Thanks, Joe. Hardiman helped-- he grew up in an otherwise nearly-all-black neighborhood as well as being our diocesan Scripture dude for the last decade. In that capacity, he examines ordination candidates who have not sustained their General Ordination Examinations. So he is familiaar with many possible interpretations of those very passages.
Also, we regularly hear sermons of this sort and idiom as we listen through back episodes of WFMU's Sinner's Crossroads, a vintage-black-gospel radio program that includes rare archival preaching. Tools to slow down playback can be helpful, too. But in the main, knowing what Scripture had been used as a basis for the text narrowed down the possibilities of what was being said, even with a sound glitch or two in the recording.