A Sacred Feast: Reflections on Sacred Harp Singing and Dinner on the Ground (At Table)

Citation preview

a sac r e d f e ast

At Table

A Sac|ed Feas@ Reflections on Sacred Harp Singing and Dinner on the Ground v Kathryn Eastburn

universit y of nebraska press  v  lincoln & london

© 2008 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America. All photographs taken by the author. Portions of chapter 1, “Southwest Texas,” first appeared as “A Joyful Noise,” in Texas Highways 5, no. 3 (March 2004): 52–56. Portions of chapter 3, “Henagar,” first appeared as “The Sacred Feast,” in Saveur, issue 94 ( June–July 2006): 78–89. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eastburn, Kathryn. A sacred feast : reflections on sacred harp singing and dinner on the ground / by Kathryn Eastburn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-8032-1831-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Sacred harp. 2. Cookery, American. 3. Shape-note singing — United States. I. Title. tx715.e1687 2008 641.5973 — dc22 2007032546 Set in Adobe Caslon by Kim Essman. Designed by A. Shahan.

In memory of my grandfather, Emery Alexander Carpenter, and my son, Theodore Kang Eastburn (September 26, 1984–July 29, 2007)

Eternal wisdom has prepared A soul reviving feast And bids your long appetites The rich provisions taste. “Odem (First),” #295, The Sacred Harp, Denson edition

v The earliest music in America is neither dead nor dying; it’s standing right in front of you, singing. from the liner notes to Matt and Erica Hinton’s documentary film Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp



contents



List of Illustrations  x



Introduction  xiii



1 Southwest Texas  1

Acknowledgments  xi



2 Birmingham  23



4 Seattle, Boulder, and Colorado Springs  77







3 Henagar  41

5 Hoboken  111

6 Benton to Birmingham  129



Epilogue  153



Works Cited  165



Appendix  161

Visitors to the national convention dig into dinner on the ground The dessert table Burning hickory will smoke hundreds of chickens and pork butts Smoked chickens and pork roasts

illustrations The Sacred Harp songbook xxiv

Children first experience singing shape notes at conventions Ham, green beans, turnip greens, and fried okra with picked pepper sauce

Example of Sacred Harp hymn xxv

Vegetables and casseroles lining the table at Hoboken

following p. 76

Mount Vernon Primitive Baptist Church, near Natural Bridge, Alabama

Mr. Uel Freeman Ann Beasley Ballard and her homemade banana pudding Volunteers organized and provided food for hundreds during national convention Singers fill their plates after a long morning of singing Volunteers uncover the dishes before the crowd converges for dinner Longtime friends and Sacred Harp singers Shelbie Sheppard and Charlene Wallace Shelbie and Charlene’s layered salad and a pan of golden corn muffins Deviled eggs, sliced tomatoes, pickles, and various relishes

Miss Willadeen leads a song Wakefield family members lay out their dishes for dinner on the ground A baked version of the traditional fried pie, with fruit fillings Heading out to play after a big dinner Many youngsters learn the shapes and the tunes on their grandmothers’ laps The grounds of the Shiloh Living History Museum in Springdale, Arkansas The old apothecary store where the Arkansas singers practice Lifelong singer Sydney Caldwell leads the Southwest Arkansas group

acknowledgments My gratitude goes out to the Sacred Harp singers across the country who talked to me about their experiences, shared their recipes, and welcomed me into the hollow square. The many scholars who have written so eloquently about Sacred Harp, especially Buell Cobb, deserve a place in music history. Thank you, Ladette Randolph and Heather Lundine at University of Nebraska Press, for believing in the idea of the book, and thanks to the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow for giving me a place to complete it. My mother and children watched with interest as I became a Sacred Harp singer and helped me believe I could write about it. To them, I send out blessings and a halle, hallelujah.

int|oduction

I came to Sacred Harp singing through the back door of journalistic inquiry, but didn’t stay in the back row for long. Notebook in hand, I was to be a reporter, an observer taking notes, listening and collecting names, learning what I could about this very old, traditional form of American religious music. It took about half of one day, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a tiny Texas church among men and women whose voices grew stronger over six hours of singing together, to join in the four-part harmony and become one of them. The community of Sacred Harp singers is a welcoming group, patient with the uninitiated and willing to take in complete strangers. That is just one of the things I have come to love about the tradition and those who practice it. I grew up in the Southern Baptist church in Kentucky and Tennessee, and adored, as a child, the spirited congregational singing in my grandfather’s small church where I was the piano player. I loved the quiet legato of “Just As I Am,” the invitational hymn we sang over and over, as I rolled chords and crested tinkling glissandos until someone finally walked up

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front to rededicate his life to Jesus, or better yet, to be saved. Even more, I loved the dramatic ballad we sang on Easter Sunday, with its rolling bass and soaring melody: Up from the grave he arose With a mighty triumph o’er his foes . . . He arose, he arose Hallelujah! Christ arose. This was music that told a story. It was dramatic; the harmonies were strong. Anyone with a lick of musical appreciation couldn’t just sit and listen to it; it demanded singing along. I grew up, married, had a family, left the South and fell away from the church until, finally, I attended services only occasionally in my adopted home, Colorado Springs. When I did go to church, whether Methodist or Episcopal, singing was largely relegated to the choir, or to a visiting rock band or solo performer, and was more a breast-beating performance than the act of harmonious group praise I remembered. The congregation was invited to sing along only on the most familiar and mundane of hymns, procedurals really, like the offertory or the benediction. Moreover, in the town where I lived, headquarters of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and ground zero for that group’s and many other religious organizations’ political activities, going to church began to feel less like an act of praise and more like a battleground of ideas. Many evangelical ministers didn’t hesitate to instruct their Sunday morning flock on how to vote at the polls. Even the staid Episcopalians in my town were constantly embroiled in one political issue or another, usually railing against any group outside of their mainstream.

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This rubbed me wrong both as a journalist and as a Christian. I hesitated to call myself a Christian, though many of the lessons I had learned as a child had stayed with me, and the songs of the Baptist hymnal still rang strong in my ears. I didn’t want to be associated with a brand of Christianity that I felt had little to do with loving thy neighbor and everything to do with condemning anyone who believed differently. Visiting a church was like crossing a potential minefield, but visiting the church music of my childhood, when and if I could find it, continued to be a happy retreat. I still had the little spinet I had learned to play as a young girl. Occasionally, I would pull out the hymnal and play “Shall We Gather at the River,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” or “In the Garden.” I gravitated toward tunes that were my grandfather’s favorites when he was still alive, songs I’d played for him during the last months of his life. Beyond the delight he got from my four children, who were very young when Grandaddy lived with us, there was little I could give him to brighten his life except for banana pudding three meals a day and a recital of hymns played in the afternoons while the babies slept. Grandaddy died, the children grew up, we moved to Colorado, and I became a newspaper columnist. One week, I decided to write about those days playing and singing hymns at the Victory Baptist Chapel in Bowling Green, Kentucky. As I researched Baptist hymns, Internet searches kept turning up the name of prolific eighteenth-century British lyricist Isaac Watts, and just as frequently, the mysterious and lovely title “Sacred Harp” appeared on the screen. Searching a bit more, I came across a Web site, www.fasola. org, that introduced me to shape-note singing, a method of musical notation applied to traditional hymns brought over from England and taught to rural American church congre-

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gations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During the early 1900s, New England tunesmiths turned out volumes of tunes written in shape notes, and itinerant teachers spread across the eastern seaboard to the Deep South to teach the music to rural congregations. Shape-note singing’s most famous songbook was The Sacred Harp, first published in Georgia in the 1840s and continually updated and published in new editions till 2003, the year I first began learning about it. The subtitle of The Sacred Harp enthusiastically heralds it as “The Best Collection of Sacred Songs, Hymns, Odes, and Anthems Ever Offered the Singing Public for General Use.” I wrote my column in praise of hymns and group singing, and continued reading about shape-note singing. Though the peculiar musical notation was unfamiliar to me, some of the lyrics and some of the melodies were not. It was like reading an account of another person’s trip to a place I had once visited but had nearly forgotten. I read accounts of singings that hinted at the same uplifting power of the hymns of my childhood. Then I heard that Sacred Harp singing would be included as part of the musical soundtrack, produced by T-Bone Burnett, for the film Cold Mountain, due to be released that same year. Armed with the journalistic hook I needed, timeliness, I sought a writing assignment that would get me a look (and a listen) at this thing called Sacred Harp singing, up close and in person. Texas Highways magazine answered my call and gave me an assignment. In the spring of 2003, I attended my first Sacred Harp singing at Bethel Primitive Baptist Church in McMahan, Texas, a rural crossroads so small it doesn’t even appear on

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the Texas map. I maintained a degree of journalistic handsoff objectivity through the first few songs, then felt the spirit of shared song enter my sleeping heart. I picked up a songbook and began to sing along, the lump in my throat melting, warmth spreading to the tips of my fingers and toes as the day passed. It was difficult at first, because these singers called the notes by their shapes the first time they sang a melody — triangles were fa; circles, sol; squares, la; and diamonds, mi. As the song was sung in shapes, it sounded like confused jibber-jabber. Each of the four harmonic sections — trebles, altos, tenors, and basses — sang from a different line on the printed page. Trained to sight-read music, I could follow the tune on the tenor line but couldn’t easily call out the names of the shape notes. My eyes jumped from the tenor line to the lyrics, losing their place again and again, crossing over in confusion. We sat in what is called the hollow square, the tenors facing the altos, the trebles facing the basses, with an open space in the center where a volunteer leader called out the number of a song, then quickly began singing, waving one arm up and down to keep time. There were no breaks between songs, just a quick announcement of the page number; my beginner’s mind was overly stimulated. Some tunes were easier than others, written in 4/4 time, slow and straightforward. Others were raucous, with incredibly quick turns and odd harmonies that left us breathless. But the sound that emerged in this small church, every square inch crammed with warm bodies, was magnificent, unlike anything I’d ever heard. One moment it sounded as plaintive as a winter storm; the next moment it mimicked a whirlwind in the desert. Sometimes it sounded like child’s play and other times it sounded like the gravest of funeral marches.

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It didn’t sound angelic and unearthly like formal, classical choir music. It was distinctly of this Earth, and as human as blood, sweat, and tears. Once the song had been sung through in shapes, the lyrics were added to the melody — lyrics rightfully called poetry by many traditional singers. The singers’ faces radiated concentration, shared amusement, and frequently reflected joy. The collective experience was of a group successfully completing a difficult joint effort, an experience that had become rare to me in everyday life. I was hooked. And to cement my interest, lunchtime rolled around with a feast as grand as any I could recall, including those served at family reunions on Aunt Erma’s farm when I was a girl. Rows of dishes — f ried chicken, baked beans, deviled eggs, three varieties of green beans, and at least as many versions of potato salad — were lined up on long tables in the crowded church kitchen, flanked by smaller tables filled with sweating cups of iced tea. At the end of the table, women who reminded me of my great-aunts with their pillowed bosoms and downy cheeks, fussed over a banquet of pies and cakes. Effortlessly, the line of at least a couple hundred hungry souls rolled past the long table, filling plates and rattling the close air with small talk. The food had appeared as if by magic at noon, and was warm and tantalizing. I crunched down on the stuff of memory. Arriving at a Sacred Harp singing, then, and participating in the American tradition of all-day singing and dinner on the ground was down-home glory for me. Back home in Colorado, I set about learning more. I came across folk historian Alan Lomax’s recollection of dinner on the ground at a 1959 singing in Fyffe, Alabama, where he and a sound crew recorded the singing for posterity: “all adjourned to the long picnic tables set up under the post-oak

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trees. Lunch was fried chicken, ham, potato salad, hot biscuits and corn pone, and every kind of cake and pie known to cooks of northern Alabama. I think the congregation enjoyed seeing us stuff ourselves almost as much as they did our struggles to mike their lively triple-forte choralizing.” My experience forty-four years later had been precisely the same. My Texas hosts took pleasure in seeing the extreme pleasure they had given me with their offerings of home-cooked food and the challenge of untethered, multi-tonal, complex harmonic singing. The Sacred Harp tradition appeared to be one that hadn’t changed much over the years. Since my first singing experience in 2003, I’ve traveled to many other Sacred Harp singings, bringing along my journalist’s curiosity, and more, my heart’s hunger to do it again, to feel the rush of joining in song with a room full of likeminded spirits. I’ve read scholarly articles and meticulous histories of the music. I’ve learned about the revisions of the Sacred Harp songbook over two centuries, and about those pioneers who composed tunes and taught Sacred Harp to others. The twenty-first century singing community, I’ve found, comprises singers with choral backgrounds, folk music aficionados, musicologists, and those who were lucky enough to grow up in the tradition, who learned it at their parents’ and grandparents’ knees. Singers range from Seattle to Minneapolis; St. Louis to western Massachusetts; to deep Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. The Sacred Harp community is a relatively small but formidable group, alive despite changing times and tastes, and relatively untouched by musical fashion and trends. Novelist Lee Smith has said that, for her, religion is “an avenue to a kind of intensity I’m always after — in love, in my

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writing. I feel like we go through the world with blinders on, or earmuffs, most of the time — I want to get down to the real thing, to plug into the main socket.” Singing Sacred Harp, I feel as if I’ve plugged into a 220volt socket and the lights have come on blazing. My experience of it is distinctly religious, but free of the constraints of doctrine, judgment, and dogma. It is wholehearted and unabashed, filled with joy and despair, humbling and exalting. Indeed, though many singers don’t like to see it described as such, it is undeniably loud. Experienced choir leaders will tell you it is “open-throat” or “full-voice” singing. And it comes dressed in plain clothes. In the “Rudiments of Music” section that opens The Sacred Harp, under “Mechanics of Singing,” one will find this bit of advice: “The voice should be natural and unpretentious. The ideals of popular, art, concert and opera singing do not apply to the Sacred Harp.” It is a fiercely egalitarian tradition that welcomes everyone into its ranks, all voices great and small into its melodic mix. Musician and Sacred Harp singing teacher Tim Eriksen, who brought Sacred Harp and its contemporary practitioners to the attention of the Cold Mountain production team, and who performed much of the solo singing on the soundtrack, believes the tradition’s democratic creed is part of its greatness. “Nothing has all the symmetry and opportunity that the Sacred Harp tradition offers,” says Eriksen, referring to the full participation of all involved and the balance of the four parts. “And the fact is, it just simply sounds better when you have a bunch of regular people doing it. A singer friend from Georgia once said to me, ‘There’s a fellow in the community who just can’t hold his pitch, but it wouldn’t be a singing

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without him.’” Eriksen is quick to add that among Sacred Harp singers, he has met some of the most skilled vocalists he has ever known. Lomax reflected similarly on the 1959 Fyffe, Alabama, singing: [T]here were no stars, just as there was no prettying up of the voice. The atmosphere was totally democratic, all participants displaying confidence in their natural voices, each adding his own embellishments and variations to the written part. This combination of musical skill and passionate individualism creates a thrilling choral texture, far from the studied polish of a classically admired blend, but nonetheless an original and fascinating way of performing counterpoint. Beyond the profound musical experience and the democratic nature of the tradition, the Sacred Harp community of singers offers a unique fellowship and kinship, based on common experience within the hollow square but extending into everyday life. Minneapolis singer Keith Willard established the fasola.org Web site and developed an e-mail list designed to accommodate announcements of upcoming singings around the country and to answer questions about Sacred Harp. The list also links wired singers instantly in the event of a family crisis, illness, or death. Frequently, a message goes out from a lifelong singer needing prayers; or a surviving friend or family member of a newly deceased singer will post a call for singers to gather at the funeral home, the memorial service, or graveside to sing a few tunes. In the short time that I’ve been singing, I’ve met numerous singers who’ve lost loved ones and asked for support over the

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e-mail list. Most recently, an Iowa singer’s ninety-four-yearold mother died in her home, and she sent out her thanks to singers for their support over the years as she took care of her aged parent. Along with probably hundreds of others, I sent my condolences by e-mail. She responded, “It was a privilege to spend the time with her and to walk with her to the edge of the river, and she set a good example for me when it’s my turn to make that journey. “This singing family of ours is a wonderful comfort, and I thank you for writing.” A few weeks after her mother’s death, that same singer posted an announcement of a new online service for Sacred Harp singers, a Web site (http://partinghand.pbwiki.com/) where singers can post the names and numbers of the songs they’d like to be sung at their memorials. Some of the posts give specific instructions on which verses, or how fast or slow they’d like their memorial songs to be sung. To arrive as an outsider and be accepted as part of this rich, caring community is a gift unlike any other I’ve known as a career-driven, overworked parent of four children in a tough, ambitious world that often values things over people. The community of singers and the act of singing have become both a musical refuge and a call to humanity. For these and many other reasons, Sacred Harp singing has become my church. Amanda Denson, an Alabama singer with a rich family tradition in Sacred Harp, reminds me and others that this music is more than a singing exercise: It is worship and it is a rich inheritance to be honored and perpetuated. She points out that in the opening pages of the songbook, these words from Jeremiah are inscribed: “Seek the old paths and walk therein.”

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All of us, says Amanda, fourth-generation singers like her as well as neophytes like me, are links in a chain that connects us with a tradition far bigger than ourselves. And if the religiosity of Sacred Harp singing seems out of reach to an occasional churchgoer, all she has to do is listen and sing with an open heart. “Our music can’t draw you in unless God touches your heart in some way,” she says, “and that’s the Holy Ghost.” To that I say, “Amen.”

The Sacred Harp songbook, 1991 Denson edition (sometimes referred to as the “red book”) has maintained its oblong shape over time to enable the pages to stay open and lay flat while a singer holds the book in one hand, leading and beating time with the other hand.

“New Britain,” better known as “Amazing Grace,” is notated like most Sacred Harp hymns, on four separate staffs. From top to bottom, the melodies written in shape notes are the treble, alto, tenor, and bass parts.

v

Chapter One



southwest texas

Let music swell the breeze And ring from all the trees Sweet freedom’s song. Let mortal tongues awake Let all that breathe partake Let rocks their silence break The sound prolong. “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” #484,  The Sacred Harp, Cooper edition

From my home in Colorado Springs, it’s about a thousand miles to McMahan, a tiny crossroads halfway between Luling and Lockhart, Texas, about an hour out of Austin. In March 2003, I approached McMahan and the 103rd annual Southwest Texas Singing Convention across a maze of state and interstate highways, past dry river beds in north Texas and roaring creeks in the center of the state, past meadows barely beginning to turn green and patches of blooming wildflowers planted in medians and along roadsides. Texas

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Highways, a colorful regional magazine published by the Texas Department of Transportation, had sent me there to report on the tradition of Sacred Harp singing, something neither they nor I knew much about beyond the rudimentary research I’d done to pitch the story. Late on a Friday afternoon I pulled into Lockhart, an attractive town of eleven thousand citizens with an ornate courthouse, beautiful turn-of-the-century homes surrounding the town center, and a worldwide reputation for excellent barbecue. Before the sun set, I drove out to McMahan at the crossroads of Farm Roads 713 and 86, and Bethel Primitive Baptist Church, small but notable in the surrounding community and in the annals of Sacred Harp singing, where on Saturday and Sunday the singing convention would be held. A strong wind blew as Tom Owen of Lockhart, a muscular man with a broomstraw moustache, and his eightythree-year-old father, Curtis Owen, prepared for the twoday singing to be held at their family’s church. Set high on a hill overlooking a hog farm in the valley below, a neat, blond-brick sanctuary built in the early 1950s had replaced a 1901 clapboard church that now served as a kitchen and dining room. To the left of the church, on the closely mown lawn, stood an outdoor tabernacle — a concrete slab with a tin roof — housing rows of picnic tables where meals were served when the weather permitted. In the center of the church lawn, a century-old mesquite tree spread its craggy branches. Father and son wiped down tables and unloaded crates of white sandwich bread from the back of Tom’s pickup. Grocery bags packed with paper towels, paper plates, and plastic

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cups were shuttled back and forth, from pickup to kitchen, as Tom and Curtis talked about their family’s history of Sacred Harp singing. “My great-grandfather moved from Dozier, Alabama, in 1893,” said Tom. “He was the first chairman of the singing convention in 1900.” “All my kids and grandkids sing Sacred Harp,” added Curtis, bent with age and neatly dressed. “It’s been in our family for over a hundred years.” I left them to their work and returned to the Plum Creek Inn in Lockhart, where ladies with professionally permed hair, dressed in polyester pantsuits, waited to hear the lounge act that night, a mariachi trio dressed in gaucho jackets, ruffled shirts and silver-tooled belts. I retired to my room to read about the Southwest Texas convention from some papers a church member had provided. In April 1900, according to the History and Record of South Union and South West Texas Sacred Harp Singing Convention, a faded document typed on a manual typewriter in 1950, a singing convention called the South Union was organized at Round Top schoolhouse in Caldwell County, Texas. The antique digest listed W. M. Owen as a member of the 1900 Round Top Singing Convention, with many Owens named thereafter in listings of attendants and officers that spanned fifty years of singings. A note from the 1901 minutes announced the noble intentions of the early organizers in the Preamble to the convention’s Constitution and by-laws: [T]o bring about a more perfect union between the lovers and users of sacred music, to revive and establish the old

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and time honored songs of Zion, cause a return to the first principles of Sacred music, kill out denominational prejudice, destroy vocal sectarianism, create a greater vocal interest among all classes and honor God with the gifts He has bestowed upon us through the theme of Sacred songs. Sacred Harp singing had spread to Texas from Alabama and Georgia in the mid-1800s and quickly became popular there, with singing schools held in many small rural congregations. Those singing schools, led by traveling teachers peddling shape-note songbooks, sometimes lasted a week or two, teaching children how to read music by the shapes, how to sing the harmonies, and how to lead and mark time. From farms tucked into rocky hills, small towns and central Texas cities, generations of Owen family singers had come back every year to sing all day at Bethel Primitive Baptist Church, bearing boxes of covered dishes, well-used songbooks, and memories of singing together. I was reminded of another account of an early-twentiethcentury Texas singing, George Pullen Jackson’s description of a convention held in Mineral Wells near the end of the Great Drought of 1930. In his landmark book, White Spirituals in Southern Uplands, Jackson observed the Texas singers: There were about two hundred of them, men, women, and children. They were all country folk, of course, though some of them lived, as I learned, in Texas cities. They were the same type, precisely, that I had met in many other Sacred Harp conventions. This was evident from their workbrowned faces and their absence of “style.” Calluses were much in evidence. If they were to be dubbed “poor whites” the term should be used to signify those people who have

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yet turned from their ancient attitudes toward life’s values and adopted the current commercially standardized ones. Jackson described a crowd of remarkably adept sight-readers whose music reached a fever pitch accented by tears and occasional shouts by day’s end. “If these people were not happy, in the best and fullest meaning of the word,” said Jackson, “then I have never seen human happiness. It is no coincidence that the Sacred Harpers’ mental picture of heaven is, as it is expressed repeatedly in their songs and as one hears them declare in conversation, prayer, and convention speeches, that of a place where they will meet again those beloved singers who have gone before, and sing again with them endlessly.” My imagination was piqued as I awaited my first experience of Sacred Harp singing. On Saturday morning, cars filled the yard of Bethel Primitive Baptist Church, and inside, the raucous sounds of homecoming filled the air. Throw pillows and knitted afghans from home were spread across the hard wooden pews. Large men dressed in pressed jeans, boots, and plaid short-sleeved shirts greeted each other with back slaps. Silver-haired women crafted comfortable nests in the pews for their grandchildren and settled down, their purses at their feet. At 9:30 a.m. sharp, the singing began after a brief opening prayer. Four groups of singers sat in folding chairs and on pews, facing inward to form a “hollow square.” The secretary of the convention called out the first leader’s name, the chairman of the convention, and he moved to the center of the square where he announced the number of the song to be sung — #218, “Mount Pleasant.”

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There is a house not made with hands Eternal and on high And here my spirit waiting stands Till God shall bid it fly . . . The tenors, forming one side of the square, sang the melody line, second staff from the bottom in their songbooks. Altos, seated directly across from the tenors, sang the line directly above. Basses, seated to the left, read from the bottom staff, and treble singers, to the right, sang the top lines. Around thirty to forty men and women of all ages filled both the tenor and treble sections; the altos were uniformly female and the basses male. The song was sung through once using only the names of the shapes — fa, sol, la, mi — then with the words. The sound that arose in the early morning air was passionate and soulful, and grew stronger with each verse. I listened in amazement as one leader after another stood up and announced the number of a new song, raised his or her hand and propelled the group forward. I was both thrilled and puzzled at the sound I heard. It was simultaneously joyful and mournful, as if an entire load of human experience was contained in the musical notation and its enthusiastic execution. Sacred Harp tunes, often written in minor keys, are notable for their haunting harmonies, and they are usually sung at full volume at a relatively quick pace. I would discover much later, after attending other conventions, that these Texas singers were notorious for the quick pace at which they pushed through the songs. They sang from the Cooper edition of The Sacred Harp, a blue book that contains a large number of tra-

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ditional folk tunes and old-fashioned hymns familiar to even lapsed Baptists like me. Several songs in, about mid-morning, a young man with closely cropped hair and a ruddy complexion stepped to the middle of the square. Shyly, he introduced his song selection, in honor of the Texas soldiers recently deployed to the war in Iraq — #484, “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Because I knew the tune, I was comfortable singing along. My country ’tis of thee Sweet land of liberty Of thee I sing. Eyes met across the square as the singers’ voices rose in unfamiliar harmonies set to the familiar tune. Operation Iraqi Freedom, set in motion by former Texas governor George W. Bush, had barely begun and I was already dreading the entry of my son, an Army reservist, into the fray. Driving across Texas, I had winced at the sight of so many American flags, feeling only dread over what they symbolized: a war that would take my son to the Middle East. The country was divided over the wisdom of the invasion, and so was I. Women and men alike dabbed their eyes as they sang the second verse in loud voices: My native country, thee Land of the noble free Thy name I love. I love thy rocks and rills Thy woods and templed hills My heart with rapture thrills Like that above.

