Chances are that you know many musicians. But among these musicians, it’s also likely that few—if any—are organists. Weighing in at hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of pounds, organs are not especially easy to transport. Nor are they particularly in vogue among today’s youth. But for Chase Castle (Kingdon Fellow, 2025–2026), the organ has always been a fact of life.
Castle grew up in a musical family, with an Americana singer-songwriter father and an uncle who owned a music store. Having grown up in a fundamentalist Baptist tradition, Castle learned to play the Hammond organ as a teenager, even going on to earn a conservatory degree in organ performance. To be sure, it was not merely his particular religious upbringing that led him to the organ, but also the properties of the instrument itself. “I often joke that I chose the organ because it’s always the loudest instrument in the room!” Castle mused. “That’s not entirely wrong, but what really hooked me was the palette of sounds available. It’s like having an orchestra at your fingertips.”
For Castle, music, religion, and scholarship are deeply intertwined. To take the first two, Castle has played the organ for nearly every protestant domination there is. His favorite part of church music? Hymn playing. “Many organists dread it because the variables so unpredictable (we don’t have as much control over how folks in the pews sing than we do over choirs and cantors),” Castle noted. “But I like it for that reason. Experimenting with registrations, adding interludes, improvising over the congregation, that’s what I love most.”
For those who are familiar with Castle’s research, it may not come as a surprise that he takes a special liking to hymn playing. After all, both his dissertation and current book project place gospel hymns front-and-center. The latter, entitled The Gospel in Black and White: Race and Popular Culture in American Hymns, offers a new history of the cultural origins of gospel music in the United States. “Gospel scholarship historically starts in the twentieth century and segregates Black and white performance traditions,” Castle explained. “My book extends further back to show how the genre emerged from racial contact, print culture, and musical discourse between 1875 and 1915.”
Much like his appreciation for music, Castle’s scholarly interests grew out of his religious upbringing. “In many ways I’ve been circling the project my whole life,” Castle reflected. “Over the years of singing and playing hymns, I became fascinated by the unseen sociality within the [gospel] genre: texts and tunes that circulate, accrue meanings, and mediate identities and politics.” This fascination came in many stages: as a teenager, Castle was so obsessed with the gospel composer Fanny Crosby that he named his dog ‘Crosby.’ Castle then did his graduate training at the University of Pennsylvania, where, in the midst of rising racial tensions during the Black Lives Matter movement, he worked with historic Black congregations and learned how Black gospel performance contrasted with the southern gospel of his childhood yet functioned similarly in devotional and ritual life.
Now at the IRH, Castle continues to work on this project, though he has since departed from his dissertation’s 1840–1900 focus in order to center the book in post-Reconstruction racial politics of gospel production and performance. Having presented his research at a Monday seminar relatively early in the year, Castle is already benefitting from his time at the Institute, and is especially grateful for feedback from Brittney Edmonds (Resident Fellow, 2025–2026), who encouraged him to consider the relevance of vaudeville to his project. “Although vaudeville peaked slightly after my core period, the through-lines between revivalism and variety entertainment are tangible, especially the shared racial logics of American popular culture,” Castle found. “I’m tracing those connections more explicitly as I continue working on the manuscript.”
Though only halfway through his fellowship, Castle has already found a scholarly community at UW–Madison. In late October, he gave a Brown Bag talk for the Religious Studies Program entitled “Always Awakened: Gospel Hymns and the Spectacle of American Revivalism, 1875-1900.” This talk was a real treat for religious studies scholars, who typically are not formally trained in music. At the same time, music scholars had much to learn from the material Castle presented—”Music scholars don’t often linger on questions of belief or religious identity,” Castle noted. In these ways, he hopes that he can be an intermediary between music scholarship and religious studies.
As a full-year fellow, it was certainly worth it for Castle to bring his books to Madison. It was not feasible, however, to bring an organ. But this did not stop Castle from practicing while here—he has access to the organ at Grace Church, a short walk from his residence. This is in addition to the electric piano that he brought to Madison, which is just as much a research necessity as his books are. “I need to hear how the hymns sound and feel them under my fingers on the keyboard,” Castle explained. “My research addresses phenomenology, affect, and materiality, so the performance aspect is important.”
Castle’s fall semester was heavy on research travel, but in the spring, he’s looking forward to staying put in Madison. To this end, he’s taking recommendations for music venues in Madison. To those readers with suggestions for a Madison music bucket list: Castle’s inbox is open!