Anglo-Texan Spirituals by William A. Owens
The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Jul., 1982), pp. 31-48
ANGLO-TEXAN SPIRITUALS
WILLIAM A. OWENS*
[*William A. Owens is dean emeritus and professor emeritus in English at Columbia University, and is the well-known author of A Fair and Happy Land, Texas Folk Songs, and Three Friends: Bedichek, Dobie, Webb. His forthcoming book, Tell Me a Story, Sing Me a Song ... A Texas Chronicle, will be released by the University of Texas Press in the spring of 1983.]
This chapter is part of Tell Me a Story, Sing Me a Song ... A Texas Chronicle, the third volume of my autobiography and also the third in my collection of Texas folk music. The scene described here occurred in the summer of 1938. The remainder is a summation of country church music of the time, and its place in Texas folk culture.
William A. Owens
May, 1982
IN THE FIRST YEAR OF MY RECORDING IS TOPPED AT A BRUSH ARBORATA country crossroads somewhere between Crockett and Madisonville. All over the South, as they had for more than a hundred years, the faithful were coming together for revivals, for a week or two of reminding each other of the Lord's mercy, and Satan's wiles. I stood outside at the back and breathed again the mixed smell of drying willow leaves, of oak sawdust six inches deep on the ground, of coal oil flares shedding their reddish glow toward the outer edges of darkness, on men and women scrooched together on oak plank benches, on children asleep on patchwork quilt pallets. Services had started and the preacher, a white-haired, white-bearded man in white shirt and black trousers, was talking. At the moment his voice was quiet, gentle for a revivalist.
From what he said I knew he was Baptist, probably Primitive or Landmark. At the proper time he would shout in anger, not at the sinner for him there would be compassion-but at the devil and his power to drag the sinner down.
It was August, the dog days, hot, dry, and dusty, the time for protracted meetings in the country. It was a dull time, between the last plow down a furrow and the first cotton sack down that same furrow. People needed this time, for rest and for gathering together with their neighbors. So they came, walking the road at dusk, meeting other families, at times moving aside to let a car bound for the meeting go by. I waited till there were no longer the sounds of people coming in of mumbling voices and shoes on hard-packed ground. Then I took a seat on a back bench. The people around me had tired eyes, tired faces, tired but not unfeeling. Like the faithful of their people who had gone on before, they were looking up at the preacher, waiting for him to bring the light and spread it among them. Only then would their quietness give way; only then would they sound their own prayer and praise.
Suddenly the preacher stopped talking and turned toward some folding chairs near the table that served as pulpit and altar. Silently half a dozen deacons moved to them, their corner, and sat with heads bowed.
Men and women, the choir, took chairs on the other side. They had neither songbooks nor musical instruments. The preacher opened his songbook and said, "Bringing in the Sheaves." To me it was an old
song, ingrained in my memory from many nights like this. But it was not a spiritual; it was too new, too much the work of a hymn maker to be a spiritual. It was a good song for country revivals, carrying as it did
the double meaning of their work in cotton and corn fields and, seasonally at least, their labor in the vineyard of the Lord. Giving neither pitch nor beat the leader began singing. The choir and congregation followed as well as they could:
Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness,
Sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve;
Waiting for the harvest and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing bringing in the sheaves.
Men and women in the congregation, more women than men, mumbled uncertainly through the words of the verse and then, as they would have said, "showered down" on the refrain:
Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,
We shall come rejoicing bringing in the sheaves;
Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,
We shall come rejoicing bringing in the sheaves.
There was a period of testimony when older men and women, strong in their faith, stood in place and with trembling voices recited their blessings, or their victories over sin and Satan. Testimonies were interspersed,
not as ritual but as routine, with songs for which neither songbook nor leader was needed. It was the place in meeting for "old time" gospel songs. A sound that was hardly more than a mumbling became a song as people picked up tune and words:
'Tis the old time religion,
'Tis the old time religion,
'Tis the old time religion,
It's good enough for me.