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I scanned the faces around the square. There were no flags waving, no hands across hearts, no salutes, only people singing. I had read that Sacred Harp singing was proudly and defiantly nondenominational, and that a song’s spiritual dimension and interpretation might be different for each individual singer. At that moment, filled with a mother’s angst, a Democrat’s partisan anger, and a rational argument against the president’s actions, my heart softened against my stubborn resolve. I could love my country, sing with these people, and still have misgivings about the war. It was my country, too. We sang the third verse, and the faces told me that the words were as much about Sacred Harp singing as they were about America: Let music swell the breeze And ring from all the trees Sweet freedom’s song. Let mortal tongues awake Let all that breathe partake Let rocks their silence break Thy sound prolong. The young man exited the square smiling, and the secretary called on an officer to say a blessing for lunch, pausing to urge singers to let the elderly go through the buffet line first. I was about to experience my first dinner on the ground. Traditional singing conventions go from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. for one or two days, with an hour-long lunch at noon. Members of the host congregation provide the food, and I had read enough accounts of these dinners to know what to expect. What I didn’t know, and discovered later, was why lunch is called dinner on the ground. An experienced singer told me

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that some people refer to it as dinner on the grounds, as in church grounds, but originally the reference to the ground was literal: after singing, families would lay out quilts and arrange their baskets for dinner on the ground. We filed into the church kitchen at Bethel past a long table piled with more delights than the eye could take in. At the center of the table was a huge platter of smoked sausages, a regional specialty from nearby Lockhart. These were densely packed, all-beef sausages smoked with the abundant post oak that covered the surrounding countryside, usually served with no sauce — though there was a bowl of red stuff sitting next to the platter for those who like their sausages wet. Singers and spectators crowded around long tables inside and outside, their plates filled to spilling over with homecooked food: macaroni and fruit salads; vegetables of every shape, size and color; biscuits and cornbread; pies, cakes, and cobblers. Barbara Moore, a singer from Pearland, greeted old friends and singers from out of state. A button on her chest read, “Time spent singing is not deducted from your life.” I asked her if she sang often. “We’ve got more singing than you can shake a switch at,” she laughed, referring to the number of regular singings across Texas. She recounted how her mother, when she learned Barbara was singing Sacred Harp, hadn’t known that these singings still existed. Barbara, who is part Cherokee, said there’s evidence that her native forefathers and mothers sang Sacred Harp. Another singer interrupted her reverie with a pat on the shoulder. Barbara’s face brightened as she greeted a small, wiry woman in glasses.

10  so ut hw e st t exas

“I’m so happy to see you,” she exuded. “I heard you singing on a CD and I thought, Lord, I wish I could sing with her, and here you are!” Across the table, singing enthusiast Gaylon Powell, a round man with a cherubic face, nibbled on a chicken leg. I asked him how long he’d been singing Sacred Harp. “Two weeks before my fourth birthday, according to the Lampasas Primitive Baptist Church minutes of 1966, I led my first song,” he said. Gaylon’s mother and father, he added, were fourth-and third-generation singers, respectively. Later I would discover that in addition to being an avid singer, Gaylon is also an active Sacred Harp historian and someone instrumental in helping fledgling singing groups across the West learn the art. The minutes, I learned, are a running record of all leaders and song numbers, kept by the secretary of the singing convention. From each local singing, they are submitted to a national secretary in Alabama, who compiles an annual book listing all singings and a current directory of singers as well as a list of those who have died in the past year. Sisters Myra Smith Palmer of Garden Valley and Myrl Smith Jones of Tyler, both well into their eighties, shared stories of going to singing school when they were little girls in a small church in east Texas. Their teacher, Tom “Pappy” Denson of Alabama, was a Sacred Harp pioneer, and his descendants continue to carry on the tradition today, both as members of the Sacred Harp publishing company’s board of directors and as singers. One of them, grandson Mike Hinton, shared lunch with Myrl and Myra at McMahan, listening to tales of his famous ancestor, who died in the 1930s. “He called the girls ‘babe’ and the boys ‘son,’” said Myra,

so ut hw e st t exas  11

smiling into her potato salad. She remembered riding to singing school in Pappy Denson’s buggy. When dinner was over, the singing recommenced at a rapid pace. I settled in next to Ramona Lee of Hoboken, Georgia, as she arranged her bag, songbooks, and pillow. “Let me make my bed, as I say,” she laughed. “I’ve got so much junk.” We chatted about the singers around us. She explained that a woman to my right was from Minnesota, another couple behind us were from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and a couple in front of us were from somewhere in Colorado. Her hand moved smoothly and thoughtlessly up and down, keeping rhythm to the tunes. I could read the music of the tenor line, and so could sing the line adequately with the lyrics. But I was confounded by the shapes and found my tongue knotted when I tried to sing them aloud. Ramona told me to just keep singing and eventually it would come to me. We sang until 3:30, by which time my voice was nearly gone. Driving back to Lockhart down the country roads, I couldn’t help but say a prayer of thanks over the rocks and rills, the woods and templed hills, and a prayer for patience and wisdom for our country’s leaders. Sunday morning, the singing continued. I knew a few names by now and was welcomed warmly to the tenor section. Beverly Owen Coates, Tom’s sister, a pretty blonde woman with a soft speaking voice and a strong singing voice, opened the Sunday lesson. Later I would come to know Beverly as the velvet hammer of the Owen family and one of the great champions of Sacred Harp singing. She learned at her grandmother’s side in the soprano, or treble, section, and led her first song at age two. She raised her own children singing Sacred Harp, con-

12  so ut hw e st t exas

verted her husband, Bruce, into a singer, and arranged family vacations around singings in other states when the kids were growing up. A visitor from Georgia, Tollie Lee, was called to lead after Beverly. A man slightly beyond middle age, with suspenders stretched across his chest and belly, Tollie cast a sly grin at the crowd before announcing his song number. His thin hair, combed back, barely covered a tanned shiny pate and his smile wavered between wistful and gleeful. He spoke with a slight pidgin patois. “Somebody asked me to sing number 319 and walk time to it,” he said, not missing a beat as he launched into a rousing tune, “Religion is a Fortune,” leading it at a steady, slow tempo. Tollie hails from Hoboken, Georgia, where the Lee family holds the franchise on “walking time,” a promenade around the edges of the square in which the leader addresses each of the four sections while beating the time with both feet and hands. The song rose gloriously around him: When we all get to heaven We will shout aloud and sing Sing glory, halle, hallelujah! A memorial service was held before the noon meal to remember singers who had died the previous year. Morris Nelms, a professor of music composition at Southwest Texas State University in nearby San Marcos, and an officer of the Southwest Texas convention, stood up to tell the story of passing a terrible wreck on the road from San Marcos as he drove into the singing that morning. He paused to offer a prayer for whoever might have perished in that wreck, and to ponder how abruptly life can end, then reflected on

so ut hw e st t exas  13

the significance of Sacred Harp singing in the contemporary world. “Sacred Harp is living music,” he said. “It reconnects us to our past the way a lot of music doesn’t. It has remained relatively unchanged since the colonial period; in fact it could be argued that George Washington heard it. It’s a chance to step into American history.” Part of that history, of course, is the long line of singers who have gone before, including those who have left just recently. Paul Wyatt of Minnesota stood to honor the sick and shut-in who might otherwise have been at the singing. “We have a duty to them,” said Wyatt, “not to let them be left out of the fold.” He concluded his message with a plea for consideration of “those in the Middle East who may come back with scars for what they’ve done.” Number 68 at the bottom of the page was sung in their honor: Come, Holy Spirit, come With energy divine And on this poor benighted soul With beams of mercy shine. Another feast was promptly served, as if from the air, and the second afternoon of the convention seemed to fly, each song progressing more rapidly than the one before. Morris Nelms, the Texas State professor, slowed it down with the final song of the day, “Old Hundred,” a tune I remembered as an offertory with the words “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” In the Cooper edition of The Sacred Harp, the familiar melody had been set to lyrics that praised Sacred Harp singing:

14  so ut hw e st t exas

O come, loud anthems let us sing Loud thanks to our Almighty King; For we our voices high should raise When our salvation’s Rock we praise. By the end of the second day, new friendships had been sealed, and voices were hoarse from singing. Families posed for photographs in front of the church cemetery. Singers hugged and exchanged addresses and telephone numbers, then hesitantly climbed into their cars, tires crunching gravel, the goodbye sound that reminded me of leaving my grandfather’s house in the country on Sunday afternoons as a girl. Patches of early spring wildflowers lined the two-lane highway leading away from McMahan. Down the hill from the church, a goat scratched its velvety horn nubs on the lower limbs of a live oak tree. A lazy herd of black cattle lolled in the sun. Along creek bottoms, tree trunks grew thick with new green leaves. In the breeze, the sound of hundreds of voices raised, the haunting, joyful noise of the Sacred Harp, still lingered. To borrow a phrase, music swelled the breeze and rang from all the trees. Songs of sweet accord rang in my ears for the duration of the thousand-mile drive home. v v v

Edith Owen’s Hominy Casserole

2 cans white hominy 1 can yellow hominy 1 can cheddar cheese soup

so ut hw e st t exas  15

1 small can green chiles, with juice ½ onion, chopped 1 container (8 oz.) sour cream Grated sharp cheddar cheese Cook hominy 15 minutes; drain. Add other ingredients except cheese, place in greased 9 × 13 inch casserole. Cover with grated cheese. Cook at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

p  “This casserole may be mixed a month or so ahead of time, placed in a gallon Ziploc bag or the casserole dish and frozen. Thaw and add cheese before cooking.”

Submitted by Beverly Owen Coates for her grandmother, Edith Owen

v v v

Edith Owen’s Bingham Salad Bring to boil and cool:

1 #2 can crushed pineapple 1 box orange Jell-O 1 box lemon Jell-O

Add:

1 cup chopped pecans 1 cup dry cottage cheese 1 cup chopped celery 1 small can pimientos

Fold in ½ pint whipped cream. Refrigerate several hours before serving.

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v v v

Grandmother Owen’s Dressing cor nbr ead: 4½ cups cornmeal 1 cup flour 2 tsp. baking soda 2 tsp. baking powder 2 to 3 eggs 3 tsp. salt 1 qt. buttermilk Mix and pour into greased 9 × 13 inch baking dish and bake at 375 degrees until done. When done, let cool, then crumble into large pan and add: 1 can cream of chicken soup 4 to 5 cooked biscuits, crumbled 6 eggs, slightly beaten Several chopped green onions 1½ cups finely chopped celery (Cook green onions and celery in 2–3 cups water for 10 minutes before adding to the dressing. Add the cooking water, too, for flavor.) 1 stick of margarine, melted Add broth or pan drippings from hen or turkey, or canned chicken broth, and mix all together well until slightly wet, not too dry. Bake at 325 to 350 degrees for 30 to 40 minutes

so ut hw e st t exas  17

until firm and top is browned. Makes 2 9 × 13 inch casserole dishes. May be mixed ahead and frozen before cooking. Thaw and bake covered, as directed above.

p  “My grandmother Owen used to cook her dressing in a porcelain dish pan. She rarely took any home.” Beverly Owen Coates

v v v

Doris Hanks’s Buttermilk Pie

4 eggs 2 cups sugar 1 stick margarine, melted 1 tbsp. cornstarch 1 tsp. lemon extract 1 cup buttermilk

Beat eggs; add remainder of ingredients. Pour into uncooked pie shell and bake at 350 degrees until pie begins to brown, then reduce to 300 and cook until center is cooked (insert knife tip; if it comes out clean, it’s done).

p  “Doris Hanks, of Luling, is my dad, Curtis Owen’s, first

cousin. She is known far and wide for her buttermilk pies. Her mother was an Owen.” Beverly Owen Coates, seconded by her brother Tom Owen

18  so ut hw e st t exas

v v v

Beverly’s Egg Custard Pie 6 eggs, beaten 2 cups sugar 2 tbsp. flour 1 pint half-and-half or milk (I use 1% milk) 1 tsp. vanilla extract Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix all ingredients and divide mixture evenly and pour into 2 9-inch pie shells. Sprinkle with nutmeg. Reduce heat to 325 when putting pies in oven. Cook about 40 minutes or until firm. May be cooked and frozen up to a month in advance. Beverly Owen Coates

v v v

Beverly’s Pecan Pie 3 eggs, beaten 1 cup white Karo syrup ¾ cup sugar 1 cup chopped pecans 1 tsp. vanilla 1 tbsp. butter

so ut hw e st t exas  19

Mix all ingredients except pecans. Fold in pecans. Pour into 9-inch pie shell and bake at 325 degrees for about 45 minutes until firm. May be cooked and frozen up to a month in advance. Beverly Owen Coates

v v v

Beverly’s Jiffy Corn Bread Casserole 1 can whole kernel corn, in juice 1 can cream-style corn 1 box Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix 1 stick melted butter 4 eggs 1 container (8 oz.) sour cream 1½ cups grated cheddar cheese Preheat oven to 350. Mix all ingredients except cheese and place in greased 9 × 13 inch casserole. Bake uncovered for 45 minutes until golden. Sprinkle cheese on top, return to oven and bake until cheese melts. Variation: Instead of corn, add 1 box frozen broccoli, thawed and drained, and one chopped onion. May be mixed ahead of time, except for grated cheese, and frozen in a gallon Ziploc bag or in casserole dish, then thawed and baked before serving. Beverly Owen Coates

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v v v

Beverly’s Orange Salad

1 (8-oz.) container Cool Whip 1 large box orange Jell-O 2 small cans crushed pineapple, drained 1 small can mandarin oranges, drained 8 oz. sour cream

Mix Cool Whip and sour cream and add dry Jell-O. Stir well. Add drained pineapple and oranges. Refrigerate several hours before serving. Beverly Owen Coates

v v v

Beverly’s Broccoli Salad 6 slices bacon 3 to 4 bunches broccoli, divided into small pieces, raw or parboiled but still crunchy ½ cup raisins ½ cup sunflower seeds ½ cup chopped red onion dr e ssing: ½ cup sugar 2 tsp. cider vinegar 1 cup mayonnaise

so ut hw e st t exas 21

Fry bacon, drain, and break into small pieces. Combine broccoli, raisins, sunflower seeds, and onion. Mix dressing and spoon over the top. Sprinkle bacon over the dressing. Cover and refrigerate several hours or overnight before serving. Toss before serving. Beverly Owen Coates

v v v

Uncle’s Sauce for Beef Sausage 1 quart bottle ketchup 5 tbsp. sugar 2 tbsp. paprika ½ tsp. red pepper 1 cup mustard (prepared) 4 tsp. Worcestershire sauce 1 tsp. black pepper Combine ingredients, add enough water to make 2 quarts, and simmer until all ingredients meld. To be served at the table, not added to the meat while it is cooking.

p  Lockhart’s famous all-beef sausages can be purchased online or by phone at Smitty’s Market, 208 S. Commerce St., Lockhart tx, 512-398-9344, www.smittysmarket.com  

or

p  Kreuz Market, 619 N. Colorado St., Lockhart tx, 512-3982361, 512-376-5576 (fax), www.kreuzmarket.com

v

Chapter Two



bi|mingham

Oh, the transporting rapt’rous scene That rises to my sight Sweet fields arrayed in living green And rivers of delight. “Sweet Prospect,” #65, The Sacred Harp,  Denson edition

In June 2004 I boarded a plane bound for Birmingham, Alabama, my destination the twenty-fourth session of the National Sacred Harp Singing Convention. I had attended the national convention on the same weekend in June just a year earlier when Birmingham native son Ruben Studdard was crowned the nation’s second American Idol. Birmingham rejoiced and marquees around town sparkled with proclamations of devotion: “We love you Ruben!” “Ruben’s number one!” The dry cleaner next door to the Howard Johnson where I stayed offered Ruben clean shirts for the rest of his life, for free. That first national convention in the summer of 2003 was

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a crash course in everything I’d wanted to learn about Sacred Harp singing, following an exhilarating introduction to the form a few months earlier in McMahan, Texas. In Birmingham for the first time, singing with a large crowd for three consecutive days, I had become more adept at singing the shapes though they still didn’t come naturally. I learned to keep up with the tenors on the fast fuguing tunes with their cascades of ascending and descending musical lines, alternating among the four sections. I met singers from across the country and around the world. Most importantly, I discovered the importance of sitting close to the front, next to an experienced singer whose voice I could follow when my sight-reading failed me. In the twelve months between that convention and this one, I’d listened to Sacred Harp recordings on CD en route from home to work every day, and read obsessively about its origins. The definitive text, most singers agreed, was Buell Cobb’s The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music, a scholarly book that doesn’t shy away from weaving in ample amounts of respect and affection. Cobb, the perennial chairman of the national convention, is a soft-spoken Georgia gentleman, and Alabama native who has loved — and long feared the demise of — traditional Sacred Harp singing, always bringing its true roots to the forefront of the national and international crowd of singers who gather in Birmingham each June. On the last day of the 2003 convention, Cobb had urged us to go out into the country the following day to attend a small family singing and experience the origins of the tradition. I’d traveled on a bright Sunday morning to Natural Bridge, Alabama, and the Wakefield family singing at King’s School House, a tiny white frame building that had once served as the community school and was now a church. I’d met Josie

bir ming ham 25

Hyde, a Wakefield before she married John Hyde, a jolly blueeyed man with a gleaming head of white, neatly combed hair. Josie, a woman in her seventies, had walked as a girl through the woods surrounding us to the school house, had attended singing school there, and had eventually settled down close by in the town of Haleyville. When I’d asked Josie which Wakefields were her family, she’d waved her hand at the decorated cemetery on the hill above us and said, “I guess everybody up there’s kin to me.” I asked how old the schoolhouse was. “Way older than me,” she said, “and I’m not thirty-nine anymore.” A year later as I fly into Birmingham, Ruben Studdard has been nearly forgotten by the rest of America except for a brief media blitz when marijuana was found in his limousine. The plane lands lightly, and in the terminal I take in the sights of the South I left behind last year, and fifteen years earlier when I moved from Nashville to Colorado, forfeiting my own southernness. Women dressed in tailored pastels wear makeup in the day and smell like flowers. Men wear Bass Weejuns with no socks, their hairy ankles exposed beneath the hem of their loose-fitting khakis. Outside the terminal, the air is lush and relaxed. It feels as if the world is taking a nap on this sultry afternoon. The streets outside Birmingham’s downtown grid are winding and confusing. No road forms a straight line and names change every few miles or so. Bright green kudzu vines with enormous leaves claim and smother raised billboards, abandoned buildings, and entire urban forests on the sides of the interstate highway. As I approach Homewood, the yuppified subdivision of 1920s and ’30s bungalows where the convention is to be held,

26  bir ming ham

I tune into a local R&B station and settle back to the croonings of Teddy Pendergrass, wishing for a dose of the sadly forgotten Ruben. I check into the Howard Johnson, eager to sing again. It is customary to bring a dish to a Sacred Harp singing for noontime dinner on the ground, so in the early morning of the convention’s first day I head to the Homewood Piggly Wiggly, just down the winding tree-tunneled road from Trinity United Methodist Church, headquarters of the threeday singing. You know a town is serious about food when the local supermarket sells a fifteen-dollar caramel layer cake and a seventeen-dollar seven-layer lemon cake, not to mention handmade biscuits and country ham for breakfast. I opt for the caramel cake, wolf down a ham and biscuit, and head to the church. Birmingham, I’ve come to realize, is home to some serious eating and some serious singing. And since I was last in Birmingham, when Ruben was king, Sacred Harp singing enjoyed its own brief moment in the national spotlight. In November 2003 Cold Mountain made its film debut; Nicole Kidman waved her ivory fingers up and down, beating time in the traditional Sacred Harp fashion, and made eyes at Jude Law across the hollow square. The movie rounded up a bunch of Academy Award nominations, including one for its musical soundtrack, featuring a group of Alabama Sacred Harp singers. In February 2004 some of those singers flew to Hollywood, dressed up in long black dresses and solemn suits and appeared on stage at the Academy Awards ceremony next to Alison Krauss, who, the fashion commentator told us, was wearing diamond-studded $250,000 shoes. Sacred Harp had hit the big time.

bir ming ham 27

According to Buell Cobb’s book, there was good evidence that shape-note singing was alive during the Civil War years dramatized in Cold Mountain. A letter from a young Confederate officer, quoted in his book, reads, There are some boys here that start playing cards and gambling as soon as they draw their money and in two days they haven’t got a cent. I have been in the war for two years and I do not know one card from another, but I do know my notes and we have some of the best singing schools around the camp fire I have ever heard. . . . Ma, you and the girls get out the old Sacred Harp songbook, turn to the old song invocation on page 131, sing it and think of me. I arrive at Trinity and enter a crush of faces and voices, some familiar, some not. There’s a rush at the front registration table and the flow of the crowd is frequently interrupted by impromptu reunions over nametags and Sharpies. Some of the singers who attended the Academy Awards are here, largely unaffected by their time in the limelight. They’ve got their books under their arms and are ready to sing just like everybody else. I move through the throng and find myself smashed against a trim, silver-haired man with a British accent. I shake hands with David Richardson of Warwick, United Kingdom, a veteran of this convention. Richardson says he heard about the songbook, The Sacred Harp, in 1990 and wrote Hugh McGraw of Bremen, Georgia, an officer of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company, asking how he could get one. McGraw, a great ambassador for Sacred Harp singing, published a national Sacred Harp newsletter at that time and put Richardson on the mailing list. Richardson and his singing friends learned

28  bir ming ham

some tunes and sang them at folk fests around England for a time, and eventually organized two conventions that are held in England each year. This is a story I’ve heard over and over, the story of how new Sacred Harp singing conventions are born. I tell Richardson I haven’t yet gotten up the courage to lead a song, and he encourages me to pick out an easy one and give it a try. “Look out for the little white-haired ladies,” he warns. “They’ll leave you in the dust.” He’s referring to the elder singers who enter the hollow square looking frail and wobbly, then ask the singers to turn to one of the most difficult songs in the book, ramp up the tempo and lead it with gusto, never bothering to look at the page because they know it by heart. These are the ladies I’ve learned to sit next to when I can. The singing begins at nine sharp. I sit in the tenor section next to Uel Freeman, an eighty-eight-year-old lifelong singer up from Mobile for the weekend. He wears starched, pressed overalls and carries a dog-eared, scarred copy of The Sacred Harp. He’s mad at his daughter who made him move away from his house in Birmingham, with its fig trees and its big garden, and made him give up his driver’s license and come to Mobile to live with her. He misses his regular singing, but he’s taken up with a group down there. He is a tinker; he makes wooden toys — paddle wheels with pecking chickens and jumping jacks — and he makes hand-woven placemats. I learn all of this between songs and during the break the first morning. Mr. Freeman makes friends easily. When the leader calls out a song number, Mr. Freeman flips to it automatically and nods his approval. He sings in a big, nasal voice.

bir ming ham 29

When the song is over, he lets out a breath and says, “That was a good ’un. That was a good ’un.” Before we break for lunch, we sing number 65, “Sweet Prospect”: Oh, the transporting rapt’rous scene That rises to my sight Sweet fields arrayed in living green And rivers of delight. Downstairs in the industrial-sized cafeteria, the ladies in charge of the food are nervous. The crowd is huge, nearly four hundred people they estimate, and they’re afraid they’ll run out. Ann Ballard, the coordinator, runs up and down the long row of tables, pulling aluminum foil and plastic wrap off dishes, sticking serving spoons in bowls. She has brought a pecan pie, a banana pudding, and a coconut cake, none of which she is perfectly pleased about — the pecans are charred, the meringue on the pudding flattened, the cake lopsided. Ann and her sisters Cora Sweatt and Sarah Smith, all helping to set out lunch, are members of a legendary singing family, the Beasleys of northwestern Alabama. “Our parents met at the Old Flatwoods singing at Nauvoo, Alabama, in 1925. Daddy saw this pretty girl sitting in the altos,” says Sarah. “He wrote her 126 letters in two years.” They married and raised their ten children on a cotton farm in northwestern Alabama. The oldest son was Joe Beasley, “the dramatic one of the family.” Joe went to the University of Alabama, where he decided he wanted to be an actor, then moved to New York City, but he didn’t leave Sacred Harp behind. He hosted monthly singings at his apartment in the city and introduced the tradition

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of his southern family to a group of singers who’ve continued, since his death in 1995, to hold a singing named after him in Brooklyn on the second Sunday of each month. Sarah carefully arranges a chocolate cake, decorated with whole pecans, on a glass plate. The table is a monument to southern cooking: trays of fried chicken and sliced ham; platters of cornbread and biscuits; bowls of butter beans, blackeyed peas, squash casserole, green beans from the garden, fresh English peas cooked with new potatoes in creamy butter sauce, trays of thickly-sliced beefsteak tomatoes, and cucumbers and onions marinated in white vinegar and black pepper. Ivalene Donaldson, a neighbor of Josie Hyde’s in Haleyville, has brought a fig cobbler made with fruit from her trees, a recipe she calls “Lazy Man’s Pie.” Against the wall are tables covered with ice-filled cups and gallon jugs of iced tea, sweet and unsweet. The elderly singers go through the line first, then everyone else. Folks who have traveled to Birmingham from other parts of the country rave over the food; locals eat it nonchalantly as if they feast like this every day. The women who brought dishes glance over to see how the supply is lasting, how their dish is being received. I sit with a professor from University of North Carolina and his twelve-year-old son. He says he first heard the sound of Sacred Harp singing as he walked across the Chapel Hill campus one day. He was captivated and set out to discover what it was. Like so many others, he fell in love with the sound and became a singer in short order. Hubert Nall, a soft-spoken man with carefully combed hair and a relaxed smile, introduces himself. A life insurance executive in Birmingham, he was one of eleven kids who grew up on an Alabama farm singing Sacred Harp.

