the same tree.
On pages of revelations braided together with an easygoing tone, this spiritual man explores
what it is about the funk that puts that hump in yo’ rump. With in-depth interviews, on-point
analysis, and his own personalized musical experiences across the black musical spectrum,
Burgh tells us all how to party on the one with ‘The One’!”
—Rickey Vincent, author of Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of The One