This is a camp meeting song, old as the religious awakenings of the frontier-the tune primitive, the stanza simple, both easy to copy in other gospel songs. By the time they came to the second stanza the beat was accented by the clapping of hands and the tapping of feet, soundless in the sawdust. They went on and on with "the Twelve Apostles," "Paul and Silas," each shouted out by someone before the preceding stanza had ended.
It was going to be a good meeting, I heard from people around me. They meant that it would reach some emotional peak. The night before had, in their words, been "a good'un." Two women had gone into trances, one of them so deep that they had had to labor over her all night and only "this e'enin," too late for her to leave her house, had they been able to bring her out of it.
At a pause in the singing the preacher came down to the mourners' bench and stretched out his arms. Then in a voice more emotional than tuneful he began a song that stretched back to early seekers, people who wanted the touch of God not through a priest but through their own reaching out:
Come you sinners, poor and needy,
Weak and wounded, sick and sore;
Jesus ready stands to save you,
Full of pity, love, and pow'r.
It was his song and prelude to his sermon. No one raised a voice with him as he slowly trod the sawdust. This was as much sermon as song a part of an appeal for sinners to seek salvation. The sad pleading of the stanza changed to a tone of comfort in the refrain:
I will arise and go to Jesus;
He will embrace me in his arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior,
Oh, there are ten thousand charms.
His sermon carried the same burden of thought, with elaboration after elaboration on human frailty, the need through Christ's blood to be born again, and the final resting place in hell for those who continued on the downward path with sin and Satan. Deacons said, "Amen and again amen." Women wept softly. Workers pleaded in soft voices with those who had not yet "given themselves to the Lord." A man laid his hand on my arm and leaned close: "You been born again?" I nodded. He moved on. Then the preacher reminded them of the saints who had gone on before.
Suddenly a woman started toward him, singing in a high-pitched voice. He shouted "Glory!" and jumped up on the mourners' bench, singing with her, beckoning others to join in until half the people were on their feet, rejoicing:
I have a mother in the Promised Land,
I have a mother in the Promised Land,
And I hope some day we'll all be there,
Away over in the Promised Land.
By the time they had started "I have a father in the Promised Land" a woman gave a shout and moved in a slow dance toward the mourners bench. Her head thrown back, her eyes closed, she bumped into benches, and into men and women sightless in their own exulting. Almost without missing a beat the singers ended one song and took up another, omitting the stanzas, beating out the refrain over and over:
Oh, you must be a lover of the Lord,
Or you won't go to heaven when you die.
On and on they went, singing, shouting, dancing, praying, but no one came to the mourners' bench, no one fell into a trance. When it was clear the meeting was trailing off to an end the preacher asked that they give each other the right hand of fellowship before departing. The people formed two lines and, in a ritualistic manner, met to shake hands with him and with each other, singing together their inner peace:
What have I to dread, what have I to fear,
Leaning on the everlasting arm?
I have blessed peace in my Savior dear,
Leaning on the everlasting arm.
They sang the stanza and then repeated the refrain over and over, loath to leave each other, the comfort of the words:
Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arm;
Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arm.
As I walked toward my car I could hear a woman's voice, high above the others, singing "thribble," a wavery, plaintive tenor, the plaint of a spirit consoled yet unconsolable, a plea from the persuaded to the almost persuaded.
At one time I would have been participant in such a meeting. Now I was spectator-student. At one time I would have sung the songs with them and let my emotions flow with theirs. Now I was concerned with the songs, the people, their response to the songs, and with the part of me that was deeply rooted in the rituals and traditions of summer revivals- as deeply rooted in the Anglo Protestants, fundamentalists mainly, who had spread themselves widely over Texas. For two hundred years and more, as they settled one frontier after another, these dissenters and children of dissenters separated themselves farther and farther from Europe and shaped themselves slowly into Americans. Before or soon after they left Europe they discarded the governance and forms of worship of established churches. On the frontier as they responded to waves of religious awakenings they drifted into worship services in which hymns, prayers, and preaching formed the essential parts-parts that were nonliturgical, spontaneous, and considerably leavened with homespun attitudes and readings of the Scriptures. The order of worship, led by a leader, whether preacher or elder or deacon, was often free enough to be no order at all-free enough for any stirred-up brother or sister to work out publicly moments of ecstasy.
