Reading a terrific book that examines the work and lives of eight American roots female singers and songwriters: Lucinda Williams, Julie Miller, Victoria Williams, Michelle Shocked, Mary Gauthier, Ruthie Foster, Elizabeth Cook, and Abigail Washburn. Hight has a degree in Divinity. In the chapter on Victoria Williams who sometimes speaks in tongues, she compares jazz scat singing and speaking in tongues:

Williams is not the only one to make the comparison between scatting and tongues. Scholars of African American culture Stephen J Casmier and Donald H. Matthews classify both as "non-mimetic" discourse, meaning it goes beyond the bounds of the literal and realistic. With specifically African American expression in mind, they explain that the non-mimetic "involves its beholder, overcomes alienating conventions and human banality, undermines hegemonies and invokes creativity, the sublime, presence and spirituality." Harvey Cox, in his apology fo the vitality and relevance of contemporary Pentecostalism, suggests tongues speaking is "primal speech" that breaks free from the constrictions of middle-class, mainline Protestant Western Christianity: "In an age of bombast, hype, and doublespeak...the first Pentecostals learned to speak--and their successors still speak--with another voice, a language of the heart."