bir ming ham 31

“Daddy made us sing every night,” he says. “I thought everyone did this.” Hubert dropped out of singing for a time when he was building his career, but came back to it and now attends as many singings as he can. After everyone has eaten, there’s not a scrap of food left. Ann begins mobilizing for tomorrow’s dinner, declaring this the largest crowd she has ever fed. “Poor old Stanley Smith,” she says. “He was last in line. He didn’t hardly get nothin’ to eat. We just ran out of food — that’s all there is to it.” A small, black-haired woman named Lou, who brought a boxload of dishes, nods in agreement. “Used to be everyone who came cooked for several days before the singing,” she says. “It’s not many of us that fixes anymore. All of my bowls was scraped.” But on day two, the ladies of the food committee have risen to the occasion. More food arrives. No one goes hungry. I sit with a bright-eyed, husky man, Louis Hughes of Brunswick, Georgia. Louis says he went to two weeks of singing school, five days a week, when he was ten years old, but lost interest as an adult. “I didn’t pick up a book for thirty years.” When his uncle died, and the funeral was held at Crossroads Baptist Church in western Georgia, Louis’s interest was renewed. Now he sings whenever he can. “I believe there’s a place in the square for me,” he says, referring to the eternal resting place Sacred Harp singers aspire to. Following dinner on day two, the singing swells to new heights. On day three, I sit next to a beautiful young couple and their seven-week-old baby. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, the

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mother and father could easily be mistaken for siblings. Their olive-skinned little daughter, dressed in a pink stretch suit with tight knit pink booties, looks mesmerized by the music. A leader calls out number 222. “Sing it right lively,” he instructs. This is an eighteenth-century Watts lyric titled “Ocean,” with musical lines that mimic swelling and towering ocean waves. I imagine that the vibration of this huge choir of roiling voices enters the baby’s body, massaging her. She dozes and wakes up, dozes and wakes up, her mother handling her expertly, moving her from knees to shoulder to lap, jiggling her to the time of the music. Her father, who can’t be a day over twenty-one, takes her in his large hands when the mother wants to focus on the songbook. He knows the songs by heart, singing each one in a strong, assured tenor honed by many years of practice, eye to eye with the baby. The mother tells me she went to singings while she was pregnant and believes the sound is familiar and comforting to the baby. The father says he attended his first singing while he was still in his pregnant mother’s womb and has gone to them regularly all his life. I watch the baby, calculating how I will ask them to let me hold her. The need to feel her weight in my arms, her smooth skin, is as visceral as hunger. So when the coffee break comes, I casually offer, “Why don’t you let me hold her while you two stretch your legs?” The mother hands her over with no hesitation and steps into the aisle for coffee. The baby’s diapered rump and silky head are equally weighty in each of my hands. Her sweet scent fills the air. I brush her cheek with a finger and her eyes roll upward, then she snoozes. The young father watches her sleep in my arms.

bir ming ham 33

“She sleeps right through the noise,” he says. “My mother always said to get out the vacuum cleaner and sweep right under the baby’s bed while it’s sleeping. That gets ’em used to the noise.” I am inexplicably proud holding her, admiring her perfection, her curled fists, her dark lashes, her curved seashell of an ear. The mother returns and I hand the baby back over, watching her settle into her mother’s hands with a stretch and a curl of her body forward, toward her mother’s chest. The singing continues following a brief memorial service naming all the singers who have died in the last year, an important Sacred Harp tradition practiced at every singing convention. Mike Hinton leads the memorial service, remembering his own father who died in May. “You never know when the seat next to you will be empty,” says Mike. We listen silently as the names of the dead are called, then raise our voices in song to number 418: There is a house not made with hands Eternal and on high And here my spirit waiting stands Till God shall bid it fly. I long to see my friends again And hear them sweetly say Come weary dove, here is thy home, Then fold thy wings and stay. I glance over to see the young father, red-faced and choked, wiping his eyes, unable to sing. His mother’s name has been called. His wife wraps one thin arm around his back and jig-

34  bir ming ham

gles the baby with the other. He looks at the baby and wipes at his eyes again. Then he holds out his arms and she is slipped comfortably into his big hands. He pulls the baby up to his red face and with one tiny finger, no bigger than a twig, she reaches out and hooks his nose. He laughs and cries as voices rise around them, singing a loud tune about glory land, sweet glory in the sky. When the memorial service is over, we file downstairs for dinner on the ground. The young man hands the baby over to an older woman, and the women he has known since he was a baby, his mother’s friends, surround him, hugging and kissing him and loading his plate with food. “Here, have some green beans.” “This cornbread looks good.” “Have a little bit of Miss Darby’s pea salad.” “Your mother loved Sarah’s coconut cream pie.” They lavish him with love, with good home-cooked food. It is the last day of the National Sacred Harp singing convention in Birmingham, Alabama, and song and food have mingled to form one grand fellowship. Taken together, they are a sacred, soul reviving feast. v v v

Mr. Freeman’s Wife’s Best Pumpkin Pie 1½ cups cooked pumpkin (fresh or canned) ¼ tsp. salt ¼ tsp. cinnamon 1 tbsp. butter

bir ming ham 35

1 (9-inch) pie crust, unbaked 1 cup sugar 1 cup rich milk ¼ tsp. nutmeg 2 eggs, beaten slightly 2 slices bread Whirl bread in food processor to make fine crumbs (slightly stale bread works best). Combine all ingredients, including bread crumbs. Pour into pie crust. Bake at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes, or until inserted knife comes out clean. Serve with whipped topping. If desired, ½ cup raisins may be added to filling. Butternut squash may be used instead of pumpkin.

p  “Some of our friends who ‘don’t eat pumpkin pie’ really think they are eating sweet potato pie when they try it.”

Ruth Freeman, late wife of Uel Freeman, from Keepsakes: Favorite Recipes of our Brown Kinfolk, 1999. Reprinted with permission of Uel Freeman.

v v v

Ruth Freeman’s Turnips and Greens 2 lbs. turnip greens 3 medium turnips, peeled and sliced 1 tsp sugar or ¼ tsp. grain saccharin or other artificial sweetener ¼ lb. salt pork ¼ tsp. salt Wash turnip greens thoroughly; drain. Tear into bite-sized pieces. Combine greens and salt pork in a Dutch oven.

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Add about 3 or 4 cups water and bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat and simmer 30 minutes. Stir in turnips, sugar or saccharin, and salt. Cover an additional 30 minutes, or until the turnips are tender. Yields about 6 servings. v v v

Lou’s Squash Casserole 10 to 12 small to medium yellow summer squash from the garden (large ones are too seedy and tough) 1 sweet yellow onion, chopped and sautéed in butter or margarine 2 eggs Salt Pepper ½­ to ¾ cup sharp cheddar cheese Slice squash into inch-long pieces, boil in salted water until tender, drain and mash with the back of a fork or a potato masher. Sauté chopped onion and add to squash. Beat eggs and add to squash mixture. Add salt and pepper to taste and fold in shredded cheese. Put in greased baking dish. Bake at 350 degrees until cooked through. Can be frozen, then thawed before baking.

bir ming ham 37

v v v

Mr. Freeman’s Fig Cake

4 eggs 2 cups sugar 1¼ tsp. baking soda 1¼ tsp. cinnamon 1¼ tsp. allspice 1¼ tsp. nutmeg 1⅓ cups chopped nuts (walnuts are good) 1⅓ cups chopped fig preserves (with juice) 2½ cups all-purpose flour 1⅓ cups vegetable oil 2 tsp. hot water 1½ tsp. salt 1¼ tsp. vanilla

Beat eggs with mixer until thick and lemon colored. Add sugar and oil, beating well. Dissolve baking soda in hot water and combine with buttermilk. Sift flour, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice together; add to egg mixture alternately with buttermilk mixture, mixing well after each addition. Stir in vanilla, fig preserves, and nuts. Pour batter into greased and floured tube pan. Bake at 350 degrees for about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Cool 20 to 30 minutes. Remove from pan, cool, and glaze. b ut t er mil k g l az e: 1⅓ cups buttermilk ⅜ tsp. baking soda ⅓ cup margarine

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⅔ cup sugar 2 tsp. cornstarch 2 tsp. vanilla Combine all ingredients in saucepan; bring to boil and remove from heat. Cool slightly and pour over cake.

p  “I usually use my own preserves, made from figs from my trees.”

Uel Freeman

v v v

Shelbie Sheppard and Charlene Wallace’s Layered Salad Chopped lettuce (iceberg is fine, enough to make a 2–3 inch layer in a large serving bowl) One can pork and beans (can be drained, but not necessary) 1–2 cups grated cheddar cheese 1–2 cups chopped tomatoes ½ cup chopped green onions Large bag of barbecue corn chips (preferably Twisters) Bottle of Kraft Catalina dressing Layer dry ingredients in large bowl until time to serve. Pour Catalina dressing over and toss just before serving.

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p  Shelbie and Charlene bring the ingredients, packaged

separately, in a cooler and assemble the salad in a large bowl just before noon. “I don’t think that’s enough dressing,” says one. “I don’t like mine drowned,” says the other. A compromise is met and the salad is finally tossed. v v v

Ivalene Donaldson’s Lazy Man Fruit Pie f ruit mixtur e: 3 cups figs, fresh or dried Water to cover 1 cup sugar Cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg to taste Chop fresh or dried figs, and bring to a boil in water with sugar. Fresh figs will require less water. Simmer until thickened. Add cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg to taste. bat t er :

1 cup flour 1 cup sugar 1 cup buttermilk

Melt 1 stick of margarine in a 9 × 13 inch baking dish. Mix batter ingredients and pour over melted margarine. Spoon fruit mixture on top. Bake for 45 minutes in a 350degree oven. Can be prepared with peaches, sweet potatoes, strawberries, or blueberries in the same manner.

v

Chapter Three



henaga| Lord, how divine Thy comforts are How heavn’ly is the place Where Jesus spreads the sacred feast Of his redeeming grace. “Our Humble Faith,” #463, The Sacred Harp,  Denson edition

july 1, 2005

En route by plane from Colorado Springs to Nashville, I’m seated next to a baby-faced young soldier with stubby, sandy hair. His T-shirt reads, “sniper. Don’t run . . . you’ll just die tired.” He’s on his way home to somewhere near Dayton, Ohio, his family farm, before deploying to Iraq in November for a year. “I don’t know whether to be excited or nervous,” he says shyly, his beefy leg jiggling up and down in a constant rapid rhythm. He has a thumbnail that obviously went missing at some point and has grown back partially. The rest of his nails are gnawed to the quick.

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We talk for a bit about Iraq, about my son the Army Reservist who will be there soon. I tell him I’m going to Alabama to sing and he reflects on singing in the country church where he grew up. “They don’t do it so much anymore,” he says. I’m bound for Henagar, Alabama, a tiny settlement in the northeasternmost corner of the state, where the eighty-ninth annual Henagar-Union Convention will be held this Saturday and Sunday, the weekend preceding the Fourth of July. The drive from Nashville to northern Alabama, down Interstate Highway 24, is a winding, climbing spectacle of green. Peak elevation is reached just outside Chattanooga, then drops as the road curves westward at the state border. Roadsides are crowded with plywood fireworks stands, all painted red, white, and blue, and each claiming the lowest prices for Black Cats and bottle rockets. Clearance sales are imminent. Henagar sits atop Sand Mountain, a rocky hump of land that rises directly opposite Lookout Mountain, green and laced with silver rivers, to the east. In the central valley dividing the two sits Fort Payne, the most populous town in the area. This area, DeKalb County, is affectionately and accurately referred to as the Highlands of Alabama. DeKalb County was once the southern home of the Cherokee Nation, but was ceded to the federal government in 1836. Fort Payne’s name derives from a fort that served as a stockade and internment camp housing Cherokees before they were marched out of Alabama, traveling by foot up what’s now Alabama Highway 35, a route straight up Sand Mountain. That route is marked now with Trail of Tears placards, a reminder of the dark journey of the area’s natives from Fort Payne to Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

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Sand Mountain got a flash of notoriety in 1995 when Dennis Covington’s book Salvation on Sand Mountain, the story of a charismatic minister’s trial for the attempted murder of his wife with poisonous snakes used in religious services at the Church of Jesus With Signs, was nominated for a National Book Award. But over the last century, among more mainstream Protestant circles, Sand Mountain has been best known as an important seat of Sacred Harp singing, especially among the Ivey, Wootten, and Lacy families, and their friends and neighbors at Henagar’s Liberty Baptist Church, the Antioch Church in nearby Ider, and many other churches across the plateau. The Wootten family’s 150-year history of Sacred Harp singing has been documented in the film Sweet Is the Day, produced and directed by Erin Kellen and Jim Carnes, both Sacred Harp singers. In it, we see and hear this large extended family sing and talk about the power of Sacred Harp music to bind a family and a community together, to raise spirits, to honor history, encourage shared faith, and pass on family traditions. Liberty Church, the Ivey family’s home church, proudly displays a framed plaque in its vestibule — a letter from the governor of Alabama honoring and congratulating the church and its community for upholding the Sacred Harp tradition for many generations. Though documentation of the remarkable singing legacy on Sand Mountain is undeniably important, it pales in comparison to the living tradition, the actual experience of sitting in hot, crowded Liberty Church and singing with the Sand Mountain folk. Every year, on the first Sunday in July and the

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Saturday before, hundreds come together for the Henagar Union Convention — two full days of singing and eating. The day before the convention begins, I drive up Sand Mountain, past Liberty Church with its tidy, decorated cemetery, to the home of Tony and Sandy Ivey, Liberty’s current pastor and his wife, both lifelong Sacred Harp singers. Tony has cranked up his brand-new smoker in the front yard to prepare four Boston butt pork roasts for tomorrow’s dinner. He sits in a webbed lawn chair beneath a stand of tall pines, throwing sticks of apple, pecan, and hickory wood — all from local trees — onto the fire. The meat is rubbed with Tony’s signature dry rub, a mix of salt, sugar, black pepper, cayenne pepper, paprika, and Accent seasoning. Tony, small and soft-spoken, is the son of Hobert and Sylvia Ivey, who live in a brick house up the road, and the cousin of David Ivey, chairman of the convention. He picks up a stick and points to a crumpled house engulfed in weeds and vines, just across the driveway. “I grew up in that old house next door,” he says. He and Sandy were married when Tony was twenty. “We went off about four miles the other side of Highway 75, then came back. I feel like I’m home here.” Tony started singing Sacred Harp when he was six or seven, and attended a singing school led by Hugh McGraw of Georgia when he was fourteen. “I stayed at Grandad’s as much as I could so I could go to singing,” he says. “He petted me over that.” He reflects on the years when he was growing up here, the 1960s and ’70s, when there were still “lots of churches” that had all-day singing. Now, he says, there are only about four on Sand Mountain that still do. Tony welcomes the tide of new interest he sees by singers

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from other parts of the country, many of whom have traveled to Henagar or Ider for a Sand Mountain singing and frequently travel to other singings in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. He cites college classes that have raised interest among Midwesterners and Northeasterners in southern Sacred Harp. “It caused kids down here to think it wasn’t just an oldfogey thing,” he says. Sandy grew up visiting her grandparents and singing on Sand Mountain too, and can’t remember a time when Sacred Harp wasn’t part of her life. Their children Scott, twelve, and Rachel, fourteen, have just returned from Camp Fasola, an annual summer camp where singing school is held daily and kids are taught the music, history, and practice of Sacred Harp. “I guess Scott could sing by the time he could talk,” laughs Sandy. “We rocked him and sang Sacred Harp tunes to him.” Scott, a dark-haired boy, admits that he knows all the words to all the verses of most of the 644 songs in The Sacred Harp. Rachel is more reticent on the subject, but will be at the singing convention on Saturday and Sunday, she says. Inside the house, Sandy prepares her dishes for tomorrow’s potluck feast — chicken and dumplings prepared the way her grandmother taught her, the dumplings hand-rolled as thin as noodles; baked beans topped with strips of thin, smoked bacon and rings of sweet onion; and refrigerator yeast rolls. “That recipe [for the rolls] came from the women of my church when Tony and I first got married,” she says. “They made up a cookbook of all their favorite recipes.” The heady smell of warm yeast fills the comfortable kitchen, cluttered with Sandy’s collection of old dishes.

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As dusk settles, lightning bugs rise from the lace cap and oak leaf hydrangeas surrounding the Ivey home. In the garden, a makeshift crutch shaped from a tree limb holds up the branches of a pear tree so loaded with fruit they are breaking. Crickets sing loudly. Tony settles in to tend to his barbecue. He’ll let it smoke all night, he says. It should be just right by morning. Tony gives me two small flyers, folded in the manner of church bulletins, one outlining the bare history of Liberty Church, the other the Proceedings of the July 14 and 15, 1923, Henagar Sacred Harp Singing Convention. Organized in 1893, the church erected its building in 1913. In 1914, the word “Primitive” was dropped from the church name. An ominous note marks October 1918: “No meeting was held from this month thru the month of April due to the new disease called influenza.” Listed among the deacons and pastors of Liberty from 1893 to the present are a number of Iveys and Woottens; the president of the 1923 convention was J. M. Lacy. Throughout the weekend, as I introduce myself to singers and cooks, they will introduce themselves as Iveys, Lacys, or Woottens — or if they have changed their names after marrying, they will refer to themselves as former Iveys, Lacys, or Woottens. I sleep uneasily in a motel in Fort Payne, eager to drive back to Henagar the next morning. I awake at dawn, and drive up in a fog of morning dew, listening to the radio. On NPR’s Morning Edition, Scott Simon interviews folk singer Pete Seeger. They are talking about the powerful experience of singing old, well-loved songs. “What do we get from singing together?” Simon asks.

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“Young people get the message that they are loved,” says Seeger. “Old people get the message that they are remembered.” When I arrive at Liberty, the men of the church are setting out tables beneath the trees and under the metal roof of the outdoor pavilion. Lacys, Iveys, Woottens, and other Sand Mountain singers slap backs, hug, and shake hands with those who have come from far away — some for homecoming, others just to sing. A few visitors wander through the cemetery, the damp morning air softening the outlines of the tombstones and the abundant, brightly colored artificial flower arrangements that adorn them. Decoration Day, the day each year when families gather to decorate their loved ones’ graves, then face the cemetery and sing Sacred Harp hymns, has just passed, says Sandy Ivey, so things still look good. Tony Ivey’s grandparents Andrew and Ester, better known as Mommy and Poppy, are buried here. Their family headstone is engraved with names and dates, and a slogan that speaks to all who come to Henagar: “Singing in a Better Land.” Another headstone echoes the sentiment: “How can I keep from singing?” Eulas and Helen Ivey’s headstone reads, “Singing Praises With the Lord.” It’s not yet 9 a.m. and the temperature is quickly reaching 90 degrees. Sandy points to the spot next to the church, a small rise where one of Tony’s uncles once set up a sprinkler aimed at the tin roof, to cool it off for the singing. This building, and many others like it around the South, are renowned among singers for their acoustical qualities, en-

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hanced by wood floors, bare wood walls, and high timbered ceilings — the barer the better. As Buell Cobb notes in his book, “These singers know, in terms of sound effect, the relative worth of building interiors. When they discuss acoustics, they refer admiringly to the hard floor and heart-pine walls and ceilings of favorite sites and speak regretfully, if not disparagingly, of the carpeted floors and spiritless sound of other churches or buildings where a few sessions are held. . . . Given a choice . . . the singers would not exchange any dozen of one-room structures they sing in for the finest halls in the land.” Inside, every pew is packed. At the front where the altar would normally be, chairs have been arranged in four sections facing each other to form the hollow square. In the middle of the square, a volunteer song leader calls out the number of the first song and the singing rapidly begins. Singing at Liberty gives meaning to the term “full voice” singing. The alto section, in particular, though not as large in number as the trebles, basses, or tenors, is so forceful that the other sections must ramp up the volume to compete. The harmony is rich and thick; the church is immediately electrified with the sound. Outside, Willard Wright has pulled his pickup truck onto the lawn, the flatbed loaded with seven ice cream freezers and the makings for seven different kinds of homemade ice cream. Throughout the morning, he pours rock salt over ice while the electric freezers whir. From time to time he stops and pulls a top off one of the stainless steel canisters and takes a taste. His favorite flavor is peach, made with fruit grown nearby and his secret ingredient: a touch of Nehi peach soda. Willard makes sugar-free orange and peach for those in the crowd

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whose diets don’t allow sugar, and he’s proud of his peanut butter ice cream sweetened with brown sugar. As noon approaches women start to drift out of the church and begin unloading ice chests and covered baskets, filling the long tables stretched end to end beneath the tabernacle roof with pots and bowls, casserole dishes, and serving spoons. Coy Ivey and his son Rodney, both olive-skinned men with dark brown eyes and thick black eyelashes, unload large aluminum roasting dishes filled to the top with Coy’s famed oven-cooked pulled pork barbecue. The tender meat is sweet and wet with a healthy kick of cayenne pepper. Another huge roasting pan is filled with crisp, deep-fried chicken livers, prepared by Coy just this morning. They’re coated with egg whites and buttermilk, then rolled in seasoned flour and fried in peanut oil in an industrial-size deep fryer. Nothing but White Lily flour will do, Coy warns. Rilla Greeson unveils her coconut layer cake. Its white frosting glossy and thick, the creation stands at least eight inches tall. Surrounding it are fruit pies, brownies, cream pies, and meringue pies. Reba Dell Windham adds her rum Bundt cake to the table, golden brown and drizzled with a rum and brown sugar glaze. Like many others who’ve come to Henagar this weekend, Reba is here to see family and friends on Sand Mountain where she grew up. She and her husband Bill divide their time between Michigan and Florida now, with many trips to singings all year long. “Daddy was a sawmiller,” she says, pulling more dishes from her ice chest — a broccoli casserole, a sweet potato casserole, and a rice dish. “My parents, my brother and sister are buried here, in the Liberty Cemetery.”

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When she travels to Henagar she parks her mobile home on family land and spends an entire day cooking in her mobile kitchen. “Mother always brought that rum cake to the singing, until she passed away,” she says, adding with a wink, “A little extra rum in the icing makes us sing better in the afternoon.” A steady buzz of conversation, punctuated by sharp laughs and the trill of a mockingbird overhead, fills the warm air. A little boy jumps from knobby root to knobby root around the base of one of the massive oaks. When dinner is over the dishes are quickly put away and the singing resumes for the afternoon. We turn to number 340 in our books, a hymn called “Odem,” written by T. J. Denson in 1935. Voices rise strong, renewed by the feast. Singers stir the air with cardboard fans as song once again permeates Liberty Church: Life is the time for words of praise Hands clasp with friendly smile, Blessings to cheer a pilgrim’s days. Give me the roses while I live Something to cheer me on; Useless the flowers you may give After the soul is gone. Following the first day of the convention, we are invited to Saturday evening fellowship at Coy Ivey’s farm where pickers pull out their instruments; Cassie Franklin, a soloist on the Cold Mountain soundtrack, gifts us with song; and teenagers, most of them fresh from Camp Fasola, flirt and swing their legs from atop Coy’s big green tractor.

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I’ve been reading Carl Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama, the book on which the popular song, and the slogan on Alabama license plates, is based. Published in 1934, Stars reportedly sold one thousand copies a day at the height of its popularity, making its description of a Sacred Harp singing possibly the most widely read account of this musical, religious, and folk history phenomenon. Many scholars have criticized Carmer’s take on the singing he attended, as he seemed more interested in a blooming romance he witnessed between a girl in an orange dress and the boy she runs off with at the end of the day, than in the singing itself or the sacred aspect of the event. Still, Carmer’s descriptions are rich, his take on dinner on the ground evocative, and though the point might not be made delicately, he accurately points out that in earlier times in rural places like Sand Mountain, these singings were much-needed social events that brought isolated farmers and their families together with others who lived in similar isolation. When I first told my Uncle Frank, who grew up on a farm in rural Montgomery County, Tennessee, that I was writing about Sacred Harp singing, he pulled this little ditty from his memory: All day singin’ and dinner on the ground Boys in the bushes and pretty girls all around. Indeed, many of the older singers will tell you they met their true love at a singing. Some will describe the first time they saw the girls or boys they eventually married across the hollow square. Those evocations of the social function of Sacred Harp singings come to mind as I watch the young singers mingling at Coy Ivey’s barbecue.

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On Sunday morning, Betty Lacy Shepherd, a fit and outgoing woman in her mid-sixties, is one of the first to arrive at the church, carrying an ice chest filled with food, including her signature dish, poor man’s caviar — a cold salad of marinated black-eyed peas, bell peppers, and green onions. Betty’s mother was an Ivey, and her father, Leonard Lacy — better known as Uncle Leonard — taught Betty and many of the Henagar singers how to read shape-note music and sing in parts when they were young children. “I thought everybody lived like this, until I joined the Air Force and saw the world,” says Betty. She left home at eighteen, and lived in many places around the country, then returned to Alabama when her husband died, to the place where, she says, “people are so good to me.” Betty worked for a while as a cook on a riverboat on the Tennessee River and now lives down the mountain in Fort Payne. “I can’t remember a time in my life when there wasn’t singing. I thought everybody did this, sang like this.” The morning sky is crisp and blue. Some of the singers from other states have headed home, so the crowd is a bit smaller today, and notably more dressed up. Ladies have pulled out their hats and men their ties for Sunday’s singing. Sandy Ivey is dressed in a straw hat and a low-waisted linen dress, a yard sale treasure, imprinted with the stars and stripes of the American flag. She wears it with equal amounts of pride and good humor. We open with song number 278, a mournful sounding song, written in a minor key, sung slowly: Long have I sat beneath the sound of Thy salvation Lord And still how weak my faith is found And knowledge of Thy word.