Sermons and prayers were rarely written, but enough have been preserved to demonstrate how much folk custom and folk adaptation shaped the speaker's imagination and, in turn, how much the character of a settlement showed the influence of the preacher. More than the other two put together, spirituals have been preserved, with their own forms of religious teaching, plus accounts of personal trials, personal victories. Floating in my memory still are the words, the sounds of women in my family working in the fields, comforting themselves by repeating:
I heard the voice of my Savior
Telling me still to fight on;
He promised never to leave me,
Never to leave me alone.
No, never alone,
No, never alone,
He promised never to leave me,
Never to leave me alone.
As in ballads of murders and battles and bad men Anglo-Texans had preserved leanings toward violence, a sinister, darker side in their character, in their spirituals they had recorded an opposite, brighter, broader in its embrace-the fervently religious. To find these spirituals I had to go to country churches, where there was neither book nor instrument to guide the singing, nor social restraint that would keep a brother or sister happy in the presence of the Lord from beginning a tune or a shout, or from spontaneous adaptation of old ideas and lines and tune into a new song familiar enough for the others to follow, emotional enough to imbue a congregation.
Much of their borrowing came from eighteenth-century hymn makers like Isaac Watts, John Newton, and William Cowper, who remained in the Anglican Communion but who wrote hymns akin to those of the people who had broken away from the established church in any form. Some came from John Wesley, Anglican turned Methodist, publisher of a collection of psalms and hymns in Georgia in 1737, and his brother Charles. In their sometimes willing, sometimes enforced shedding of European customs, manners, and dress, the pioneers clung to and adapted to frontier use such basics as English common law, English language, and more widely practiced English art forms.
Among these basics was the hymn form of the religious dissenters. In the eighteenth century hymn composers were moving away from metrical rearranging of psalms into hymn forms as in The Bay Psalm Book to writing nonscriptural songs that more nearly expressed personal religious experience. The four-line ballad stanza was readily at hand; so were hundreds of ballad and other folk tunes. The hymn stanza-four lines in common meter-emerged. New tunes were created, old ones adapted, and a leveling of religious music was under way. These songs were brought to America in hymnbooks or in the memories of singers. In Massachusetts they eventually supplanted The Bay Psalm Book but not before it had reached its fifteenth revised edition. In Virginia, in the Anglican church, they found a place alongside but did not replace the English plain song. On the frontier they were widely accepted, and as secular music underwent change to reflect new experience, so did the religious.
In the Appalachians and farther west, beyond the reach of the established churches, beyond the reach of ordered liturgies, preachers preached and congregations sang of the fear of hell, the hope of heaven, and of an intense, even conversational relationship with God. Each could be his own priest and, whether he could carry a tune in a sack or not, his own choir. Preachers, often unlettered, made up sermons on the spot. Singers, fully as unlettered, also improvised. They sang songs as they remembered them, and memory often served them poorly; or they changed them to incorporate new religious experience, or to seek a new communion with their God and with their brethren. Under these circumstances old songs underwent change, some so drastic as to leave them almost unrecognizable. Under the same circumstances new songs came into being, some to survive and also to undergo change as they passed from one singer to another. West of the Blue Ridge Mountains these songs preceded keyboard instruments by almost a hundred years, and the use of songbooks in worship by almost as many. Whether individual or communal, these backwoods compositions lacked conformity in both poetic and musical form, but not in religious fervor, which ran deeply to the evangelical.
The several tunes of "Barbara Allen," probably the best known ballad in America, lent themselves easily to religious words. So did the widely known tune for the English and Scottish "The Three Ravens," in America "The Three Black Crows," the tune for the Union song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." This tune has had almost as many lives as a cat: first as a popular ballad, then as a hymn, then as a war song, lately as a theme for a symphony, and now another as a part of country music drawn from the oral tradition.