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Show my forgetful feet the way that leads to joys on high Where knowledge grows without decay And love shall never die. The room vibrates with the steady tapping of shoe soles on the hardwood floor. The memorial lesson commences before the noon break for those singers who have passed away in the last year, and a song is offered for the sick and shut-in, led by Alison Ivey, Coy’s tall, blonde granddaughter, a graduate student at Auburn University studying audiology. Alison’s father, David, a well-known teacher of Sacred Harp singing, is the president of this annual convention. We dismiss for lunch, and Karen Ivey, David’s wife, uncovers a large blue-speckled enamel dish containing her sweet potato cobbler, its golden crust fragrant with nutmeg. “I got the recipe from Miss Alma Lambert of Oneonta, Alabama,” Karen recalls. Firm slices of bright orange sweet potato mingle with soft dough beneath the firm crust. “She wrote the recipe right in the back of my songbook.” Karen’s book is a living history, the pages crowded with notes scribbled throughout: “Sung at Papa’s funeral.” “First song Alison ever led.” David says he tasted that sweet potato cobbler and announced to the world, “I found a woman I’m gonna marry.” A breeze has come up, and at the bottom of the hill beyond the churchyard, the dappled surface of a pond ripples beneath the pines. Dishes of vegetables grown in local gardens line the table: bush beans, pole beans, butter beans, sweet corn, cucumbers and tomatoes, yellow squash. Ladies fan the tables with branches to keep the flies away.

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At the edge of the crowd, eighty-six-year-old Loyd Ivey crouches over an old zinc washtub in the back of his pickup truck. He has squeezed some 650 lemons by hand this weekend to provide lemonade for the singing. He makes a syrup of a gallon of pure lemon juice and ten pounds of sugar, then starts adding water. “No chemicals or nothin’, just water from the well,” says Loyd. He adds water until the mixture tastes right, then starts adding ice, stirring all the while with a big ladle. Bud Oliver, an old friend from Lookout Mountain, looks on. “If you want to taste some real lemonade, come on over to the Lookout Mountain singing in August,” he says, glancing up at Loyd for a reaction. The Lookout Mountain Convention at Pine Grove Church has been held continuously for over one hundred years, and the good-natured lemonade rivalry has persisted for about half that time. There’s even a session on lemonade making at Camp Fasola, complete with the lore of the long-held competition. “He says his water comes out from under a rock and that makes it taste better,” says Loyd, still stirring. “Well, mine does too — a rock way under the ground. He leaves his hulls and all in. I think if you leave those hulls, after a while they get bitter.” Bud laughs and takes a swig of Loyd’s lemonade, pretending to gag. At the end of the singing each year, Loyd takes his washtub home, oils it and hangs it up in the barn until the next singing. He has done it this way for fifty-seven years. Gazell Parker (“She’s a Lacy,” says Sandy) has brought homemade hominy to dinner, a rare treat that calls for Hickory King corn which Gazell grows in her garden. An elabo-

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rate washing and soaking process involving lye softens and swells the hard corn kernels that are then cooked at a slow boil. The flavor is unforgettable, smoky and earthbound. Just as the food has all been laid out, a huge thunderburst shatters the sky overhead and rain begins to pour. Everyone moves into the pavilion, crowding around the table as the men of the church unroll plastic sheeting to form temporary walls. A few folks escape into the church, their plates piled with food. “The good thing is we always make it work,” says David Ivey. He and Karen recall dinners before the tabernacle at Liberty Church was built, when sheets of plywood were stretched across the pew tops to form tables. No one seems to notice or to miss a bite as thunder clashes outside the makeshift dining room. Rodney Ivey escorts several older women, one by one, back to the church beneath the shelter of his umbrella. Finally the rain calms, the tables are cleared, and the afternoon singing commences. “We had a good dinner again today,” says David, leafing through his book toward the song he has chosen to lead. A long round of applause ensues, praise for dinner. During the final afternoon session several leaders call friends or family members up to lead with them. Reba Dell Windham and Betty Lou Shepherd lead a rousing rendition of number 196, “Alabama.” Coy Ivey fills the square with eight of his grandchildren — Alison, Richard, Zach, Ivey, Sumner, Worth, Jessica, and Cheyenne — and they lead “Sweet Canaan”: O who will come and go with me? I am bound for the land of Canaan O Canaan, sweet Canaan,

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I’m bound for the land of Canaan, Sweet Canaan ’tis my happy home; I am bound for the land of Canaan. As the afternoon sun heats the fallen rain, clouds of steam rise from the lawn and the singing draws to an end. Rodney and David Ivey, Shane Wootten, and Tony Ivey lead the group in a beloved ritual, the Parting Hand. A closing prayer is offered and #62, “Parting Hand” is sung. During the first verse the congregation stands in place. Then as the remaining verses are sung, singers embrace one another at will, receiving and giving the parting hand as they sing: How sweet the hours have passed away Since we have met to sing and pray. How loath we are to leave the place O could I stay with friends so kind, O would it cheer my drooping mind! But duty makes me understand That we must take the parting hand. Two days of singing have passed and the bittersweet final song has ended. Clouds have cleared and the air has been washed by rain as the singers say their long goodbyes. The Henagar Union Convention is over for the eightyninth time. Cars are loaded and the church lot empties as tired singers rest their voices, their hearts inclined already toward next year’s all-day singing, their recipes sharpened, and their appetites primed for next year’s dinner on the ground.

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v v v

Coy Ivey’s Oven-cooked Pulled Pork Barbecue 1 or more bone-in pork Boston butt (about 7 lbs.) 1¾ cups barbecue sauce, preferably Cattlemen’s Original 1 cup ketchup ⅓ cup Coca-Cola ½ tsp. Tabasco sauce ½ tsp. cayenne Salt and black pepper Hamburger buns Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Wrap pork well in heavy aluminum foil, sealing it tightly at the top. Transfer to a deep roasting pan, sealed side up, and fill pan halfway with water. Bake, refilling water halfway through, until the pork is very tender and falling away from the bone, about 8 hours. Unwrap pork, discarding any juices, and transfer to a sheet tray. When cool enough to handle, shred pork, discarding bone and any fat, and transfer to a large bowl. Add barbecue sauce, ketchup, Coca-Cola, Tabasco, cayenne, and salt and pepper to taste. Mix well to combine. Discard water from roasting pan and dry out pan with a towel. Transfer pork to the pan and cover tightly with aluminum foil. Cook in oven until pork is heated through, about 45 minutes. Spoon the pork barbecue onto hamburger buns and serve hot.

p  “I usually do about 5 or 6 whole Boston butts in two cookings; that’ll make about 40 pounds of barbecue.” Coy Ivey

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Coy Ivey’s Pepper Sauce 1 quart apple cider vinegar 1 tsp. salt 1 tbsp. sugar Whole hot peppers, red or green or both Boil vinegar, salt, and sugar; cool slightly and pour into a glass jar over washed, whole hot peppers and seal. Serve over greens and cabbage, with beans or anything else you want to spice up. v v v

Sandy Ivey’s Baked Beans

2 28-oz. cans pork and beans (I like Showboat brand) 1½ cups light brown sugar 1 cup ketchup ½ cup yellow mustard ½ cup molasses ¼ cup juice from a jar of sweet pickles 1 small yellow onion, thinly sliced 4 strips bacon, halved crosswise

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Put pork and beans, ketchup, mustard, pickle juice, brown sugar, and molasses into a large ovenproof pot or bean pot and stir well to combine. Top the bean mixture with onion slices and lay the bacon over

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the top in a single layer. Bake, uncovered, until the bacon is crisp and the beans are hot and bubbling, about 1 hour. Remove from the oven and allow to cool slightly. Stir the onions and bacon into the beans before serving. v v v

Sandy Ivey’s Chicken and Dumplings 1 whole chicken Chicken bouillon cubes 3⅔ cups self-rising flour Salt and pepper to taste Put chicken in a large stew pot; add about 8 cups of water, bring to a boil then simmer until meat is falling off the bones. Salt lightly. Take out chicken, cool and remove bones. Cut meat into bite-sized pieces and put in a bowl. Strain the broth into a medium-sized saucepan, add about 7 chicken bouillon cubes to broth and dissolve over low heat. Take out 1½ cups of broth and cool to use for making dough. Add broth to flour — enough to make a stiff dough. Let dough sit while you bring the remaining broth to a boil. Meanwhile, take half the dough and roll it out on a floured cloth. Sprinkle flour on top of dough so it isn’t sticky. Roll and roll some more; you want the dumplings thin. Cut into strips about 1½ inches wide with a pizza cutter. Have your broth boiling and pinch off pieces of your dumplings and drop into boiling broth. Keep it boiling but be careful it doesn’t boil over; lower heat if it does.

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Continue adding dumplings until you’ve used up the dough you had rolled out. Turn pot on low, cover, let simmer 2 or 3 minutes. Don’t stir the dumplings or they will come apart. Transfer cooked dumplings to a Dutch oven along with part of the chicken. Add some ladles of hot broth. Bring the remaining broth back to a boil, roll out the rest of your dough and cook as before, transfer to Dutch oven with more chicken and more broth if needed (you don’t want them dry, nor do you want them drowning).

p  “If you are making them in the morning to take to a singing

you want them a little soupy because they will take up broth before it’s dinnertime. Also I wrap the pot in a big towel or two to keep it hot until dinnertime. My dumplings are more like noodles; I make them the way my grandmother taught me.” Sandy Ivey

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Sandy Ivey’s Refrigerator Rolls 1 cup plus 1 tbsp. vegetable shortening 1 cup sugar 1½ tsp. salt 1 cup boiling water 2 eggs, beaten 2 7-gram packages active dry yeast 1 cup warm water 7 cups unsifted plain flour ¼ cup butter, melted

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Grease a baking sheet with 1 tbsp. shortening; set aside. Put remaining shortening, sugar, salt, and 1 cup boiling water into a large nonmetal bowl and stir to dissolve shortening; let cool to lukewarm. Add eggs and stir with a wooden spoon to combine. Put yeast and 1 cup warm water into a small bowl and stir to dissolve. Add yeast mixture to shortening mixture; stir to combine. Add flour and stir, first with a wooden spoon, then with your hands, to form a dough. Turn dough out onto a heavily floured surface and knead gently until dough forms a smooth ball, about 1 to 2 minutes. Clean out bowl, place dough inside, and cover with plastic wrap. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours or overnight. Transfer dough to a lightly floured surface and roll out into an 8 × 15 inch rectangle. Cut out rounds using a 2½inch round biscuit cutter. Brush tops of each round with melted butter (reserve leftover butter), then fold each in half to form half-moon shapes, pressing down gently on edges to secure shape. Arrange rolls on the prepared baking sheet, spaced evenly apart. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and place in a warm spot to let rise until doubled in size, about 1 to 2 hours. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Uncover rolls and bake until golden brown and cooked through, 13 to 15 minutes. Brush with reserved butter; let cool.

p  “When Tony and I married, the ladies of the Church gave me a book they made of their favorite recipes. This is one of them.” Sandy Ivey

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Sandy’s Pound Cake ½ pound real butter 3 cups sugar, divided 6 eggs, separated 1 tsp. vanilla 1 cup heavy whipping cream 3 cups cake flour Have all ingredients at room temperature. Grease and flour tube pan. Cream butter, add 2 cups sugar and cream till light and fluffy. Add beaten egg yolks, mix well. Sift cake flour 3 times and then measure. Alternate adding flour and whipping cream, starting and ending with flour. Beat well after each addition. Add vanilla and mix well. Beat egg whites till soft peaks form; gradually add remaining sugar while beating into a stiff meringue. Fold into batter. Pour in tube pan. Place in cold oven. Bake at 325 degrees for 1½ hours or till done. Let cool in pan for 20 minutes. Turn out. v v v

Tony Ivey’s Dry Rub for Barbecue Pork Measure proportionately, depending on the amount you need:

6 parts salt 6 parts sugar 2 parts red pepper

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2 parts Accent seasoning 2 parts black pepper 1 part paprika

Put in a 2-gallon Ziploc bag and mix. Rub generously onto meat before barbecuing. v v v

Betty Shepherd’s Poor Man’s Caviar 2 cans black-eyed peas, drained 1 red and 1 green bell pepper, seeded and finely diced 8 green onions, chopped 1½ cups cilantro, chopped fine 2 cups tomatoes, finely diced Mix all ingredients to blend flavors. Pour 1 bottle spicy Italian dressing over the top, mix, cover and refrigerate several hours or overnight. Serve as salad or side dish, cold or at room temperature. Makes 8 cups.

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Ramen Noodle Slaw dr e ssing: 1 cup olive oil ¼ cup sugar ¼ cup vinegar

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¼ cup soy sauce 2 flavor packets from ramen noodle soup Mix all together and cook over low heat, stirring constantly to dissolve sugar. Set aside and cool. sl aw :

1 bag coleslaw mix 1 medium head cabbage, grated 6 bunches green onions, chopped 1 heaping cup sunflower seeds 1 cup slivered almonds 2 or 3 packages ramen noodles, lightly crushed

When ready to serve, mix thoroughly and pour dressing over slaw mixture. Toss lightly.

p  There are many versions of this recipe prepared for singings across the country. This one comes from Betty Shepherd of Fort Payne, Alabama.

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Betty Shepherd’s Chocolate Sheet Cake

2 cups sugar 1 stick margarine 3 tablespoons cocoa

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2 eggs, beaten ½ tsp. cinnamon ½ tsp. salt 2 cups flour ½ cup shortening 1 cup water 1 tsp. vanilla ½ tsp. baking soda ½ cup buttermilk ½ cup chopped nuts (walnuts or pecans)

Bring margarine, shortening, water, and cocoa to a rolling boil. Pour over mixture of cinnamon, salt, flour, and baking soda. Mix well, then add eggs, vanilla, and milk. Add nuts. Bake in 9 × 13 inch pan that has been floured and greased; cook at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. Don’t overbake. ic ing: 1 stick margarine ⅓ cup milk 1 tsp. vanilla 3½ tsp. cocoa 1 box powdered sugar 1 cup chopped nuts 1 cup flaked coconut (optional) Bring milk, margarine, and cocoa to boil. Remove from heat. Stir in powdered sugar and nuts. Pour over hot cake. Cool completely and serve.

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Willard Wright’s Fresh Peach Ice Cream 3 large eggs 2 cups sugar 12 oz. can evaporated milk 1 cup whole milk 1½ cups puréed ripe fresh peaches 1 cup peach soda Whole milk Pinch of salt In large microwave bowl, combine eggs, sugar, evaporated milk, and whole milk. Beat well. Cook mixture in microwave, stirring every 1 to 2 minutes. Cook until mixture is like thin pudding. Cool. Peel and purée peaches. When ready to freeze, combine cooked egg mixture, puréed peaches, and peach soda. Pour into a 4-quart electric freezer, add enough whole milk until mixture reaches fill line, then add a pinch of salt and freeze according to freezer directions.

p  “We try to make 9 gallons of homemade ice cream for the July singing at Liberty Church every year. The peach is the favorite.” Willard Wright

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Betty Wright’s Fruit Punch

6 lemons 6 oranges 1 quart boiling water 5 lbs. sugar 2 oz. tartaric acid (cream of tartar) 4 oz. citric acid (I use Mrs. Wage’s)

Juice lemons and oranges. Set juice aside. Reserve rinds or peels and sprinkle the tartaric acid and citric acid over the peels. Cover with boiling water, let stand 15 minutes. Strain and throw away the peels. In large pot combine 5 lbs. sugar with the strained water and heat until sugar is well dissolved. Cool. In gallon container combine juices and sugar mixture. Add enough water to make 1 gallon. This makes a heavy concentrate. Store in a container with tight-fitting lid. Refrigerate for at least 2 days before using, to let the flavors come together. When ready to use, mix 1 part fruit punch concentrate with 3 parts water. Serve over crushed ice. Refrigerate leftover concentrate up to 2 weeks, or freeze and reconstitute later with water. Makes 4 gallons.

p  “We like to make this a couple of days ahead and we use

non-chlorinated water. This recipe has been in our family prior to the Civil War. We make it several times a year for singings. The flavor blossoms after it sits in the refrigerator a few days, and it freezes well. I just pull it out of the freezer and add water whenever the grandkids come over.” Betty Wright

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Rilla Greeson’s Best Coconut Cake 1 box Duncan Hines butter cake mix ¼ cup sugar ¾ cup vegetable oil 4 eggs 1 container (8 oz.) sour cream Mix all at medium speed of mixer for 4 minutes. Bake in 3 9-inch cake pans. Bake at 350 degrees 22 to 30 minutes. Cool. f il l ing: 1 cup sugar 3 well-beaten eggs ¾ cup Pet milk (small can) 1 stick margarine 1 tsp. vanilla 1 12-oz. package frozen coconut Cook sugar, eggs, milk, and margarine until thickened, stirring as you cook. Add coconut and vanilla. Let cool. Spread between layers and on top layer. ic ing: 2 egg whites 1½ cups sugar 6 tbsp. water

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¼ tsp. cream of tartar 16 large marshmallows or about 2 cups of miniatures 1 tsp. vanilla Mix egg whites, sugar, water, and cream of tartar in top of double boiler. Let water come to a boil, set top on and set timer for 4 minutes, beating all the time with electric mixer. When 4 minutes are up add marshmallows and vanilla. Remove from heat and beat until thick enough to spread on cake. Spread icing on cake and sprinkle with frozen coconut. This icing recipe is usable in damp weather. It will make enough icing to fill and ice an 8-or 9-inch cake if filling above is not used.

p  “Cake layers can be cooked and frozen ahead of time on

the day I stack it. I stack the cake on Thursday and place in the refrigerator. Then I put the icing on on Saturday. If it is for Sunday dinner, you can leave it out of the refrigerator. It can be stored in refrigerator in hot weather.” Rilla Reed Greeson

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Sylvia Ivey’s Grape Salad

1 block (8 oz.) cream cheese 1 container (8 oz.) sour cream 1 cup granulated sugar

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1 tsp. vanilla 4 to 5 cups grapes, red and green, washed and patted dry, cut in half if desired Brown sugar Pecans, chopped Mix cream cheese and granulated sugar until sugar dissolves. Add sour cream and vanilla, mix well. Put grapes in a bowl, pour cream cheese mixture over the top, sprinkle with brown sugar and chopped nuts, if desired. v v v

Karen Ivey’s Sweet Potato Cobbler 4 medium-large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut lengthwise into ⅓-inch slices 5 cups sugar 2 sticks butter ½ to ¾ tsp. nutmeg ¼ tsp. cinnamon 3 cups self-rising flour ¾ cup plus 1 tbsp. vegetable shortening 1 egg, lightly beaten 1 tsp. white vinegar Ice water Preheat oven to 400 degrees. To make crust, cut ¾ cup shortening into flour using pastry blender or 2 table knives, until it resembles coarse meal. Whisk together egg, vinegar, and 1 cup ice water

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in a small bowl; pour into flour mixture. Mix, first with a wooden spoon, then with your hands, into a dough. Form dough into 3 balls, wrap each in plastic wrap, and refrigerate. Put potatoes, sugar (reserve 1 tbsp. for later use), nutmeg, and 6 cups water into a large pot; bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until potatoes are just tender, 6 to 7 minutes. Remove from heat. Grease a 9 × 13 × 3 inch baking pan with remaining shortening. Roll a dough ball out into a 10 × 13 inch rectangle and cut lengthwise into 3 equal strips. Line only the sides of the pan with dough strips, pressing them together where their edges meet. Bake until crust is a light golden brown, about 18 minutes. Remove pan from oven, fill with half of the potatoes and their water, and dot with 6 tbsp. of the butter. Roll second dough ball out into a 10 × 13 inch rectangle; drape it over potatoes. Melt 4 tbsp. of the butter and brush dough with half of it. Bake until golden brown, about 20 minutes. Remove pan from oven, top with the remaining sweet potatoes and their water, and dot with remaining 6 tbsp. butter. Roll remaining dough out into a 10 × 13 inch rectangle; drape it over potatoes. Brush with remaining melted butter and bake until golden brown, 25 to 30 minutes. Remove from oven and sprinkle with reserved sugar and cinnamon. Let cool completely.

p  “When making this cobbler for singings, I double the recipe. Two pans of potatoes will cook at the same time, and I use a large blue-speckled enamel roasting pan.” Karen Ivey

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Eloise Wootten’s Chicken Casserole 1 can cream of chicken soup, undiluted ¾ cup margarine 1 cup cooked rice 2 tbsp. chopped onion 1 can water chestnuts, sliced 2 cups chopped cooked chicken breast ½ cup slivered almonds Ritz crackers Margarine Mix all together except crackers, and put in casserole dish. Crush 1 sleeve Ritz crackers, sprinkle on top. Dot with slices of ½ stick margarine. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.

p  “For the singing, I usually fix green beans, stewed new

potatoes, maybe a chicken casserole, fried okra, some kind of salad, creamed corn (home-grown), four-layer delight ice box cake, a pudding.” (When I spoke to Eloise Wootten on the telephone and asked for her recipes, she sighed and said, “It’s just food, honey.”) Eloise Wootten

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Louise Ivey’s Easy Cream Pie Crust 1¼ cups plain flour ¼ cup powdered sugar 1 stick margarine, melted Mix ingredients together. Use your hands to press dough into a Pyrex pie plate, bake in preheated 350 degree oven until lightly browned. Remove from oven. v v v

Louise Ivey’s Coconut Cream Pie 1 cup sugar 2 cups whole milk 4 tbsp. self rising flour 2 eggs, separated (use whites for meringue) 1 tsp. vanilla 1⅓ cup Angel Flake coconut Beat egg yolks in ½ cup of the milk. Mix sugar, flour and a little milk in a saucepan until smooth, then add additional milk and egg mixture. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until real thick. (Use a wooden spoon and stir bottom of pan to prevent scorching.) Remove from heat and add vanilla and coconut. Pour into baked 9-inch piecrust.

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mer ingue: 2 egg whites ½ cup sugar Coconut With mixer, beat egg whites until they stand in stiff peaks, adding sugar a little at a time (whites should continue to stand in stiff peaks). Spread on top of pie and sprinkle with coconut. Brown in preheated 400-degree oven until lightly browned, about 3 to 5 minutes. Watch closely — coconut will burn quickly. v v v

Louise Ivey’s Chocolate Cream Pie

1 cup sugar 2 cups whole milk 4 tbsp. self-rising flour 2 tbsp. cocoa 2 eggs, separated (use whites for meringue) 1 tsp. vanilla

Beat egg yolks in ½ cup of the milk. Mix sugar, flour, cocoa, and a little milk in a saucepan until smooth, then add additional milk and egg mixture. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until real thick. Use a wooden spoon and stir bottom of pan to prevent scorching. Remove from heat and add vanilla. Pour into baked 9-inch piecrust.

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Spread with meringue (see recipe above) and brown in preheated 400-degree oven until lightly browned, about 3 to 5 minutes (watch closely).

p  “I don’t cook the day of the singing. I do mine the day we

eat. Everybody says, ‘How do you do that?’ I get up at about 4 in the morning.” Louise Ivey

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Louise Ivey’s Homegrown Cornbread

1½ cups plain cornmeal 2 tbsp. self-rising flour ½ tsp. salt ½ tsp. baking powder ¼ tsp. baking soda 1 tbsp. oil ½ cup buttermilk ½ cup water

Preheat oven and well-oiled cast iron cornbread skillet to 460 degrees. Heat pan until oil is slightly smoking. Mix dry ingredients then add liquids, mix well, then pour into hot, oiled cast iron cornbread skillet. Return to oven and cook 10 to 15 minutes or until top begins to turn to medium brown, then turn oven on broil and brown to desired color.

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I bake my bread in a cornbread skillet that is divided into 8 individual triangle wedges. Put 1 teaspoon oil in each section and put skillet into cold oven as the oven preheats to 460 degrees (8 to 10 minutes). Spoon batter into the sections and bake 10 to 15 minutes until top begins to turn a medium brown, then turn oven on broil and brown to desired color.

p  “We grow our bread corn in the summer and take it to

Skyline Mountain and have it ground into meal. We sift the meal to remove the bran and then we bag it and freeze it to keep it fresh. We enjoy fresh cornbread all year. My grandchildren would rather have another piece of cornbread than a piece of cake. Use plain meal (white) if you don’t have access to fresh ground meal.” Louise Ivey

My singing buddy Mr. Uel Freeman ready for all-day singing and dinner on the ground at the 2004 national convention.

Ann Beasley Ballard oversaw pulling dinner together for four hundred and still managed to bring her homemade banana pudding. Fried chicken heads the table at the National Sacred Harp Singing Convention held each summer in Birmingham, where volunteers organize and provide food for hundreds of singers over three days.

Singers fill their plates after a long morning of singing at the national convention in Birmingham. Following dinner on the ground, the singing resumes for two more hours.

Volunteers rush to the kitchen or the pavilion to uncover the dishes before the crowd converges for dinner.

Longtime friends and Sacred Harp singers Shelbie Sheppard and Charlene Wallace make their trademark layered salad at each year’s national convention. Shelbie and Charlene’s layered salad, complete with Bar-B-Que Twisters, flanked by a pan of golden corn muffins

The table is generally blessed with an abundance of deviled eggs, sliced tomatoes, pickles, and various relishes. Visitors to the national convention dig into dinner on the ground.

No calorie cutting at the dessert table

At dawn, the small town of Hoboken fills with the smell of burning hickory to smoke hundreds of chickens and pork butts. Smoked chickens and pork roasts are the staple meats at the Hoboken dinner.

Children like this little boy get their first experiences singing shape notes at conventions like the one in Hoboken. Ham, green beans, turnip greens, and fried okra with pickled pepper sauce

Vegetables and casseroles lining the table at Hoboken

Mount Vernon Primitive Baptist Church, formerly King’s School House, located near Natural Bridge, Alabama Inside the tiny church, Miss Willadeen leads a song.

Wakefield family members lay out their dishes beneath the tabernacle for dinner on the ground.

These are a baked version of the traditional fried pie, with fruit fillings and fewer calories. Heading out to play after a big dinner

Many youngsters, like this little girl, learn the shapes and the tunes while sitting in their singing grandmothers’ laps. The old apothecary store where the Northwest Arkansas singers practice

A group of Northwest Arkansas singers regularly practice on the grounds of the Shiloh Living History Museum in Springdale.

Lifelong singer Sydney Caldwell leads the Northwest Arkansas group in a Sunday afternoon practice session.

v

Chapter Four



SEA#LE, BOULDER, ‡ COLORADO SP|iNGS Farewell, dear brothers, fare you well Pray do not weep for me. I’m going home with Christ to dwell Throughout eternity. “Sister’s Farewell,” #55, The Sacred Harp,  Cooper edition

sep t ember 2005 Over the two years since I had attended my first Sacred Harp singing, I’d met a number of Coloradans who were longtime singers. Like me, they were happy Sacred Harp pilgrims, driving or flying hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles, to join the throngs at a faraway convention or to venture down Alabama, Georgia, or Mississippi country byways to experience the old ways. Finally, in the glorious autumn of 2005, I traveled to Boulder to sing with my neighbors on our shared western turf. The sixteenth annual Rocky Mountain Sacred Harp Convention

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convened on September 24 and 25 at the Wild Sage Common House, part of a progressive co-housing community in that most progressive, spiritually hybrid of cities. The drive up from Colorado Springs was bathed in crisp fall air and light, beneath a sky the color of morning glories. September in the Rocky Mountain West is as close to heaven as it gets beyond the experience of a really good Sacred Harp singing. The idea of combining the two filled me with rapturous anticipation. The common house sat at the center of a neighborhood of modern, utilitarian houses, all sided with corrugated aluminum and painted brightly in competing hues. The streets were designed to enclose the community, protecting it from through traffic and opening the streets to bikers and walkers except for the occasional creeping car seeking an unobtrusive parking space. Co-housing communities, invented in Denmark and exported to the United States in the 1980s, are often referred to as “intentional” communities, designed, planned, owned and operated jointly by the individual homeowners and renters who make up the community. If a trail is to be built, a street blocked off to automobiles, a piece of common open space designated to be a vegetable garden, the decision is made by consensus of all who share the community. Common houses, like the one at Wild Sage, usually house a community kitchen, possibly a place to sit together and enjoy a fire or watch television, and an open area where meals can be shared and meetings held. The common house belongs to everyone in the community and permission for its use is granted by consensus of all community members. Wild Sage’s common house sits in the center of the complex and is graced with a beamed cathedral ceiling, wood

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floors and large windows, and glass doors that open out to decks offering spectacular mountain views at all times of year. The sun streamed through so brightly the first day of the convention that many singers kept their sunglasses on. Nametags boasted home states as far flung as New Mexico, Utah, Pennsylvania, California, and Texas. The singing comprised a healthy group of around seventy singers, all seated in comfortable folding chairs around the sun-dappled hollow square. In the front row, tenors Ginnie Ely, who divides her time between Massachusetts and Rocky Mountain National Park, and Gaylon Powell of Austin, Texas, awaited their responsibilities pitching the tunes and helping leaders with time signatures and tempo. Ely, who leads singing schools and has a long history in Sacred Harp, has also written a flyer that is often reprinted and handed out at singing conventions, particularly those outside the South. Her treatise is titled, “A Plea for Participation in the Sacred Harp Tradition.” “It is especially important that you understand that there is a two-hundred-year old tradition behind this music,” writes Ely. “There is a lot more than just getting together with friends and opening the Sacred harp songbook and singing the songs. . . . [W]e are here to take up the flame in its present form and carry it forward respecting all that has gone before and letting that guide us as we move forward in time and place.” Ely urges newcomers to read the histories and, more importantly, “try very hard not to force your own musical and philosophic assumptions on the existing tradition.” The tradition continues to evolve and everyone contributes to that evolution, but it is important to keep in mind that “the elements within the mainstream of the tradition are the domi-

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nating forces that drive the evolution, not our external assumptions.” Another flyer, a Frequently Asked Questions piece, explains the role of the front-row tenor, generally among the most experienced of singers, and always singers comfortable spontaneously pitching a song without the aid of a pitch pipe, and guiding uncertain leaders. When a volunteer gets up to lead, he or she faces the front-row tenors and holds his hand in the air, poised to begin. If a song is written in 4/4 time, the tenors and the leader beat out 1–2–3–4, either down–down– up–up or down–left–right–up. A different meter, 3/4 time is beat to a 1–2–3 count: halfway down on one, all the way down on two, and all the way up on three. Watching the front-row tenors sometimes helps a nervous leader who might be worried about reading the shapes. The leader is able to simply follow the front-row tenor’s hand movements and become accustomed to them rather than, upon demand, try to incorporate yet another skill into the complicated mix. And if a song goes awry, a rare occurrence but one that inevitably happens, the front-row tenors will stop the procession and begin again with no recriminations. Skilled front-row tenors like Ginnie Ely and Gaylon Powell look right into the leader’s eyes, offering an encouraging nod and, frequently, a smile to acknowledge that the song went well. These gestures are especially important to children who stand up to lead, but are equally important to the inexperienced fifty-year-old who wants to lead but doesn’t want to throw a wrench in the works of a well-oiled singing. The morning singing of the Rocky Mountain Convention went smoothly with, predictably, the veterans leading more complex, less familiar tunes, challenging themselves and the

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assembled class, and rookies choosing songs with a familiar melody in the tenor line. Approaching time for dinner on the ground, the warm room began to fill with the scents of food bubbling out of Crockpots, casseroles, and unsheathed aluminum pans. We dismissed with a prayer and walked to the back of the common room where we were greeted by a feast similar to those at southern singings but with a decidedly healthier, Boulder bent: wild rice salad, spaghetti squash, an orange and pecan salad, and some dishes labeled vegan. Someone joked that a healthier lunch makes it easier to save room for dessert, in this case lemon-coconut chess pie, date-nut cake, a pineapple–cream cheese mixture served in a graham cracker crust, and assorted other sweets. I filled my plate three times with a fragrant, spicy lamb dish prepared by Boulder singing veteran Alfred Saussotte, a big, bearded man with a deep bass voice that rumbled across the table we shared. Among those gathered in Boulder were John and Jean Shaffer, two of the original Rocky Mountain shape-note singers who established a regular singing community back in the late 1960s. An oral history by John, preserved on the group’s Web site, recalls a time in 1967 or ’68 when a group from the Denver Friends of Folk Music was encouraged by one of its members to listen to the old Alan Lomax recordings of Sacred Harp singing. A few songbooks were purchased for $3.50 each (they now cost $15 — still a bargain for a thick, sturdy hardback), and John and others tried to teach themselves a few songs. “We got together — about fifteen or twenty of us — on a weekly basis and just started singing,” said Shaffer. None of the songs looked familiar, but at the second session, they dis-

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covered that number 45, titled “New Britain,” was “Amazing Grace” — the tenor line carrying the beloved melody, the lyrics the same as in regular hymnals. “We were fascinated by the different and sometimes strange harmonies but struggled along, working over one part at a time for a handful of songs,” he said. Only a few singers remained of that original group and the once-a-week habit became taxing for young families with children. The group faded out for a while, but after a couple years was rejuvenated. Attendance was good, and the group expanded its reaches to neighboring Fort Collins, Estes Park, and Loveland. Again, singers left the area and the group lost much of its central core. In the 1980s, an enthusiastic couple that had enjoyed a regular singing group in Palo Alto, California, and had relocated to Colorado, helped revitalize the group. Alfred Saussotte, who still sings regularly, contacted Hugh McGraw of Georgia and the Sacred Harp Publishing Company to get on the national newsletter mailing list and to purchase new books, now $6.50. The newsletter listed ongoing singing conventions around the country, and John and his wife, Jeanne, traveled to Birmingham in 1986 for the three-day National Sacred Harp Singing Convention. “Having attended some conventions of professional organizations, we expected a hefty registration fee and panel discussions and seminars and a long, dull Annual Meeting,” said John. What he found instead were warm greetings, no registration fee, a perfect acoustical setting, singers from across the country, and a sound like nothing he’d ever heard. “Two hundred people sounded that first chord like they meant it, and off we went,” Shaffer remembered. When he and Jeanne returned to their motel, they listened to tapes and,

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at one point, could still hear the sound of Sacred Harp singing after the tape had been turned off. They looked out the window to discover a “bunch of singers gathered around the swimming pool and singing without books.” The Shaffers returned to the national convention again the next year and in 1990 the first Rocky Mountain Singing Convention was born, with the encouragement of Hugh McGraw. To the Shaffers’ delight, he had convinced an Alabama woman named Ruth Brown, known for loading up buses of southern singers and taking them to singings around the country, to bring a group of about thirty to Colorado. Singers from New Mexico came up for the weekend and the seeds of that group were sown. Eventually, the two groups decided to alternate the Rocky Mountain convention between New Mexico and Colorado, and that arrangement remains in place today. Shaffer’s history, recorded in 1988, ends with the plaintive question, “Who will write the second twenty years?” That might remain unclear, but participation in Sacred Harp singing some eighteen years after his oral history was recorded is regular, strong, and healthy in the Boulder area. Small groups hold regular singings each month in Boulder, Fort Collins, and Denver, and in 2005 a new singing was born in Colorado Springs. Following dinner, the afternoon session was rousing and satisfying. Singer Russ Nye offered a closing prayer for day one: “Dear Lord, the world needs more harmony, and we’ve got it here today.” Day two was a sparkling September Colorado Sunday, and despite being tempted to spend the day outside, most singers, with the exception of those who had to leave early to drive long distances home, returned to sing.

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Ginnie Ely, who lives part of the year at Estes Park and works as a naturalist and guide in the Rocky Mountain National Park, gave the memorial lesson. Just a few days before the convention convened, the body of thirty-one-yearold park ranger Jeff Christensen, who fell to his death, was found in a remote area of the park. Ginnie and others had searched for their colleague for a week. She dedicated the memorial service to him. Just as the park rangers were bound to Jeff, said Ginnie, so Sacred Harp singers are “bound by community. No matter where we go to sing this music, we are at home.” John Shaffer led a song in honor of the sick and shut-in and the class dispersed for a second day of feasting in the Wild Sage common room. Neighbors wandered in to listen throughout the afternoon, including a young Hasidic Jewish man with the traditional long forelocks and head wear. His eyes wandered from the book in his lap to the singers who seemed to race through tunes, so fast at times they lost their breath and heaved a collective “Whew!” after the last note. We sang until Earl and Leon Ballinger, brothers in a well-known Alabama singing family, led the final song, number 75: I looked to Jesus and I found In Him my star, my sun; And in that light of life I’ll walk, Till trav’ling days are done. Nearly five months later, I packed a bag of unseasonable clothing and drove through a blizzard to the Colorado Springs airport to await a flight to Seattle and the fifteenth annual Pacific Northwest Sacred Harp Singing Convention. The 7 a.m. flight was delayed indefinitely. Snow and ice

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flew violently sideways, caking over the airport terminal windows. Rather than sit and wait for a flight that might never get off the ground, I gave up my seat and accepted a flight voucher and a free taxi ride to Denver International Airport. What would normally be an hour’s drive took nearly three hours through freezing fog, gusty winds, and swirling blasts of snow on this bitter morning. A few hours later, my plane glided through a crystalline sky past glittering, snow-capped Mount Rainier. The mountain’s mighty canyons and ridges were parallel to our descending aircraft, thrilling and close enough to raise heart rates. The efficient public transportation system of the People’s Republic of Seattle carried me past industrial plants, yacht basins, ports, and skyscrapers to Ballard, a northern suburb originally settled by Scandinavian loggers and millers, now shorn of its forest but tidy and well gardened. Annexed to the city in 1907, Ballard is now a local and national historic district. My bed and breakfast, Chez Sharon, the lower level of a private home, looked out on a sleeping patch of perennials, eager to begin their seasonal bloom. Along the streets red, white, and pink crabapple blossoms burst forth, with cherries and plums soon to follow. In twelve hours, I’d traveled from deep winter to early spring. The next morning I walked past stands of crocus and viola peeking out of deeply mulched flowerbeds, to the Sunset Hill Community Association Clubhouse where Sacred Harp singing would shape the next two days. A neat, beige two-story clapboard building with brown trim and shutters, tall windows, a high ceiling and a wood floor, the clubhouse might have been a church in an earlier incarnation. If not, it was on this day. Morning greetings filled the air as a crowd quickly gath-

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ered. Petite, dark-haired Katharine Hough, a regular Seattle singer, rushed about asking lingerers to help bring up more chairs from the basement. “We’ve never had the problem of not enough chairs before!” she exulted. Her husband, Dave Hough, introduced himself and told me about folk festivals and music fairs of the early 1970s where he’d first heard Sacred Harp singing. He and others became interested and began learning songs from The Sacred Harp. Dave met his wife, Katharine, at a folk singing camp and eventually the couple traveled south to hear the music at the source. “We brought the enthusiasm back,” he said. Seattle is gifted with a number of veteran singers who have traveled to southern singings over the years. Most notable is Karen Willard, co-chair of the convention, a woman in a large-brimmed hat who swept around the room directing food bearers downstairs, checking the coffee supply, and greeting visitors as the singing’s opening time approached. Willard has been instrumental in typesetting pages for the most recent revision of the Cooper edition of The Sacred Harp, has developed a curriculum for teaching shape-note reading to newcomers, is an accomplished alto singer, and travels South each year to teach sessions at Camp Fasola in Alabama. In Seattle, she has helped develop a strong cadre of singers with a high level of musical knowledge. She ceaselessly bears witness to the history and traditions still practiced in the South, urging her fellow northwesterners to keep it pure. The crowd gathered in Seattle this February morning included Mother Felicitas, a Catholic nun dressed in a formal, floor-length black habit, several familiar faces from Alabama and Georgia, and a tattooed and dread-locked contingent of younger singers from Portland. One young man was dressed

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in a long, sackcloth skirt and another in tights, wool socks, hiking boots, and knickers. “I can’t get used to how some people out here dress,” said Reba Dell Windham, here from Alabama with her husband, Bill. “I’ll be giggling all day.” Reba was quick to add that the Portland group included some strong singers and leaders and she was happy to see so many young people involved in Sacred Harp singing. Indeed, as the singing progressed, the young singers from Portland proved to be more than competent, challenging leaders, choosing difficult songs they knew from front to back. Months later, I would think of these singers as I read an e-mail correspondence with Mary McDonald-Lewis of the Portland group, titled “Thoughts on Welcoming Strangers, Portland.” A query had gone out on the fasola.org e-mail list, asking singers to weigh in on how they welcome new singers into their ranks. Mary replied, “I was blessed to have my first exposure to Sacred Harp music be at the hands of Portland Sacred Harp, in the city where I live. For a number of reasons, some of which I can identify and others which are marvelously mysterious, the culture of this group is so open, welcoming and inclusive that walking into the room feels like walking into a hug . . . this, not from my experience alone, but has been related to me by many a newcomer who went on to become a Sacred Harp singer here in Portland.” While MacDonald-Lewis acknowledged that rigorous marketing on the part of the Portland group had resulted in a strong community interest, she affirmed that “a healthy, thriving Sacred Harp practice relies on three things: 1) the very real merits of the practice itself; 2) inclusivity and tolerance; and 3) mindful welcome.”

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The message went on: [W]e are so very blessed by our variously pierced, tattooed, black-clad younger folk who appear to enjoy singing with us oldsters as much as we enjoy singing with them. People coming in on a singing often get an immediate, visual message that this music transcends many differences, welcomes and binds us in a fellowship that is sadly rare in our culture. And though there are many reasons, one that I think really impacts that is this. Some folks, when they discover Sacred Harp, say among themselves, “We have a secret and we want to keep it.” Other groups say, “We have a story and we want to tell it.” We have a story and we want to tell it. During the morning break of the first morning of the Pacific Northwest convention, I noticed Reba Dell Windham deep in conversation with the tattooed young man in the sackcloth skirt. He watched her hands and moved his own hand along as she explained to him the lessons she had learned as a child in Alabama. A new friendship was sealed. Sipping a cup of coffee, I introduced myself to a woman from Eugene, Oregon, and asked how she became a Sacred Harp singer. She hesitated only briefly, then answered, “I was at an aa meeting one night, and some singers were practicing upstairs. They said to everyone who came to listen, ‘Grab a book.’ I had sung in a choir before, so I did, and I’ve been singing with them ever since.” On the way back to my seat, I was delighted to see Janice and Louis Hughes from Georgia, a couple I’d met at the national convention in 2004. Janice travels with Louis to sing-

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ings across the country, always finding a comfortable perch in the back of the room from which to listen. Though she grew up with Sacred Harp singing going on all around her, she wasn’t aware of it and never started singing. “It just wasn’t my thing,” said Janice, but she liked the traveling. “I just leave the singing to [Louis],” she said. We settled back down, and a Portland man with thinning gray hair, Dick, was accompanied to the square by a woman friend. He struggled with his words as he addressed the group. “This time last year I lost my daughter,” he said. “I found out about it after the convention. Later I heard that this song was sung in sympathy. I hope I can make it through.” He called out number 549, a tune called “Phillips Farewell”: My days on earth are almost gone The things I want cannot be won; It is the Lord that freely gives, It’s where He lives I want to live. My friends have been so good to me, And where you go I want to be; My love for you no tongue can tell, Dear loving friends, so fare you well. Despite his sadness, Dick looked relieved once the song was finished and offered a grateful smile to the group. Loss and imminent loss are themes revisited again and again in Sacred Harp singing, sometimes to the degree that the music is decried as morbid for all its references to death. I’ve heard it reconciled many different ways. One singer explained that the bulk of these lyrics were written between 1790 and 1820, when families frequently experienced the death of loved ones,

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including the deaths of children, and that these songs offered much-needed solace. Sometimes songs with lyrics about death are sung with little pointed attention to the meaning of the words, and other times, like this, they are engorged with meaning. We adjourned for dinner on the ground which, in this case, was dinner in the basement, retreated into the heady smells of meatballs in barbecue sauce and jambalaya with sausage, and were met with a mélange of colorful side dishes: beets with horseradish, veggie pasta with olives and artichoke hearts, and Dijon potato salad. Joanne Hoover, a retired physician from Mercer Island, sat with me and talked about the busy singing group here in Seattle that regularly makes appearances when requested and considers spreading the word of Sacred Harp singing to be one of its primary tasks. I was reminded of a paper I’d read: “Should Northerners Learn to Sing Sacred Harp?” written by Ted Mercer and published in the 1998 Chicago Sacred Harp Newsletter, now defunct. Having felt vaguely like an outsider despite my southern upbringing, I’d wondered how singers from places as geographically and socially different as Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and Chicago were seen by Deep South singers and whether their renditions of the songs could actually replicate what I’d heard in Texas and Alabama: rough vocals with bends, hooks, and turns that all contributed to a messy, cacophonous sound, its power distinctly linked to its untidiness. Mercer argues that while singers from outside the South are warmly welcomed into the Sacred Harp fold and aren’t held to a particular vocal standard, that the distinctive sound is “what set[s] Sacred Harp singing apart from all other mu-

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sic.” Mercer concludes that the old-time fasola sound is endangered and that despite the warm welcome offered outsiders by traditional singers, they “are fiercely proud of the old sound of which they have long and faithfully been the custodians” and that “they are not alone in their belief that its dilution is loss.” What to do then? Mercer offers a list of suggestions, foremost among them a plea for anyone who sings Sacred Harp to go to the source, to Georgia or Alabama to a traditional singing, to hear what it sounds like in that setting, sung by those who’ve done it since they could talk. Short of that, listen to CDs of traditional singings over and over, set aside any other musical training when singing Sacred Harp, follow along in the book while listening to recordings, and practice, practice, practice, bringing all that you’ve learned to someone else. On the afternoon of the first day of the Pacific Northwest Singing Convention, I listened to the sound in the Sunset Hill Clubhouse and found it distinctly prettier than what I’d heard down South. The harmonies were more precise, the voices more modulated. Many of these singers clearly had prior choral experience and read with skill and ease. But I also heard, in the urgency and volume of so many singers there, and saw in the flash of their eyes, the beat of their feet and hands, a knowing, almost gleeful break with everything they’d known about singing to this point. That evening, a group of us gathered for dinner at a nearby Thai restaurant and got to know one another over noodles and curry. As we were standing to leave and gathering our belongings, someone at the top of the table began an impromptu tune and the group fell in, singing a ragged fourpart harmony in voices dramatically roughened and weakened

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by the eighty or so songs we’d sung over the day. The love in those singers’ faces could have lighted the naked bulbs of an Alabama church over a thousand miles away. Sacred Harp was in good hands in this city by the Pacific Ocean. Day two, another unusually sunny and crisp day for Seattle in February, began with an eloquent prayer, offered by a young woman, her words borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself to me in his gifts?” It was the beginning of a morning when I finally received one of the most important lessons imparted in Sacred Harp singing, both through the songs and lyrics and by the shared experience: We are not separate. We are one. Janice Hughes had greeted me when I arrived, and I had frozen when I tried to tell her how sorry I was about the news that her son, Sergeant Philip Dodson, had died serving in Iraq. Another singer had told me the afternoon before, and because my son was in Iraq finishing his first active tour of duty with the U.S. Army, I felt compelled to say something to Janice. But when I tried to speak, the words caught; a jagged pain like the stab of tonsillitis rose in my throat. Janice looked at me kindly and patted my arm. “I knew I wouldn’t see him again when we were together in August,” she said. “But that time together was God’s blessing. I got to say to him everything a mother would want to say to her child.” Again, I tried to make a sound, to say that my son was in Iraq and would soon be home. That he was ok. I looked at her and she searched my eyes. Finally, I blurted out how

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sorry I was, and that my son too was serving in Iraq, my voice choked. Janice took me in her arms and hugged me as we both cried. “He’ll be all right,” she said. “I know he’ll be all right.” “He is all right,” I said, but I didn’t believe it for a minute. I didn’t know how he would be when he returned. I hated the war he was fighting. I was ripped with the guilt of loving the soldier and hating the war. Yet this woman whose son had not returned was offering me comfort. The morning passed like a very beautiful, solemn funeral. Songs that hadn’t sounded so sorrowful in the past now pierced my heart with every line. We sang “Liverpool”: Your joys on earth will soon be gone Your dust in flesh be laid. We sang “David’s Lamentation,” an A-minor tune based on the verses in second Samuel of the Old Testament: David the king was grieved and moved He went to his chamber, his chamber and wept. And as he wept, he wept and said: O my son! O my son! Would to God I had died, Would to God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son! Around me the powerful sound of the anthem arose, singers throwing their voices and bodies into the plaintive call: O my son! I couldn’t open my mouth as the knife in my throat dissolved into a searing hot pulse, throbbing to the rhythm of the song.

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We sang number 385 on the bottom, “Can I Leave You?” Yes, my native land I love thee, All thy scenes I love them well. Friends, connections, happy country, Can I bid you all farewell? Can I leave, Far in distant lands to dwell? I had watched untold numbers of singers get up and dedicate songs to a loved one who’d passed away, to a husband, sister, mother, or friend who had left this world, and the meaning of what they had done only now hit me with full force. They had stood in the hollow square and faced down their deepest sadness and despair, had held it up in song, and offered it to those who sang with them. In doing so, they had publicly declared their love, and through the singing, the sheer force of voices raised, they had been washed in comfort. Their grief had been blessed. I cried into my tissue freely now, relieved of a little of the terror that had gripped me for months, grieving for Philip Dodson, looking around at these generous brave souls, glancing over my shoulder at Janice Hughes who listened serenely from the back of the room. Her husband, Louis, sat red-faced on the front row of the basses, bravely singing the lyrics, hearing in them the same funereal offerings I was hearing, bravely wading through them, sure of his place in the square. The memorial lesson came and Sergeant Dodson’s name was called along with those of many others who had died in the past year. “Whatever we believe about life or death, we find ourselves in a spiritual embrace,” said the woman leading the memorial prayer. We sang “Fleeting Days” and I thought

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of all the Sacred Harp songs that had been sung at funerals and at the bedsides of the dying. I thought of all the requests for singers I had seen go out as e-mail messages over the past years, requests for a final song. We sang: Our life is ever on the wing And death is ever nigh; The moment when our lives begin We all begin to die. I still didn’t know how I felt about death, about the loss of Sergeant Dodson, or about my fears for my son, but I knew that carrying this sorrow and fear was something we all shared and placed at each other’s feet as Sacred Harp singers. I knew that I had many years to go before I could really consider myself one of them, but that when my time came, the hollow square was where I wanted to be, receiving the laying-on of voices in four-part harmony. We ate another feast together, including a version of Coy Ivey’s pork barbecue, Sylvia Ivey’s chicken casserole and Shelbie Sheppard’s “purple food,” a blueberry concoction, all recipes borrowed from southern singers. We reconvened and finished the convention with joyful sound. At the end of the day, the secretary announced that we had sung 171 songs over two days. The committee members of the convention were thanked and a unanimous resolution went out: Thanks for the sunshine! Seattle was a turning point for me, a chance to see and appreciate a thriving, inclusive Sacred Harp singing community outside the South, and a chance to understand the importance of preserving every aspect of the tradition as purely as possible.

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Barely a month later, the fledgling group of singers in my hometown, Colorado Springs, hosted their first-ever all-day singing convention in the basement of the Boulder Street Church. Pete Mathewson, who had just begun singing Sacred Harp in 2005 but who’d done so with gusto and determination, had, along with his wife, Suzie, started a small group of local singers who practiced once a month, and determined that they should experience an all-day singing. Supporters came from Boulder, Denver, and Fort Collins; from Santa Fe and Albuquerque; and from central Texas. Gaylon Powell was there to perform the important role of the front-row tenor. I invited two friends who had never heard the music and who went away fascinated by its odd, harsh beauty. We sat in little plastic Sunday School chairs on a cold linoleum floor beneath a low acoustic tile ceiling. We turned out a dinner on the ground (or dinner in the basement) that would’ve made Sandy Ivey proud. Crockpots filled with stews and meats steamed on linoleum-topped tables. A beautiful platter of angel food cake — cut into cubes and surrounded by strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries — provided the centerpiece. We sang from both the Cooper and Denson editions of The Sacred Harp until our voices were gone. Pete Mathewson opened the singing with an arrangement of “America the Beautiful,” rewritten in shape-notes with the use of a computer program. The song’s lyrics had been composed in our town in 1904 by a New England professor, Katharine Lee Bates, after she had traveled up Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs’s fourteen-thousand-foot-high backdrop, and returned to town to reflect on its beauty. As we sang it in four-part harmony, I felt no pangs of the usual resistance I’d felt over patriotic demonstrations ever since the war in

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Iraq began. Instead, I felt pride in my town and in our small group of singers, sharing the beauty of where we lived with our treasured guests: O beautiful, for spacious skies For amber waves of grain For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain . . . My son had returned home from Iraq but the war continued to rage. Months of anxiety about not knowing where he was or what he was doing had been replaced by intense relief tinged by curiosity. I fed and pampered him and wondered what he had seen, what he had done. He looked good, fit and strong, but didn’t talk much about his experience except to occasionally drop the name of an Iraqi city I’d never heard. Once, in a moment of bravado, joking with a friend, he mentioned that anything was better than sleeping on the ground of a bombed out building in Fallujah. I was wowed by his courage. I still grieved and raged over the violence in the Middle East and my country’s policies, but here in the basement of the Boulder Street Church, the other thing that lingered in my heart, the sound of two hundred years of voices singing Sacred Harp together soothed and softened me. On a Saturday in March 2005, America, despite its political divisions over the war in Iraq, was beautiful. Our good, reflected in the faces of a basement full of Sacred Harp singers, was crowned with brotherhood.

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v v v

Bill Howe’s Rajas 2 or 3 mild roasted chiles (poblanos are good) or 1 large can mild chiles (Hatch is a good brand) ½ stick butter or margarine 1 tsp. granulated chicken bouillon 1 can corn 8 oz. sour cream Clean, seed and chop chiles (if roasting peppers, wipe off charred outside membrane). Sauté briefly in butter or margarine with chicken bouillon. Cool. Add corn and sour cream. Mix well. Bill Howe, Denver, Colorado

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Ila Jean Nye’s Spinach Cheese Torte 1 cup or more wilted, finely chopped fresh spinach, or 1 box frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed to drain all juice 1 cup ricotta cheese ½ cup shredded Parmesan cheese ½ tsp. garlic salt 1 egg yolk Dash pepper 1 pkg. boxed hot roll mix

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Mix spinach, ricotta, Parmesan, salt, egg yolk, and pepper. Make a batch of hot roll mix according to directions on box. After it rises twice, divide it in half. Flatten half on cutting board, place in greased 9-inch cake pan. Spread with cheese mixture. Roll out top dough and place on top, tucking edges under. Cut slashes in top for ventilation and brush with a beaten egg. Let rise again, about 15 minutes. Bake at 350 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes in the bottom of a preheated oven. (Sautéed finely chopped onion or garlic can be added to the spinach-cheese mixture.) Ila Jean Nye, Denver, Colorado

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Alfred Saussotte’s Spiced Leg of Lamb (Raan) 2 tbsp. scraped or peeled, finely chopped fresh ginger root 6 medium-sized garlic cloves, peeled and coarsely chopped Seeds of 2 cardamom pods or ⅛ tsp. cardamom seeds 1-inch piece of stick cinnamon, coarsely crushed with a rolling pin or mallet 8 whole cloves 1 tsp. cumin seeds 1 tsp. turmeric 1 heaping tsp. ground hot red pepper ½ tsp. salt ¼ cup fresh lemon juice

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5 to 6 lb. leg of lamb, trimmed of all fell (parchment like outer membrane) and any excess fat ½ cup raw, unsalted pistachios ½ cup seedless raisins ¼ cup slivered, blanched almonds 1 cup plain yogurt ¼ cup honey ½ tsp. saffron threads 3 tbsp. plus 1 cup boiling water Combine ginger, garlic, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, turmeric, red pepper, salt, and lemon juice in the jar of an electric blender. Blend at high speed for 30 seconds, then turn off the machine and scrape down the sides of the jar with a rubber spatula. Blend again until the mixture becomes a smooth purée. With a small, sharp knife, make about a dozen slashes 1 inch long and 2 inches deep on each side of the leg of lamb. Rub the spice purée over the entire outer surface of the leg, pressing it as deeply into the slashes as possible. Place the lamb in a heavy casserole large enough to hold it comfortably and set it aside to marinate for 30 minutes at room temperature. Meanwhile, purée the pistachios, raisins, almonds, and yogurt in the blender jar, and spread the mixture evenly over the lamb. Drip the honey on top of the lamb, cover the casserole tightly, and marinate in a cool place (less than 40 degrees) for about 24 hours, or in the refrigerator for at least 48 hours. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Drop the saffron threads into a small bowl, add 3 tablespoons of boiling water, and let them soak for 15 minutes. Pour the saffron and its soaking

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water over the leg of lamb, and pour the remaining cup of water down the sides of the casserole. Bring to a boil over high heat, cover tightly, and bake the lamb in the middle of the oven for 1½ hours. Then reduce the heat to 250 degrees and bake 30 minutes longer, or until the lamb is tender and shows no resistance when pierced with the point of a small, sharp knife. Remove the casserole from the oven, uncover it, and let the lamb cool in the sauce for 1 hour before serving.

p  “I adapted this recipe from The Cooking of India, one of

the Time-Life series of cookbooks of world cuisines, done in the 1970s.” Alfred Saussotte

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Coffee-Chocolate Rice Krispie Treats 6½ tbsp. margarine or butter 1 lb. marshmallows 2 tbsp. instant espresso or dark-roast instant coffee 9½ cups Cocoa Krispies or generic chocolate-flavored crisped rice cereal 1 can ready-made chocolate frosting 2 tsp. instant coffee Melt margarine or butter and marshmallows in microwave or on stovetop. Stir in Cocoa Krispies and instant espresso powder. Let set and cool. Frost with canned frosting combined with instant coffee. Judy Van Duzer, Centennial, Colorado

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Sausages with Mashed Yams 3 or 4 precooked sausages (the kind with apples or sundried tomatoes) 8 large yams ½ cup butter Salt and pepper to taste Half-and-half Pecan halves and butter for garnish Peel yams, cut into small wedges, boil until soft but not mushy. Using a potato masher, mash them slightly with butter, salt, and pepper. Use an electric mixer to incorporate enough half-and-half into the mixture to make it the consistency you desire (creamy, not too thick, not too thin). Heat the sausages, slice them into ½-inch rounds, and stir them into the yams. (Can be made a couple of days before the singing up to this point, and refrigerated.) On the morning of the singing, put yams and sausages in a Crockpot and heat during the morning’s singing. Just before dinner on the grounds, stir the yams, put 2–3 tablespoons of butter on top of them and sprinkle with toasted pecan halves. Leave out the sausages for a (mostly) vegetarian dish.

p  “This recipe is kind of mindless. I like to keep my head

free of many responsibilities the day of the singing so I can be imagining tunes I want to sing. This recipe is therefore perfect.” Sharon Kermiet, Denver, Colorado

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Lime or Lemon Love Notes c rust: ½ cup butter 1 cup flour ¼ cup powdered sugar Combine until crumbly, press in bottom of buttered 9 × 13 inch pan, and bake at 350 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes, until set. f il l ing: ¼ cup lemon juice Grated rind of 1 lemon 2 eggs, beaten 1 cup sugar 2 tbsp, flour ½ tsp. baking powder Combine ingredients well, pour over crust, return to oven and bake about 20 minutes more until custard is set and starts to brown. While warm, drizzle with icing made of about ½–1 cup powdered sugar and enough lemon juice (1–2 tbsp.) to make pourable icing. Cut into squares while still warm.

p  You can substitute lime juice and rind and add a couple

drops of green food coloring to the filling for Lime Love Notes. Anita Landess, Denver, Colorado

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Dijon Potato Salad 3 lbs. small red potatoes, preferably organic ¼ cup Dijon mustard 2 tbsp. sugar ¼ cup white wine vinegar 1 bunch fresh dill, chopped Sea salt and pepper to taste ¼ cup canola oil Scrub the potatoes, but do not peel. Cut in halves or quarters. Bring to a boil with a splash of vinegar added to the cooking water to help keep the potatoes intact. Simmer potatoes until tender. Do not overcook. Gently drain the potatoes and cut into bite-sized pieces. Combine mustard, sugar, vinegar, dill, salt, and pepper in a food processor and whir until blended. Gradually add oil until sauce emulsifies. Pour sauce over warm potatoes and mix carefully with rubber spatula. Serve warm or cold. Makes enough for 1 potluck salad; can easily be doubled.

p  “I adapted this recipe from Vegetables by Joe Famularo

and Louise Imperiale (Barron’s, 1993). I modified it by using less oil and sugar, and made the salad vegan by omitting the ¼ pound of smoked salmon called for in the original.” Erika Wilson, Seattle, Washington

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Mandarin Cake 1 box yellow cake mix (Duncan Hines) 4 eggs ½ cup cooking oil 1 can (11 oz.) mandarin orange segments, with juice ½ cup finely chopped walnuts or pecans 1 large can (20 oz.) crushed pineapple, with juice 1 box (4-serving size) vanilla pudding mix 1 cup Cool Whip Beat together the cake mix, eggs, and oil. Add the orange segments and nuts. Pour into a 9 × 13 inch pan. Bake 35 minutes at 350 degrees. Cool, then put in refrigerator. Mix together the pineapple and pudding mix. Let sit 5 minutes, then stir in the Cool Whip (thawed if it was previously frozen). Spread over the cake and keep in cool place until ready to serve.

p  “I clipped this recipe from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,

John Owen’s ‘Intermediate Eater’ column. Because I prefer to cook from scratch whenever possible, I jokingly call it ‘chemical cake’ because it contains boxed cake mix, pudding mix, and Cool Whip. It is quite a departure from my usual repertoire, but it is quick to make, easy to transport, and keeps well, so it’s perfect for potlucks. (And it tastes good, too!)” Erika Wilson, Seattle, Washington

(Reprinted with permission of John Owen)

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Dave’s Gram’s Baked Apples Apples ( Jonathan are best; Red Rome have a longer season) Butter Cinnamon Cool Whip or whipped cream Sugar (dark brown, light brown, and/or granulated in some combination) Preheat oven to 350 to 375 degrees. Peel, halve, and core apples. Place apples center up in baking dish. Dot each half with a pea-sized piece of butter. Sprinkle apples with cinnamon. Top liberally with sugar (¼ inch or more) Add ½ cup of water to baking dish. Bake in preheated 350-to 375-degree oven for 30 to 60 minutes, or until knife slides smoothly into apple. After apples are removed from oven, turn upside down to cool (keeps top surface from getting tough). Serve cold, garnished with whipped topping. Dave Hough, Seattle, Washington

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Marinated Vegetable Salad ¾ cup white vinegar ½ cup vegetable oil 1 cup sugar 1 tsp. salt ½ tsp. pepper

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2 (11-oz.) cans white shoepeg corn (drained) 1 (15-oz.) can small sweet English peas (drained) 1 (14-oz.) can French style green beans (drained) 1 cup chopped green bell pepper 1 cup chopped celery 1 cup chopped onions 1 (2-oz.) jar diced pimientos (drained)

Bring vinegar, oil, sugar, salt, and pepper to boil, stirring until sugar dissolves. Cool. Combine corn, peas, green beans, green pepper, celery, and onions. Stir in vinegar mixture. Chill for eight hours. Drain and serve.

p  Regular canned corn (15 oz.) works fine in this recipe.

Cooking the dressing first gives it time to cool before you add it to the salad. It can be a little warm when first added, but if it’s too hot the vegetables will wilt. Pour the ingredients from the cans and jar into a colander and rinse thoroughly to remove the canned taste before combining. Dave Hough, Seattle, Washington

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Easy and Delicious BBQ Meatballs 1 large package of frozen meatballs, preferably Costco brand 1 large can jellied cranberry sauce, melted 1 large container (16 oz.) prepared salsa Dump all ingredients in Crockpot and cook until meatballs are warmed through. Stir occasionally. Joanne Hoover, Mercer Island, Washington

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Beets with Horseradish and Sour Cream 1 #10 large can sliced or julienned beets, about 1 gallon (cubed is ok, not preferred) 1 small jar (4 oz.) prepared horseradish 1 cup sour cream Drain beets, reserving juice for later soup stock. Stir entire jar of horseradish and all sour cream into drained beets (use a bit more sour cream if necessary, to moisten them all). Allow to sit overnight for 8 to 10 hours. Stir at least once.

p  “The quantities were scaled up from one of my old FinnishAmerican cookbooks.”

Angie Johnson, Seattle, Washington

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Slow Roasted Pork with Soured Cabbage 1 pork sirloin, about 8–10 lbs. 5 heads green cabbage Salt 1–2 cups white wine (or reserved beet juice from recipe above) Salt Caraway seed

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Shred and liberally salt cabbage. Leave in cool place (around 40 degrees — easy to do for winter sings) overnight to sour. Important: do not use aluminum pans; use stainless steel, glass, or enamelware. Add caraway seed to taste. Expect cabbage to release some fluid; don’t drain. Next day, trim and slice sirloin into service-size pieces, arrange in large roaster or other baking pan over cabbage. Cover. Cook in very slow oven, 225 to 250 degrees, until tender. Add fluid (wine or beet juice) as desired or needed to keep dish moist. Browning the dish once the pork is done is optional. Dish can be cooled and reheated the next day, or wrapped and packed for transport and served on site. Beets with horseradish (see recipe above), make a good accompanying side dish. Angie Johnson, Seattle, Washington

v

Chapter Five

hoboken

There is a happy land Far, far away Where saints in glory stand Bright, bright as day. “Happy Land,” #348,  The Sacred Harp, Cooper edition

mar c h 1 8, 2006 When I tell my friends I’m traveling to Hoboken, way down in southeast Georgia on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp, they look at me with vague curiosity and dull incomprehension. When I mention to Sacred Harp singers that I’m going there, they look at me with envy and anticipation. They know I’m headed for the promised land. From Colorado, the best route to Hoboken and nearby Waycross (the closest town with a motel) is via Jacksonville, Florida, by plane, then a short drive north and west across the state line via a series of state and county highways. I ar-

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rive in Jacksonville in late afternoon, as the sun is beginning to turn the hazy sky to a fuzzy pink like peach skin, then fleshy orange as the day deepens to dusk. The road cuts through forests of industrially planted pines, thousands of rows of obedient trees with straight trunks reaching skyward out of the sandy soil. Wisteria vines cling to pines bordering the roadside ditch, and in broad country lawns bordering plain houses, azaleas and dogwood in bloom spot color the soft landscape. I’m following a handwritten map to the home of David and Kathy Lee, where out-of-town singers have been invited to gather the night before the one-day Hoboken singing convention begins. Just as I turn onto the country road leading to the Lee house, the sky turns black and I am lost beneath a million stars, undimmed by street lamps. I pass the turnoff three times before finally maneuvering onto the sandy road, my tires swishing as I approach the Lee’s well-lighted brick home settled deep beneath tall pines, not the industrially planted variety but old growth. The lawn is soft with their fallen needles. Inside, a crowd of guests from Minnesota and Maine, Indiana and Texas has gathered to sing a few tunes before tomorrow’s one-day convention. Tom Owen is here from Texas, and I recognize a few others. Kathy Lee sets out bowls of chips and dip as she talks busily with Steven Levine, a northern singer with a long black braid down his back who might be Kathy’s brother or cousin for all their comfortable familiarity. She tells him the family news, of the new baby born just this week, hospitalized still but getting stronger every day, her son Bryant’s first child. The group gathers around the Lee living room and begins to sing from the blue Cooper edition of The Sacred Harp,

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some old camp songs. One begins with a sweet chorus of female voices, joined by the men in the rugged chorus: We’ll camp a while in the wilderness We’ll camp a while in the wilderness And then we’re going home. David Lee is a tall man with a convex torso, long arms, enormous hands, and an unlined boyish face. He says his earliest memory of singing Sacred Harp is as a small boy — so small that he remembers seeing his feet sticking out from under the book as he held it on his lap in a chair. He grew up going to singing school at his family’s church here in Hoboken. Children lined up around a table and were taught the shapes and the rudiments by a long line of Lee brothers and uncles. “My uncle Wilson Wainwright would get us all up on the floor and teach us to walk time and beat time while singing,” says David. Singing school occurred each year for a few months at a time, usually on the night of the community’s regular monthly singing, an hour or so before the singing started. In this rural, isolated place, Lees have sung Sacred Harp since the mid-1800s when David’s great-great Grandpa John was a singer. His grandfather Frank Lee and Uncle Silas — brothers — were both singing school teachers, and from them, through Uncle Wilson Wainwright, the skills were passed down to David’s cousin Clarke, and to David, who teaches singing schools around the country now, working hard to keep the tradition alive. As the legend goes, and as David confirms, just a little over a decade ago the Lees thought they were the only folks

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in the United States still singing Sacred Harp the good old way. They knew nothing of the burgeoning community of singers gathering regularly in Alabama, north Georgia, and far beyond in Massachusetts and Minnesota, until they were invited to a singing in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1994 and they met singers keeping the same tradition they’d held so dear. The Lees began visiting singings outside of Hoboken and invited singers to join them at home. Since then, their annual one-day singing at the local Hoboken Elementary School has become a highlight of the Sacred Harp year. Beyond the annual Hoboken Singing Convention, the town and the Lee family have maintained a regional tradition of Sacred Harp singing that can still be heard at funerals, as well as at the regular monthly singing held each month on the Saturday night before the third Sunday. Though this regular singing has persisted for more than fifty years, the presence of Sacred Harp isn’t as strong as it once was in Hoboken, but the dispersal of the Lee family tradition throughout the larger community of Sacred Harp singers has enriched both the Hoboken tradition and the practice of singers nationwide. “I have often said that Sacred Harp is a living tradition,” says David Lee, “and anything that is living will change over time. The only things that don’t change are dead things. Given that I want Sacred Harp to live, I welcome the change that comes with Sacred Harp singing being spread across the country, and particularly through the young people. “My Uncle Silas, the last time he talked to me about Sacred Harp before he died, said, ‘Keep a good thing a-goin’.’” On Saturday morning, I can smell the Hoboken All-Day Singing before I see the low white frame schoolhouse where it is held. In the parking lot, custom-built smokers fashioned from oil drums belch hickory-scented smoke into the chilly

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spring air. These elaborate contraptions are mounted on chassis with wheels and pulled behind pickup trucks piled with stacks of oak, hickory, and pecan wood. A group of coffee-sipping local men stoke the fires they started well before dawn to smoke hundreds of quartered chickens, pork roasts, and racks of ribs. Bobby Hecox, a local, tends one of the fires and swaps stories with his friends, who have gathered to provide meat for today’s dinner on the ground. None of these men sings Sacred Harp, but each says he’s proud to support the singing every year. As they talk, the Lee family name pops up time and again. Hecox says he’s not a Lee, but “might as well be one. Been married to one for fifty years.” A rosy-cheeked man in a baseball cap opens the swinging door to his cooker and checks on his fare. “Himalayan possum,” he chuckles, then breaks into a big belly laugh. “I found him a layin’ on the road.” Ronnie Dale Lee, a cousin of David, remembers coming to singings when he was a boy with his brother Tollie. Their father, Silas Lee, was the singing school teacher. Ronnie confesses that sometimes he and his brother would run off into the woods to play in the creek when the preaching drew long. “We could hear him singing two miles away from the church,” says Ronnie. “We’d be playing, then when we heard him start singing, we knew it was time to come back.” The main hallway of Hoboken Elementary School, bedecked with construction paper art projects and poems scribbled with number two pencils, is barely passable as time for the singing draws near. I greet many new and old friends and am especially happy to see Janice and Louis Hughes again. David Lee stands beaming in the hollow square, marveling

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at the huge crowd that has gathered, overflowing from the seats, onto the stage and into the hallway. “It don’t never get old, us being together,” he says. We sing from the blue Cooper edition of The Sacred Harp, but first David runs us through the major scale. “We need to burn it into young ’uns’ brains like it was burned into ours,” says David, as he raises his arms and leads the assembled singers through eight ascending notes that quake the wooden walls: Fa–Sol–La–Fa–Sol–La–Mi–Fa We follow with the descending scale: Fa–Mi–La–Sol–Fa–La–Sol–Fa David calls the first song, number 68 on the bottom of the page, to be led with his son Bryant. Bryant’s a tall, thin young man with bright red hair, neatly dressed in a pressed shirt and tie. His wife and newborn baby are still in the hospital, but he knows the importance of leading with his father this morning. Father and son set the pace of the song, then slowly walk the perimeter of the square, addressing each section of singers. It’s an emotional moment, both men poised on the edge of tears. Looking around, I notice that most of the ladies here in Hoboken are dressed in skirts and stockings. I admonish myself to dress better the next time I come, heeding Ginnie Ely’s call to respect the local traditions and their individual ways. Singing at Hoboken is deliberately slow and measured, and though I don’t know this song well, it feels comfortable. We sing the notes and move to the lyrics:

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Come, Holy Spirit, come With energy divine And on this poor benighted soul With beams of mercy shine. Before we have passed through the morning’s first set of songs, I notice something different in my experience of singing. For the first time since I began singing Sacred Harp, nearly three years ago, I am singing the shapes naturally, not singing the musical notes on the scale and adding the names fa, sol, la, and mi as I read the shapes separately. It’s a hardto-explain, not-so-subtle transformation, and it is liberating. When a new leader stands and calls out the song number, when the song is pitched and the enormous choir of a couple hundred singers around me begins to sing the shapes the first time through, I am, for the first time ever, an easy participant, blending in without overthinking. A circle on the scale enters my brain as both sol and a musical pitch, and the la that follows is not a square but simply la. I am reading a new language fluently, my mind not stopping at each syllable to translate. I get so excited my mind clenches and doubles up, and I forget how to read the notes as quickly as they first came to me with their magical, literal ease. But as the day goes on, the notes come back to me free and clear. We sing two familiar songs from my Baptist childhood, and like the notes, the lyrics come back to me with ease. I hang my book across my wrist and, looking around the square into the faces of my fellow singers, sing out loud: Yes, we will gather at the river, The beautiful, the beautiful river,

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Gather with the saints at the river, That flows from the throne of God. I catch sight of Steven Levine and can hear his voice, quavering and nasal, above the others. He sings so hard his chest expands and his shoulders ride up and down. At breakfast at the motel in Waycross, Levine told me about a piece he’d written twelve years ago, “Celestial Fruit on Earthly Ground,” when he first came south for a Sacred Harp singing. He’d already been singing for ten years with groups in Boston and Minneapolis, but trying to understand the stirrings of emotion he felt singing at the Antioch Baptist Church in Alabama was a struggle. Levine found himself caught up in the emotion of the day, brought to tears when a man led a song that had been a favorite of his father’s, then again when a woman dedicated a song to her late father. Was it the geography? he wondered. The magnificent dinner on the ground? Levine concluded that the ability to lose emotional selfconsciousness was what differentiated the southern singing experience and the musically rich experience up north. “I don’t think we can sing together as do folks who, in addition to singing Sacred Harp, worship together and share a religious worldview,” he wrote. I have often felt that division between those like me — who love the singing and can absorb the spirit of it, but who worship differently, if at all, on a regular basis — and those who loudly proclaim the spirit that moves and guides them daily. The emotional release available at singings in the South is something Levine still treasures and for which he travels to places like Hoboken year in and year out. As I watch him across the square, I can see him letting go, his long black braid swinging behind his back in time to the music.

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David Lee leads a rousing memorial lesson, pausing to remember “where we came from, the roots of our community. “We are here to remember those that went before us,” he says. “Those of us here are trusted with that flame, a duty and obligation. And there is a reward: to pass it on to those after us. Every year we talk about those who’ve passed. It’s time to recognize those young ones coming after us.” David Lee is crying openly, wiping away tears as he leads number 29, “Entreaty”: Young people all attention give And hear what I shall say I wish your souls with Christ to live In everlasting day. The somber mood changes as a beautiful young woman gets up to lead a spirited, complicated tune. She has no book, but carries a chubby, vigorous baby boy, a little less than a year old, slung over one hip and held tight with one arm. The baby faces the surrounding singers’ faces as his mother calls out her chosen song number. “Last year when I was here, he was in my belly,” she says shyly, then waits for a pitch and launches into song, leading with her free hand, turning in time to the altos and the basses, then to the tenors and trebles. The baby smiles at the faces around him and turns his eyes to watch her hand rise up and fall down, beating the rhythm. In the surrounding aisles, people care for other people’s children. I realize that there are many young children here, snuggled in grandmothers’ laps, bouncing on fathers’ knees, walking unsteadily along the tops of a row of grown-up feet. We have been singing for nearly three hours, and I haven’t heard a single child cry all morning.

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Dinner on the ground, or dinner in the school cafeteria — as it is fashioned at Hoboken — is a well-tuned extravaganza of home-cooked food. Kathy Lee has ushered cooks and their hundreds of dishes to long rows of tables surrounding the room. Desserts are arranged separately, on tables in the main eating area. The morning’s bounty of smoked meats sits shining on giant platters surrounded by bowls of vegetables and homemade chicken and dressing. The room explodes with conversation as the doors are thrown open to the sunny outdoors. In a corner of the dining room, David Lee’s mother, Delorese, stands sentry over two tall layer cakes — her own peanut butter cake and her daughter Sonya’s nut-studded Italian cream cake. Singing commences an hour later and the afternoon pace is quickened. Clarke Lee leads as the day winds down and, spontaneously, other singers walk into the square to share the leading with him. Syble Adams, a member of the Wootten family of Sand Mountain, Alabama, throws an arm around Clarke and smiles up at him, offering support and sharing a moment of spiritual bonding. The spirit is here, in the room, and we all can feel it, though many of us watch quietly from a distance as these singers say it out loud. The kind of emotional release observed by Steven Levine brings the entire crowd of singers, about to depart, up to their feet at the end of the day. On Saturday evening, those of us who haven’t started for home already gather at Mars Hill Primitive Baptist Church in Hoboken for a casual dinner of egg-salad sandwiches and banana pudding, and one more round of singing. I sit next to Bozo Willis, a freckled farmer with thinning strawberrytinted hair, dressed in denim overalls and a plaid short-sleeved shirt. He shares his recipe for “Dollar Store Dressing,” served

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at dinner on the ground earlier in the day, so named because many of the ingredients can be found on sale for a dollar at the local general store. Bozo grew up in a family of “hard shell” Primitive Baptists, his daddy a preacher. Primitive Baptist churches, distinguished from the Baptist denomination by their split a century ago over the Baptist’s inclination toward mission work, abound in this part of the country. In general, the term “primitive” refers to “original” Baptists whose churches don’t have paid ministers but teachers called Elders, and whose music is a cappella, or sung without accompaniment, usually shape-note music. Primitive Baptist churches across the country have varied over time in their degree of modernization — Mars Hill enjoys electricity and running water but no piano or organ — and Bozo refers to the most traditional sects, bereft of all modern conveniences, a few still alive in rural areas of the Deep South. The Hoboken All-Day Singing is one of the highlights of Willis’s year, though he doesn’t consider himself a singer. He reads the words as the rest of us sing from a palm-sized book titled Lloyd’s Hymnal, a compilation of lyrics to traditional religious songs with no musical notation. Compiled by nineteenth-century Alabama pastor Benjamin Lloyd, the hymn book has remained in print since it was first published in 1841 and has enjoyed forty printings, with few changes beyond the quality of its binding. Song numbers are called out by members of the assembled crowd, about half as many singers as were gathered earlier today, and as if from a shared historical memory, melodies and harmonies arise that some of us have never heard. I harmonize an alto line with the woman sitting next to me, who sings a high, vibrato-laden soprano. When a song is called

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that few in the group know, Clarke Lee, the elder in charge of tonight’s singing, asks his cousin Tollie to line the song, singing a melodic line, then waiting for the harmony to follow. We sing for an hour or so, then Tollie is asked to pray. His prayer, a long, rhythmic incantation for the souls of all gathered here, for the country, for the world, for the love of Jesus, is delivered from a kneeling stance, his knees pressed against the hardwood floor, his head leaning on the wood pew, his hands reaching forward. As he prays, many others fall to their knees, some of them echoing his words aloud. Tollie and his friends and family pray for the singing, for Sacred Harp, for the continuation of the tradition and its history across time. That history has penetrated Tollie’s life from its beginning. His father, Silas, born in 1912, was a Sacred Harp teacher for nearly sixty years. Silas met his wife, Tollie’s mother, at a singing school class taught by her father, Martin Dowling, when the two were young children — six or seven years old. Together, they had ten children, six sons and four daughters. Tollie says his mother was known as one of the best cooks of her time. “There is a special talent given to southern ladies,” he says. “They cook for taste; they cook to please; they cook for you to enjoy it.” A lifelong singer who has traveled the country to sing Sacred Harp over the last decade, Tollie celebrates the expansion of the tradition across the country. “I am very pleased to see Sacred Harp growing across our land, these blessed United States,” he says. “The singin’ is the spiritual food for the soul. All of it is tied together in bonds of Christian love. The loving spirit must be present to adorn them both for the occasion to be enjoyed and felt by all that are in the congregation.”

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He’s also pleased to see the tradition of dinner on the ground endure at Sacred Harp singings. “It’s good for people to keep it up,” he says, “for a time of fellowship is at hand to share the bountiful blessings of table comforts, just as the singing makes the soul feel satisfied.” Tollie says his motto, his “patent,” is “SING ON::” (notice the repeat sign). “Sacred Harp has been a life growing experience for me, an instrument to help over the rough spots. I have seen weddings come from singing schools. Even in death we sing Sacred Harp songs at funerals for families, a comfort to broken hearts. When you are singing, for the most part all bad thoughts seem to vanish away. What other activity can compare in a group of people? You could search the world over and be hard pressed to find a substitute that reaches so deep into the mind and soul of humankind.” His fervor is felt tonight as singers, some of them rising from bent knees, say their goodbyes. Pine resin and wet dirt scent the cool air outside as we retreat to our cars and trucks, many of us headed tomorrow morning for homes far away from Hoboken and southeast Georgia. On Sunday, we are all invited to attend services at the Lee family’s church, but I decide instead to catch a glimpse of the Okefenokee, the largest freshwater swamp in the United States, on whose banks I’ve been driving, walking, and singing for the past thirty-six hours. But this land is heavily wooded, and expansive views are not part of the landscape. I have yet to see even a puddle of standing water, much less the nearly halfmillion acres of black water that comprise the expanse of the Okefenokee. Yesterday, several singers told me stories of their parents and grandparents wringing livings from the swamp, fishing and trapping, farming, and logging at its edges.

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I drive to the closest access point, a private park near Waycross, and roll my windows down as the air thickens and collects on the windshield of my rented car. The road winds through thick stands of cypress and black gum trees and ends at a broad asphalt parking lot. I set off across a half-mile raised boardwalk through the wetlands, past warning signs: “Do not feed the alligators”; “Do not leave the trail”; “Alligator forecast: very high.” It is early in the day and the park is not officially opened as I spy herons and egrets dipping their elegant bills into the still waters, and wander past thick stands of lily pads. Still, there is no broad expanse of water, just inlets and bays and forests overhead. After an hour or so, when the air begins to warm and swarm with insects, I return to my car and drive due east. I sing along to Hoboken City Limits, a Sacred Harp CD recorded in 2002 at the Hoboken Elementary School, “lovingly dedicated to the good people of Hoboken” by David Lee in the liner notes. The highway is straight and narrow, lined with tall pines, and every ten miles or so, on the periphery, I catch sight of a small wooden church surrounded by cars parked beneath the trees. Welcome signs dot the side of the road. I don’t stop, but imagine instead the crowd inside, singing loudly from Lloyd’s Hymn Book or perhaps from The Sacred Harp, the sound loud and unadulterated by a piano or organ. I follow the highway all the way to the Atlantic Ocean and Jekyll Island where, at midday, standing on a sand dune for a few brief minutes before I turn south toward Jacksonville and the airport, I finally catch a view so expansive it has no end, blue meeting blue at water’s edge.

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v v v

Bozo Willis’s Dollar Store Dressing 4 boxes cornbread mix ( Jiffy, Martha White, or any other brand) 1 46-oz. can chicken broth 2 dozen eggs, hard-boiled and chopped fine 2 sleeves Ritz crackers, crushed 2 sleeves saltine crackers, crushed 1 to 2 stalks celery, chopped fine 2 onions, chopped Poultry seasoning Prepare dressing according to package directions. Bake and crumble into two large aluminum baking pans. Sauté celery and onion in vegetable oil. Mix in cornbread, remaining dry ingredients, and poultry seasoning to taste. Pour in hot chicken broth until mixture is soft but not too wet. Let sit in refrigerator for 24 to 48 hours to mingle flavors. Remove from refrigerator and bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until completely heated through. If mixture becomes too dry, add more broth.

p  “I call this Dollar Store dressing because you can get four

packs of cornbread dressing for a dollar there, and the poultry seasoning’s a dollar too.” Kenneth “Bozo” Willis, Nahunta, Georgia

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v v v

Delorese Lee’s Peanut Butter Cake ½ lb. margarine 1 cup shortening 2⅔ cup granulated sugar 3 cups cake flour 1 cup milk 5 eggs 2 tsp. vanilla Beat margarine and shortening until light and creamy. Add sugar and beat until creamy. Add flour and mix well, adding milk a little at a time. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition. Add vanilla. Pour mixture into 3 9-inch cake pans. Bake at 325 degrees for 30 minutes.

Frost with the following: 2 cups granulated sugar 1 tsp. vanilla ½ cup peanut butter ¼ cup margarine ¾ cup evaporated milk

Mix sugar, margarine, and milk. Bring to rolling boil. Remove from heat. Add peanut butter and vanilla. Beat until smooth and thick. Frost cooled cake.

p  “I always let the frosting boil about two minutes and

if it starts to get too thick to spread I just add a little canned cream. I use the mixer to beat it as it does take a little time. [The original recipe called for more margarine and less peanut

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butter] but Johnny, my husband, said it needed more peanut butter and less margarine so I made changes. You can do it either way.” Delorese Lee, Hoboken, Georgia

v v v

Sonya Lee’s Italian Cream Cake ½ cup Crisco 1 stick butter 2 cups sugar 1 tsp. vanilla 1 tsp. baking soda 5 eggs, separated 1 cup buttermilk 2 cups cake flour ½ tsp. salt 2 cups coconut 1 cup pecans, chopped Cream Crisco, butter, and sugar together. Separate eggs; add yolks one at a time. Add dry ingredients along with buttermilk and vanilla. Stir in nuts and coconut. Fold in stiffly beaten egg whites. Bake in 3 9-inch pans at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. ic ing:

1 stick butter 1 8-oz. block cream cheese

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1 box (1 lb.) powdered sugar 1 tsp. vanilla 1 cup pecans, chopped

Warm butter and cream cheese to room temperature. Mix butter, cream cheese, powdered sugar, and vanilla until smooth. Add pecans. Spread on cooled cake layers.

p  “’Til we meet again . . . keep the Sacred Harp singing

alive — and loud!” Sonya Lee

v

Chapter Six



Benton to Bi|mingham

The Lord into His garden comes The spices yield a rich perfume The lilies grow and thrive The lilies grow and thrive. Refreshing show’rs of grace divine From Jesus flow to ev’ry vine And make the dead revive And make the dead revive. “Garden Hymn,” #284, The Sacred Harp, Denson edition

From the time I first discovered and fell in love with Sacred Harp singing, I hoped to find a connection between it and my former home and family of origin in southern Kentucky. Memories of singing hymns in the Southern Baptist church of my upbringing had led me to Sacred Harp, and those memories had grown more vivid as I experienced group singing across the country. I could remember walking home from elementary school

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for lunch in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and eating peanut butter sandwiches with my mother while watching the noon live gospel singing show on television, broadcast from up the road in Nashville. The Happy Goodman Family, The Singing Speer Family, and others — gospel quartets — sang praise at lunchtime every day. They were southern people from the area, and somewhere they had absorbed four-part harmony as if it were the breath of life. The Speers actually hailed from Double Springs, Alabama, home of the Denson Brothers of Sacred Harp fame. William Lynwood Montell’s book Singing the Glory Down: Amateur Gospel Music in South Central Kentucky, 1900–1990 explained a lot about the genesis of gospel quartets in the area, and the religious music that preceded their sweetened, tidied-up harmonies. Montell devotes a section of his book to shape-note singing schools of the early twentieth century in southern Kentucky. “Typically held in churches or schoolhouses in early spring before planting time, during the summer when the crops were laid by, or in late fall, when the farm families had extra time,” these schools were designed to improve the quality of congregational singing and to teach leaders how to carry on strong congregational singing throughout the year. As Montell observed, the success or failure of a rural church depended in large part on the quality of congregational singing. The final night of a two-week singing school, said Montell, was devoted to group singing before a community audience. “That was the night for the proud students to show off their abilities to sing by the shapes of the notes without the aid of an instrument or another voice to lead them. Often the teacher formed a ‘scrap iron quartet’ on the spot by choosing a soprano, alto, tenor and bass. Their performance provided a

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grand finale to the school. . . . They were expected to sing in near-perfect harmony, time and pitch.” Montell concluded, “Many quartets formed in this manner became official foursomes, offering their services to area churches.” Thus were born many early Kentucky gospel quartets, before the golden age of the 1950s and ’60s when I chewed peanut butter sandwiches, humming along to the Happy Goodman Family. Montell also described enormous southern Kentucky singings during the years when my grandparents were young. “Overflow crowds at church singings were, in fact, the rule rather than the exception from the early 1920s to the 1950s. People came from miles around in such numbers that it was often necessary to set up a public address system to accommodate those forced by seating limitations to remain in the church yard,” he said. And though sometimes a gospel quartet performance was featured, the bulk of the program was devoted to congregational singing from shape-note hymnals. The place names referred to by Montell neighbored Bowling Green, where I grew up, and Trigg and Christian Counties, where my father and grandparents were raised. I could imagine my grandmother as a young girl in Hopkinsville, dressing in her Sunday best and attending the Big Singing in nearby Benton, the only early Kentucky singing convention to survive into the twenty-first century. I couldn’t ask her or my grandfather or father if they’d attended shape-note singings; they were all long dead. In May 2006, I loaded up my Subaru and headed for Benton and the 123rd annual Big Singing, convinced, but with no proof, that someone in my family might have sung there once. Joyce Bannister, a distant cousin who still lived in the area,

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prepared me for the journey with a handwritten copy of the Thomas family tree — my grandmother’s. Here were the names I had treasured as a child, then lost as I moved westward: great-grandfather Starkie and great-grandmother Julia Thomas and their children — Earlie, Erma, Eska, Edna, Ott, Mary Rhett, Ocie, Clyde, and Eula Louise, my grandmother. Just reading their names evoked images of the soft faces of the great aunts I’d known as a child, women I resembled more every day after I reached fifty. This branch of the Thomas family had lived on a farm in Trigg County, just across the stretch of land now called Land Between the Lakes from Benton. When Louise was twelve, they moved to Hopkinsville, the nearest sizable town, so the kids could get a better education. The family reunions I remembered from early childhood were held at Aunt Erma’s farm in nearby Caledonia Community. And just down the road from Benton, in the tiny town of Pembroke, Louise and my grandfather Emery Carpenter had raised their little boy Billy, my father. On May 28, my daughter and son, a family friend, and I drove down the Bluegrass Parkway from Louisville to Benton for the Big Singing. The plan was to introduce them to shape-note singing, in this case from the Southern Harmony tunebook rather than The Sacred Harp, and to show them the country where generations of Thomases and Carpenters, their kin, had lived. We sped down the empty highway through a tunnel of trees, past rock outcroppings and smooth pastures, across nearly two hundred miles before arriving in Benton, an old town with the familiar modern outskirts that ring every American town — a highway strip of big box outlets, fast food joints and prefab motels. Lost and late, I stuck my head into the Four Pigs barbe-

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cue joint on the main thoroughfare and called out to nobody in particular: “Do you know where I can find the Big Singing?” Twenty heads swiveled toward the front door and answered in unison: “Straight up this street, at the courthouse,” their voices tinged with the familiar derision that in recent years has given rise to the ubiquitous insult, “Duhhh.” We arrived in time for lunch, and though the temperature was 90 degrees and rising, I was disappointed to find that dinner was not being held on the courthouse grounds but at Main Street Java, an air-conditioned coffee shop across the street. My wilting family and I looked around and realized that we were the only ones there not dressed in suit and tie or dress and hat. We crossed the street to the Marshall County Courthouse and the afternoon session of the singing. I shared a book with a lovely white-haired woman, Vitrue Cain, wife of Osage and mother of Mark Cain, a friendly man I’d met at lunch. When she was sixteen, said Vitrue, she had a job near Paducah picking strawberries with a friend from high school. Big Singing Day in Benton, she said, was the social event of the season each year, a gathering nobody dared miss. I had seen photographs of the courthouse lawn on Big Singing Day in the 1940s, with massive crowds crammed shoulder to shoulder, stretching all the way to the street. Today’s gathering was modest by comparison, with around one hundred participants. “I bought a new hat and white high-heeled shoes and bought a bus ticket to Benton for the Big Singing,” remembered Vitrue. “Those shoes like to killed my feet.” This Southern Harmony singing was distinctly different in pace and mood from a Sacred Harp singing. Leaders paused

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to talk before announcing the number of their song, acknowledging the gathered crowd, acknowledging the chairman, thanking the ladies for wearing hats — a proud Benton tradition — and remembering singings of old. Nostalgia tinged the atmosphere. I flipped through Vitrue’s vintage songbook, the 1939 edition, and its photos of the Big Singing during its heyday. Among the pictures was a curious one of two little boys, John and Frank Nichols, dressed as twins and standing in front of a stern, gaunt old man with a long moustache and popped eyes, Wesley G. Thomas. Could this Thomas be one of my Thomas ancestors? It seemed possible. The leaders, most of them men, tended to sweep their arms in the fashion of choir directors rather than the crisp upand-down tempo-setting arm movement I’d learned at Sacred Harp singings. From Vitrue, I learned that just last year, at the 2005 Big Singing, women were allowed to lead for the first time. Among the women leaders was Deborah Loftis, a music scholar who had written her PhD dissertation on Big Singing Day in Benton and the Southern Harmony tradition. Loftis noted the differences between the two shape-note singing styles, observing that the characteristic “intensity at Sacred Harp singings [was] not present in Southern Harmony singing.” Whereas Sacred Harp singers moved quickly from song to song, tapping their feet and unleashing unrestrained vocals at a brisk pace, the highest notes “almost shouted in enthusiasm,” Southern Harmony singing was more relaxed, the tempos considerably slower and without much variation from song to song. “Southern Harmony [singers],” said Loftis, “have tried to preserve their tradition without change. . . . Little influence

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has come from other groups. . . . Most of the singers on Big Singing Day sing Southern Harmony only on that occasion each year, and do not sing with any other shape note traditions.” Though Big Singing Day had brought me back to southwestern Kentucky in search of an ancestral connection, it was not my singing home. And though it was meaningful to hear about my family from Cousin Joyce, and to reunite with another cousin, Don Walker, in the days after the singing, I realized that my singing family lay beyond Benton and stretched across the continent, from deep southern Georgia to Seattle, wherever fever-pitched singers gathered on any given weekend to raise their voices, singing loud praise from the pages of The Sacred Harp. A few weeks later, I was back in Birmingham for the 2006 national convention and a reunion with the family that had taken me in three years earlier. The singing had moved from the center of Homewood to the Unitarian Universalist Church, perched high atop a hill overlooking the city. As I drove up at the end of the first day of singing, I could hear the throng inside as soon as I stepped out of my air-conditioned rental car onto the blistering asphalt parking lot. Inside, I slipped into one of the back chairs and marveled at the vaulted, beamed ceiling of the circular room, with tall slatted shutters holding back the afternoon sun from the walls of windows. The group was a bit smaller than the one gathered at the 2004 convention, but this was the summer of three-and fourdollar gallons of gasoline across America. The sound was as grand as ever. Glancing around the room I saw many familiar faces. Mr.

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Freeman sat in the third row of the tenor section. Behind him, frowning intently into her songbook was a friend from Birmingham, Kathleen, whom I’d invited to come and hear the singing. She caught my eye and beamed across the room. “I love it!” she mouthed, then returned her attention to the book. Before the day ended, a little curly-haired boy who couldn’t have been more than eight years old led “David’s Lamentation,” a complex tune with changing tempos. When his song ended, the group burst into applause. Clapping is rare as Sacred Harp singers are careful to distinguish between participation and performance. But when a young child leads, it is customary to reward him with applause, and on occasion, when a very old singer leads, spontaneous applause, signifying respect, erupts. That first evening in Birmingham, I joined a group of singers at a local restaurant for a special dinner organized by Amanda Denson. In the previous year, Amanda had endured surgery for cancer of the throat and now, her larynx removed, busily scribbled notes. We had become acquainted through e-mail, introduced by her cousin Mike Hinton. Both Mike and Amanda are descendants of the famed singing Denson family that included two of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s great singing school teachers, brothers Thomas and Seaborn Denson, who taught thousands to read and sing shape-notes until their respective deaths in 1935 and 1936. In his history of Sacred Harp singing, Buell Cobb reflects on “professor” Tom Denson’s funeral in Double Springs, Alabama, about an hour northwest of Birmingham. Denson died getting ready for a singing and word spread quickly by radio and word of mouth. Singers drove all night to be at the

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funeral. “By noon the line of cars seemed to those present to stretch almost infinitely on both sides of the road by the church,” said Cobb, “the modest building serving only as the focal point for such a crowd. . . . The singers, one of the family recalls, were spread out over three acres of land. The funeral was essentially a great singing in Denson’s memory.” Amanda carries on the Denson family tradition with great zeal and energy. As a girl, she traveled in the summer from her hometown of Tuscaloosa to spend time with her aunt, Ruth Denson Edwards, and to attend singings. Aunt Ruthy’s words grace the opening pages of the 1991 edition of the Sacred Harp Denson edition: “Music is a God-given faculty that by sounding its melody and harmony opens the doors to human hearts and souls and brings man back to his first relationship with God.” I once asked Amanda by e-mail how the love of Sacred Harp singing was instilled in her as a child. “Like most things in life,” she replied, “it’s not taught but caught.” She recounted a story told by Rodney Ivey a few years earlier. “His little girl, who was about four then, was playing with her cousin. They were pretending to get their dinner baskets ready to go to a singing. “That still makes me smile,” said Amanda. Our group traded stories over dinner, Amanda smiling over us from the head of the table, then retired early to prepare for the next morning’s singing. On day two, I joined Mr. Freeman in row three. He had aged over two years and was noticeably thinner, his skin hanging looser than when we’d first met in 2004. But he was still active in singing, having organized his Mobile church’s first all-day singing the year he turned eighty-nine, and teaching

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the men in his woodworking shop to sing shapes. Ninety now, he’d been singing since he attended singing school classes in Cullman County, Alabama, at age twelve, and bought his first songbook at fourteen. I asked Mr. Freeman to name his favorite songs, and he opened his book to a handwritten list on the inside cover. At the top of the list was number 64, “Nashville.” Each song in the Sacred Harp songbook is annotated with a verse from the Bible whose meaning and words the song reflects, either directly or indirectly. The verse on Mr. Freeman’s favorite song came from the Book of Isaiah, chapter 58, verse 11: “Thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” Appropriate for the man who’d written me letters over the past two years about the wonders of his garden: abundant tomato plants, a gardenia with twentysix blossoms. Following the morning coffee break, a group of elderly African-American women dressed in their finest hats and dresses joined the alto section. One of them, Bernice Harvey of Ozark, Alabama, was introduced by Buell Cobb as the daughter of “the great Dewey Williams,” a singer featured in the Bill Moyers documentary film Amazing Grace. As the group sang “Easter Anthem,” a four-page-long celebration of the resurrection of Christ, she beamed broadly, closed her book, shut her eyes and listened, her face reflecting a life’s worth of singing memories. A young woman led number 61, “Sweet Rivers”: A few more days or years at most My troubles will be o’er I hope to join the heaven’ly host On Canaan’s happy shore.

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Mr. Freeman nudged me with his elbow. “That’s me,” he said, pointing his index finger at his heart, and my heart froze. But as the day passed, lesson after lesson, song after song reflected the same exultation in death expressed in “Easter Anthem” and Bernice Harvey’s beatific expression. Tim Reynolds of Nashville helped his elderly father, Dr. William Reynolds, to the hollow square to lead number 128, “The Promised Land,” an old familiar hymn sung at a very brisk pace. As we repeated the refrain three times, our voices climbed to the vaulted ceiling and roared back down: I’m bound for the Promised Land, I’m bound for the Promised Land Oh, who will come and go with me? I am bound for the Promised Land. When the last note was sung, Dr. Reynolds dropped his hand and with great glee announced: “And I am!” Every time I had attended a singing, I was left with an overriding message. This time the message was about the wisdom of age, the joy of sharing singing over a lifetime and the power of this musical form, these sacred songs, to ease death’s certain approach. On the third day of the convention, Mike Hinton led the memorial lesson. “There are not just Sacred Harp singers in heaven,” he said, “but there are plenty of them.” Mike described his vision of “a good corner of heaven, outside, under the tall trees, with perfect acoustics and plenty of benches,” the corner of heaven reserved for Sacred Harp singers. “We love Sacred Harp,” he said. “That’s what our measure is. Either you love it or you don’t.”

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The national convention ended as it had begun, joyfully and filled with grace. The following day I traveled to Natural Bridge, Alabama, for the Wakefield family singing with Miss Ila Ingle, a seventy-ish woman I’d met just the day before. A retired seventh-grade schoolteacher of thirty-three years, petite and silver-haired, she arrived dressed smartly in a teal dress and matching jacket, driving her Dodge Caravan with ease and familiarity over roads as familiar to her as the back of her hand. The van, she explained, was for hauling the grandchildren around. She checked her cell phone repeatedly, hoping for a message from her daughter. I thought of my own children, scattered to the winds, three of them traveling in disparate parts of the country, the fourth at home working, awaiting new orders from the Army, possibly for Afghanistan. A wave of anxiety rose in my chest as I told her about the four of them, all so far away. “The first trip I ever took was to a singing,” said Miss Ila. “My parents always carried us to singings in nearby communities, and as I got older, we went out of state. After my mother died, when daddy was in his nineties, I carried him to singings every weekend. My husband would say, ‘I’m fine. I’ll just sit and watch my ballgames.’” Miss Ila didn’t expect her husband’s sudden death. Her voice softened as she remembered the many times she left him at home to carry her father to a singing. Because it was nearby and because I had expressed an interest, Miss Ila drove me to Double Springs before the Wakefield singing began, to see the statue of the Denson brothers, erected by the townspeople in their memory. Entering the tidy little town, I read a sign on the side of

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the road: Double Springs, Winston County, Free State of Winston. I’d read in Buell Cobb’s book that Winston County “detached itself from the Confederacy before the Civil War” as its poor farmers were not slave owners and its loyalties were to the Union. At the edge of the courthouse lawn, the Denson Brothers statue stood gleaming in the morning sun. “To the memory of the Brothers Seaborn M. Denson (1834–1936) and Thomas J. Denson (1863–1935),” the inscription read, “Way Over in the Promised Land.” Next to their statue stood another, a bronze sculpture of a soldier in a uniform torn to shreds. Across his shoulder hung a broken sword. The plaque read, “This soldier, one-half Union and one-half Confederate, symbolizes the war within a war and honors the Winstonians in both Armies; their shining new swords of 1861 were by 1865 as broken as the spirits of the men who bore them.” We had sung prayers for the soldiers still pouring in and out of Iraq and for the Iraqi people throughout the national convention, and at Double Springs, I offered a silent prayer of my own. We drove through the quiet morning, past small settlements and neat lawns, over crystalline rivers and winding roads to the former King’s School House, now Mount Vernon Primitive Baptist Church, and parked on the gravel driveway in front of the white one-room church. Across the way, the tabernacle where dinner on the ground would be held in a few hours stood silently in front of an elaborately decorated hillside cemetery. A huge black gum tree cast its shadow over the church grounds. Inside, men moved chairs and benches to form a square,

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beneath a reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Miss Ila kissed her cousin Josie Hyde, whom I’d met here two years ago, and her husband, John, blue-eyed and dapper in a blueand-white pinstriped shirt that matched his eyes. We began to sing, a small group, as latecomers trickled in joining either the Wakefield family members at the back of the church or the singers up front. Next to me was Betty Wakefield Baccus, who shared her book and sang the tenor line a full octave lower than I did. Betty remembered her mother singing Sacred Harp songs while washing dishes. Uncle Tom, Miss Ila’s father, she said, was a great singer and leader. Normally, on Sunday mornings, said Betty, she played piano at a neighboring Methodist church where her husband was the pastor. But this morning, she said, she told him they’d just have to do without a piano player. A half-hour into the singing, more singers arrived: two women traveling back to Nashville from the Birmingham convention; and three brothers, the Ballingers, prolific singers I’d met over and over at singings across the country. “My daddy and his daddy were best friends, lifelong friends,” said Betty, pointing to one of the Ballinger boys. “They come to help us out and we go to their singing every year to help them out.” This Sunday was Father’s Day and many songs were dedicated to daddies alive and dead. We sang number 406, “New Harmony”: I want to live a Christian here I want to die a shouting I want to feel my saviour near While soul and body’s parting.

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The church walls began to rattle just before we broke for dinner on the ground, a Wakefield family feast pulled from ice chests and boxes, laid out on long tables beneath the shade of the tabernacle’s tin roof. Josie’s ricotta cheesecake, fried green tomatoes, cobblers with lattice crusts sprinkled with sugar, roast beef with carrots and onions, new potatoes fresh from the garden, pies and puddings dense and rich — every bite a tribute to one of the women or men gathered around the table. The singing recommenced after lunch, just as a cell phone’s ring shattered the quiet of the small room. “Somebody’s pacemaker’s going off!” shouted one of the Ballinger boys, setting off a big laugh. The day ended with number 499, “At Rest”: The world can never give The bliss for which we sigh; ’Tis not the whole of life to live Nor all of death to die. Farewell, dear friends, farewell, For just a little while; We’ll meet and sing on Heaven’s shore, Where parting comes no more. Miss Ila drove me back to Birmingham, past Nauvoo where she was born, through Jasper, a prosperous looking small town where she lived as a young woman. She drove me past the grand old house where the actress Tallulah Bankhead, a Jasper native, once lived, past Confederate and American flags flying on the town square, past a church sign that read: “Give Satan an inch and he’ll be a ruler. Everyone welcome.” She drove me past the courthouse where singings used to be

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held, back in the day when “people used to ride the train to Jasper” to sing. She drove me to the Howard Johnson in Birmingham, where we said a reluctant goodbye. We had talked all the way, strangers just yesterday. Miss Ila extended the parting hand and I took it, assuring her we’d meet again, we’d sing together again. Next year, I said. In Birmingham. v v v

Josie Hyde’s Red Velvet Cake c ake: 1 cup oil 1½ cups sugar 2 beaten eggs 2 oz. red food coloring 2 tbsp. cocoa 2 cups plain flour 1 tsp. vanilla 1 tsp. baking soda 1 cup buttermilk Cream together oil, sugar, and eggs. Make a paste with the food coloring and cocoa and add to mixture. Add flour with buttermilk, vinegar, and vanilla, then alternately add baking soda and blend lightly. Bake in 2 greased and floured 8-inch pans for 30 minutes at 350 degrees. (Layers may be split to make 4 layers.)

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ic ing: 1 8-oz. block cream cheese ½ stick butter or margarine 1 tsp. vanilla 1 box confectioner’s sugar Blend cream cheese, butter, and vanilla, then add sugar gradually. Spread over cooled cake and top with nuts, cherries, dried fruit, or coconut if desired. Josie Hyde (first published on Dr. Warren Steel’s Web site; reprinted here with permission of Josie Hyde)

v v v

Aunt Annie’s Old-fashioned Cobbler Pies 1 qt. fresh sliced peaches, cherries, strawberries, blueberries, or apples 1 cup sugar 2 tbsp. butter or more Water Pat out pre-made pie dough in bottom of greased baking pan. Peel half of fruit and place on top of dough. Add about 1½ cups water, ½ cup sugar, and dot with half of butter. Roll out more dough and cut in strips. Cover fruit with strips of dough. Repeat same with rest of fruit, sugar, and butter, omitting water this time. Cover with top pie crust, vented. Brush with a little melted butter and sprinkle with sugar. Bake at 350 for 1 hour.

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p  “My aunt Annie used an oval enamel dish pan rimmed

in black as she had to feed farm hands at noon too. Annie Denson Aaron wrote the words and music to #367, ‘Consolation’ published in 1935.” Amanda Denson Brady, Birmingham, Alabama

v v v

Aunt Ruthy’s Sour Cream Pound Cake 2 sticks butter (don’t substitute margarine!) 3 cups sugar 6 eggs ¼ tsp. baking soda Pinch of salt 3 cups flour 1 cup sour cream 2 tsp. vanilla ½ to 1 tsp. almond flavoring Butter and flour a tube pan (not Teflon coated). Sift flour, salt, and baking soda together. Cream butter and sugar. Beat in 1 egg at a time, add sour cream, then gradually add in dry ingredients. Add flavorings. Hit on the counter 2 or 3 times to get the air bubbles out. Put in cold oven set to 325 degrees. Bake 1 hour and 20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out dry. Bake 10 minutes more if needed. Take out and let set in the pan for 5 minutes or so, then turn out.

p  “When Cousin Michael was in Vietnam, Aunt Ruthy sent him a pound cake. When he’d come visit, she always fixed it for

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him, too. He asked for the recipe, and she said, ‘No, I want you to have something special when you’re here,’ and as much as she loved him, she didn’t share. He was talking about that cake one day, and I said, ‘I’ve got the recipe; I’ll give it to you.’ When I had surgery, Michael had his wife make that cake, and they sent it FedEx to me.” Amanda Denson Brady. Aunt Ruthy is Ruth Denson Edward, recording secretary of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company for many years. Cousin Mike is Mike Hinton, president of the board of directors of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company.

v v v

Cousin Belle’s Egg Custard Pie Filling 3 eggs 1½ cups sweet milk 3 tbsp. flour 1 cup sugar 1 capful of vanilla 1 tbsp. butter Combine eggs and dry ingredients well. (You don’t need to get out a mixer for this. Do it yourself.) Add milk. Mix thoroughly. Pour into unbaked pie crust and dot with the butter. Bake in preheated 400-degree oven about 30 minutes, or until middle is firm.

p  “At the National Sacred Harp Singing Convention, I told cousin Phillip Denson Aaron as he was going down the line to get a piece of that egg custard pie, that I had made it. He said,

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‘Aunt Belle used to make those.’ I said, ‘It’s her recipe.’ She was Belle Claighorn Denson, married to Cousin Bob Denson, who was mayor of Addison, Alabama, in Winston County. I called her Cousin Belle.” Amanda Denson Brady

v v v

Bill Beverly’s Rhubarb Pie 1½ cups sugar 4 tbsp. cornstarch Zest of ½ orange Pinch salt 1 beaten egg Juice of ½ orange 4 cups raw rhubarb, cut into 1/2 inch lengths 1 unbaked 9-inch pie crust (preferable homemade) and top Mix together the sugar, cornstarch, zest, and salt. Stir in the egg and orange juice. Then add the cut rhubarb and mix well. Place in the unbaked pie crust and cover with top. Slit top for venting. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour or until the juices are bubbling thickly. I often freeze the pie to bake later and usually use frozen rhubarb when doing so. When baking a frozen pie, preheat to 425 and after 5 minutes reduce to 350 degrees. Judge doneness by whether the juices are bubbling thickly. Foil can be used if the crust is browning too fast.

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p  “Bill is a total nut about pies. He only uses unsalted butter,

freezes, put the [crust] ingredients in the Cuisinart to mix, then into Ziploc bags to roll. Untouched by human hands . . . but you eat every last morsel of his crusts, and then lick your fingers.” Martha Beverly, Kalamazoo, Michigan. Recipe adapted from the Upjohn cafeteria recipe, 1970s

v v v

Blueberry Buckle bat t er :

¾ cup sugar ¼ cup butter 1 egg ½ cup milk 2 cups flour 2 tsp. baking powder ½ tsp. salt 2 cups well-drained blueberries

topping:

½ cup sugar ⅓ cup sifted flour ½ tsp. cinnamon ¼ cup butter

Have all ingredients at room temperature. Mix sugar, butter, and egg together, then stir in milk. Sift together the flour,

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baking powder, and salt. Stir into the wet ingredients. Add the blueberries to this and pour into a greased and floured 9-inch square baking pan. Combine the topping ingredients and sprinkle over batter in the pan. Bake at 375 degrees for 45 to 50 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool before serving.

p  “My Grandmother Beverly often brought this to family gatherings.”

Martha Beverly, Kalamazoo, Michigan

v v v

Fried Fruit Pies d o ug h: 2 cups self-rising flour ¼ cup Crisco 1¼ to 1½ cup buttermilk f il l ing: 2–3 cups dried apples or peaches ¼–½ cup sugar Water Put 2–3 cups dried fruit in a saucepan, add ¼–½ cup sugar, or equivalent measure of Splenda, to sweeten and water to cover. Simmer 30 to 40 minutes until fruit is tender. Drain, cool briefly, and run through food processor until

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consistency of thick jam or use potato masher to mash fruit filling. Mix flour and Crisco with fingers or a fork until the texture of cornmeal. Gradually add buttermilk until the mixture becomes a solid dough. Flour hands and board, and turn dough out. Knead well. Keep board floured. Pinch off in golf ball–sized pieces and roll very thin. Put a spoonful of fruit on one side of the circle of dough, fold over to form a half moon–shaped pie, trim and seal edges together with fingers or a fork. Pinch holes on top with fork. Heat 2 tablespoons Crisco in an electric skillet to 350 degrees. Be sure it’s hot. Brown pies on one side, then the other. Drain on paper towels.

p  “It takes a lot of practice. I’ve made as many as over one

hundred at a time; I made eighty-two last Thursday when a friend’s husband died. I don’t sing but I like to go to the singing and listen and make pies.” Ellen Walters, Bowdon, Georgia

epilogue The community of Sacred Harp singers is a dynamic, living and breathing organism that never stops changing. As the song says, The moment when our life begins, we all begin to die. Living this tradition means experiencing new life, witnessing change, growth, and death in a time-honored cycle. A year after Ivalene Donaldson gave me her recipe for “Lazy Man’s Pie” at the national convention in Birmingham, I received notice of her death. In early September 2006, Josie Hyde’s loving husband John, with whom I’d sung at the Wakefield family singing at King’s School House in Natural Bridge, Alabama, just a few months earlier, succumbed to a massive stroke. The message announcing John’s death, sent to those on the fasola e-mail list by Richard Mauldin, bore the subject line “John Hyde made it home today.” John was eighty-seven, a cheerful, good-looking man who brought light to the room at every singing he attended. Babies are born, children grow from young adolescents to young adults, couples marry, cancers are discovered and treated, elderly singers die in the time that passes between singings, as we yearn toward our next reunion.

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“The tradition of Sacred Harp exists through intervals of space and time, is experienced as convenings and separations, group happenings eagerly anticipated and wistfully concluded,” writes Buell Cobb. “The fact of parting and the hope of reunion are the common bond of Sacred Harp followers.” Since I went to my first singing in 2003, I’ve made friends who’ve demonstrated the meaning of courage and grace, who have happily shared their lives with a stranger, known to them only within the confines of the hollow square. Uel Freeman, whom I first met when he was eighty-eight, has been a loyal letter writer in the years since, addressing me always as “Singing Buddy.” He tells me about his garden, sends photos of his prize-winning hibiscus with blossoms ten inches across, describes what he’s making in his woodworking shop, reminisces about his long lifetime in Alabama, sends prayers for my children, and most importantly, keeps me up to date on his singing activity. Mr. Freeman, and others like him, remind me that this is not a static but an open community — welcoming and fluid while steeped in tradition. Tim Eriksen, of Massachusetts and Minnesota, a wellknown Sacred Harp singer as well as a respected popular vocal artist, demonstrates the elasticity of the form, recording the mournful tune “Idumea” (“And am I born to die / To lay this body down?”) as a punk rock number with his band, Cordelia’s Dad, then as a brooding solo ballad on the Cold Mountain soundtrack. But despite his innovations, Eriksen remains deeply devoted to group singing and the history of the Sacred Harp, and to the rudiments of shape-note singing, teaching it to Introduction to Music students at Amherst College. In 2006 Eriksen led a group singing at the Newport

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Folk Festival, the first appearance by Sacred Harp singers at that venue since the 1960s when Sacred Harp singers shared the stage with Johnny Cash, Doc Watson, and Jimmy Driftwood before a crowd of twelve to fourteen thousand. Eriksen says he likes to pay close attention to the lesson that comes with each new song and each new leader at a singing. In Sacred Harp terminology, each song called is a “lesson.” “People’s way of relating to the text is so interesting,” says Eriksen. “There’s definite meaning and structure there, and there’s room for people to be themselves. There’s something in the attitude of the music, the singing and the tradition that is not left or right. “The way in which the leading is done is so graceful and effortless, and not preachy in the normal sense.” Tim’s words ring true for me, and the lesson I take away is that a song is never exactly the same, that it changes with each leader in each lesson, and that the same leader might find new meaning in a song the next time he or she leads it or sings it with a group. At the 2005 Henagar-Union Convention I met Matt and Erica Hinton, a young couple who, in addition to carrying a diaper bag for their sweet little baby girl, dragged around cords and microphones and filmed the singing from a high perch on a ladder. A year later I watched in wonder as their documentary film, Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp, was screened at the national convention. The result of seven years of work, the film is both a scholarly overview of the music and its history and a moving depiction of the tradition’s deep emotional value. I loved seeing singers I had met onscreen and almost jumped out of my seat when I heard two different lines of narration from the film.

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First the narrator explained what probably should have been obvious to me by now: “The human voice: That is the Sacred Harp.” A whole new layer of meaning was added to experience at that moment. Second, the narrator said: “It once was lost, but now it’s found. . . . The earliest music in America is neither dead nor dying; it’s standing right in front of you, singing.” Had I heard shape-note music referred to this way before, as America’s earliest music? Probably. But it had not registered until the Hintons showed me the majesty of this music’s history on film. That’s how it is with Sacred Harp singing; there’s always a new experience to take home with you. Visiting Arkansas in September 2006, I was lucky enough to sing on a Sunday afternoon with the regular Springdale group at the Shiloh Museum, a living history exhibit with a tidy turn-of-the-century wooden building just right for singing Sacred Harp. In the back row of the tenors, a group of older ladies, dressed in their Sunday best, sat quietly listening. They were guests for the first time. Halfway through the afternoon’s singing, they were asked to introduce themselves. One of them held up a fragile, tattered copy of the 1911 edition of The Sacred Harp, a book she had saved from her family’s library all her life. Her friend two seats down told us she hadn’t been to a singing in many years, but when she was a child living in New Mexico, her father carried her entire family home to Alabama each summer, so that the children could attend a singing. She had forgotten it, she said, but it came back to her as soon as the Springdale singers struck the first note. Why do we love Sacred Harp singing? For me, it is the

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powerful community experience of reading a common language, finding harmony, and sharing passion, tradition and memory with our bare naked voices. Since I discovered Sacred Harp, I’ve summoned my adult daughter to attend the Joe Beasley singing in Brooklyn, New York, where she lives. This summer, she and my son, a sophomore at New York University, attended the Manhattan allday singing in Greenwich Village. He reported it was “awesome.” In June 2006, I finally took my mother to a singing, the 151st annual East Texas convention in Henderson, about two hundred miles from her home in Galveston. She sat amazed at the power of the sound around her, more than two hundred loud, joyous voices raised. I was equally in awe as I looked around the room and saw so many singers I’d met elsewhere: Rodney Ivey of Henegar, Alabama; Tom Owen of McMahan; Beverly Coates of Dallas; and Gaylon Powell of Austin. A singer I’d never met but whose legend preceded him was Hugh McGraw of Bremen, Georgia, widely known as the single most important ambassador of Sacred Harp singing in the last century. McGraw, a cherry-cheeked, sprightly gentleman with a broad chest and a booming laugh, looked out from the hollow square at the crowd gathered. “I was here about twenty years ago, when Texas Highways magazine was doing a story about Sacred Harp singing,” said McGraw. “I believe there were about three basses, two trebles, and three altos. Back then, they said it was dying!” McGraw raised his eyebrows mischievously and the crowd roared with laughter. “It’s good to see Sacred Harp is alive and well in Texas,” he said and launched into number 416, “My Native Land.”

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My mother, a great southern cook, loved the singing and the noontime dinner on the ground, and I loved giving her this gift of music that swelled the spirit, that united us with the religious tradition that defined the part of the country where both of us grew up. Last week I got a letter from my singing buddy Mr. Freeman, and enclosed was a Scotch-taped envelope of seeds. “I have been working with my flowers, for they have so many seeds on them,” he said. “I have a big cup of seeds, so here are some for you. The name is Horn of Plenty. They will come up next year. You have to plant them after the cold weather gets gone, or plant in a warm place.” At ninety-one, Mr. Freeman is still working and singing. Three of his great-grandchildren are expecting babies, he tells me. He is always busy, but not too busy to write long letters by hand. “I’ll hush now,” he said in his last letter, “and I hope to see you soon or at the national convention next year.” I looked up Horn of Plenty in my gardening books. The flower likes wet conditions and deplores direct sunlight. It’s hardy in Zone 10 and 11, basically anywhere south of Montgomery, along the Gulf Coast. I tucked the packet of seeds inside the front cover of my Sacred Harp songbook where I knew I wouldn’t lose it, and come next spring, I’ll plant the seeds in this rocky western ground. Whether they will grow at an altitude of six thousand feet remains to be seen, but stranger things have happened. Just a few years ago, my hardened heart cracked open and let in the sound of unadorned voices raised in praise. Singing Sacred Harp restored to me many treasured parts of a life past and gave me hope for a spiritual future, for grace, amazing grace:

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How sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found Was blind, but now I see. “New Britain,” #45, The Sacred Harp, Denson edition

appendix

At most singing conventions, CDs and songbooks, as well as brochures and leaflets about Sacred Harp singing, are laid out for sale on tables spared around the edges of the room. There are also numerous excellent video, print, and recorded resources and a wealth of information on the Internet. The list below suggests only a few.

f ilms on dv d Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp. Directed by Matt and Erica Hinton. N.p.: Awake Productions, 2006. Visit www .awakemysoul.com or www.thesacredharp.com for more information. Sweet Is the Day: A Sacred Harp Family Portrait. Produced and directed by Erin Kellen and Jim Carnes. Montgomery: The Alabama Folklife Association, 2001. To order and to view a guide to the film, visit www.alabamafolklife.org. Amazing Grace with Bill Moyers. Produced and directed by Elena Mannes. Beverly Hills ca: PBS Home Video, 1990. Available new or used at www.amazon.com.

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sel ect ed bibl io g raphy Cobb, Buell E., Jr. The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Bealle, John. Public Worship, Private Faith. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Jackson, George Pullen. White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. New York: Dover Press, 1965.

r ecor dings To hear Tim Eriksen and Cordelia’s Dad’s rock version of “Idumea,” go to cdbaby.com/cd/cordeliasdad2. To hear numerous recordings of Sacred Harp singings, visit www .pilgrimproduction.org/catagories.html, a remarkable Web site that features the Voices Across America project, offering recordings of American music as wide ranging as Dixieland and bluegrass to Sacred Harp singing. Just click on Sacred Harp singing and you’ll be led to a long list of recordings of singings from across the country. A good resource for purchasing CDs of Sacred Harp singings is www.morningtrumpet.com, singer Richard Delong’s Web site for Morning Trumpet Recordings. Other recordings, separately distributed, include the following: The Joe Beasley Memorial Sacred Harp Album, a two-CD set recorded at Old Flatwoods Church near Nauvoo, Alabama, and produced by the Joe Beasley Memorial Fund. $25 plus $2 shipping from Jean and George Seiler, 15 Hill Road, Stillwater, ny 12170. The Owen Family: A Heritage of Singing. Released in 2006, recorded at the home of Tom and Mary Owen, McMahan, Texas. Engineered and mixed by Don Brewer, Cowpatty Studios,

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Lytton Springs, Texas, [email protected]. To purchase a CD, write [email protected].

act iv it ie s Camp Fasola: Each summer in late June or early July the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association sponsors a camp for learning and singing Sacred Harp convenes at Camp Lee near Anniston, Alabama (about halfway between Birmingham and Atlanta). Campers enjoy singing school lessons, hayrides, bonfires, lectures on the history of Sacred Harp, lessons on making lemonade and how to fix and carry dinner for singings, swimming, ropes course, canoeing, hiking, fishing, and the famous Camp Lee rock slide. Nearby traditional Sacred Harp singings are scheduled on dates immediately before and after the camp so that participants can practice what they’ve learned and support traditional singings. For more information, visit www .fasola.org and click on Resources.

r e so ur c e s At www.fasola.org, designed by Keith Willard of Minnesota, one can find everything a beginner needs to know about Sacred Harp singing, including a beginner’s guide, numerous essays about the tradition, comprehensive calendars of singings across the country including maps to the locations, links to state and local organizations, and much more. To order songbooks, visit www.originalsacredharp.com. Dr. Warren Steel of the University of Mississippi maintains an excellent online resource guide, www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~mudws/ harp.html, with straightforward links to many articles on the music and the tradition, MP3 music samples, recipes from dinners on the ground, and much more.

works cited

Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp. Directed and produced by Matt and Erica Hinton. N.p.: Awake Productions, 2006. Carmer, Carl. Stars Fell on Alabama. Rev. ed. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2000. Cobb, Buell, Jr. The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Cooper, W. M., ed. The Sacred Harp. Dothan al: W. M. Cooper, 1902. Ely, Ginnie. “A Plea for Participation in the Sacred Harp Tradition.” N.p., n.d. Freeman, Uel. Keepsakes: Favorite Recipes of our Brown Kinfolk. N.p., 1999. History and Record of South Union and South West Texas Sacred Harp Singing Convention. N.p., 1950. Jackson, George Pullen. White Spirituals in Southern Uplands. New York: Dover Press, 1965. Levine, Steven. “Celestial Fruit on Earthly Ground: Singing at Antioch.” www.fasola.org, April 14, 1994. Loftis, Deborah Carlton. “Big Singing Day in Kentucky: A Study

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of the History, Ethnic Identity and Musical Style of Southern Harmony Singers.” PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 1987. Lomax, Alan. Liner notes, Harp of a Thousand Strings: All Day Singing from The Sacred Harp. Southern Journey, volume 9. Rounder 80205-2. (P) 1998. Mercer, Ted. “Should Northerners Learn to Sing Sacred Harp?” Chicago Sacred Harp Newsletter, 1998. Montell, William Lynwood. Singing the Glory Down: Amateur Gospel Music in South Central Kentucky, 1900–1990. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991. “Rudiments of Music.” In The Sacred Harp: The Best Collection of Sacred Songs, Hymns, Odes, and Anthems Ever Offered the Singing Public for General Use, ed. Hugh McGraw et al. Denson edition. Bremen ga: The Sacred Harp Publishing Company, 1991. Shaffer, John. Rocky Mountain Shape Note Singers: The First 20 Years (1968–1988). www.sacredharpcolorado.org./Documents/ History_CO_Shape_Note_Singing.pdf. Smith, Lee. Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process. Indianapolis: Alpha Books, 2001. Sweet Is the Day: A Sacred Harp Family Portrait. Produced and directed by Erin Kellen and Jim Carnes. Montgomery: The Alabama Folklife Association, 2001.

in t he at tabl e ser ie s Spiced: Recipes from Le Pré Verre Philippe Delacourcelle Translated and with a preface by Adele King and Bruce King Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias Edited by Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch Recovering Our Ancestors’ Gardens: Indigenous Recipes and Guide to Diet and Fitness Devon Abbott Mihesuah Dueling Chefs: A Vegetarian and a Meat Lover Debate the Plate Maggie Pleskac and Sean Carmichael A Sacred Feast: Reflections on Sacred Harp Singing and Dinner on the Ground Kathryn Eastburn A Taste of Heritage: Crow Indian Recipes and Herbal Medicines Alma Hogan Snell Edited by Lisa Castle The Banana: Empires, Trade Wars, and Globalization James Wiley

avail abl e in bison bo oks edit ions The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe Lesley Chamberlain With a new introduction by the author The Food and Cooking of Russia Lesley Chamberlain With a new introduction by the author The World on a Plate: A Tour through the History of America’s Ethnic Cuisine Joel Denker Masters of American Cookery M. F. K. Fisher, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Julia Child Betty Fussell With a preface by the author Good Things Jane Grigson Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book Jane Grigson New introduction by Sara Dickerman Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book Jane Grigson New introduction by Amy Sherman

Dining with Marcel Proust A Practical Guide to French Cuisine of the Belle Epoque Shirley King Foreword by James Beard

Pampille’s Table Recipes and Writings from the French Countryside from Marthe Daudet’s Les Bons Plats de France Translated and adapted by Shirley King