On a few occasions, more often in black churches than white, I found preachers still using the frontier custom of "lining out" a hymn or a passage from the Bible. This practice, as old as Protestantism itself, older than the dissenting hymns, came into use in Britain and then in America because so many could not read and their memories were faulty. Only once was I able to record "lining out." The place was a small Negro church at Franklin, the pastor a man about sixty with dark brown skin and graying hair, the service a combination Sunday school and morning worship. The pastor was eager for me to record his choir and congregation but warned me not to expect too much. He had been to the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Calvert and urged me to go there.
"Their choir, being able to read music, is more uplifted than we." His choir sang spirituals and I recorded Mary Riley, his choir leader, singing "Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep." I started playing back the record and the congregation sat in silent wonderment until she came to the words:
One o' these mornings bright and fair
I'm gonna wing my way through the chilly air.
Pharaoh's army got drownded,
Oh, Mary, don't you weep.
Suddenly a woman burst out, "Mary, he sho' caught you." They wanted to hear the record again. Then they wanted to hear themselves. The pastor offered to "line out" "When I Can Read My Title Clear," an Isaac Watts hymn often sung in white country churches. Mary Riley would pitch the tune. In a kind of rapid chanting voice he began from memory:
When I can read my title clear ...
Mary pitched the tune but he held up his hand and stopped her.
"H'ist it agin, Mary. You pitched it too shalluh."
The second time he let her go ahead and, though the tune was set in common meter, the congregation lengthened it by doubling and tripling notes and by irregular flourishes. Before they had finished sounding clear the pastor was giving the next line:
To mansions in the skies ...
Mary Riley dragged them through that and the next two lines of the first stanza:
I'll bid farewell to every fear,
And wipe my weeping eyes.
In white churches the process was equally slow, equally weighted against prospects of animation or inspiration. At the same time it is a recognizable step in the development of the spiritual, white or black. The printed word unavailable, the spoken word and the sung response became a kind of communal composition. A leader spoke or sang a statement or a question and joined the congregation in singing the response. Thus new words were created for old tunes, whether hymn or ballad. Words and tunes were simple-so simple that new tunes, new words could rise spontaneously from the preacher. Out of such singing came the simple form of what came to be the camp meeting or gospel song. Stanzas were formed by a statement and affirmation, as in:
I shall not be, I shall not be moved;
I shall not be, I shall not be moved;
Like a tree that's planted by the water,
I shall not be moved.
Or by question and response, as in "The Hebrew Children":
Where are the Hebrew children?
Where are the Hebrew children?
Where are the Hebrew children?
Safe in the Promised Land.
Though the furnace flamed around them,
God, while in his mercy found them,
And with love and mercy bound them,
Safe in the Promised Land.
Where are the holy martyrs?
Where are the holy martyrs?
Where are the holy martyrs?
Safe in the Promised Land.
Those who washed their robes
Made them white, pure, and spotless,
And they made them where no earthly stained them,
Safe in the Promised Land.
Where are the twelve apostles?
Where are the twelve apostles?
Where are the twelve apostles?
Safe in the Promised Land.
They went through the flaming fire
Trusting in the dear Messiah,
Holy Grace that lifts them higher,
Safe in the Promised Land.
Where are the holy Christians?
Where are the holy Christians?
Where are the holy Christians?
Safe in the Promised Land.
Their souls have joined the chorus,
Saints and friends come before us,
While the heaven's beaming o'er us,
Safe in the Promised Land.
By and by we'll go and meet them,
By and by we'll go and meet them,
By and by we'll go and meet them,
Safe in the Promised Land.
There we'll sing and shout together,
There we'll sing and shout forever,
There we'll sing and shout to Zion,
Safe in the Promised Land.
Like links in a chain new stanzas could be added by the substitution of names of other biblical characters or of friends and relations who had crossed over to walk the golden streets. Variations in line and meter occurred with some frequency:
There'll be no dark valley when Jesus comes,
There'll be no dark valley when Jesus comes,
There'll be no dark valley when Jesus comes
To gather his loved ones home,
To gather his loved ones home,
To gather his loved ones home;
There'll be no dark valley when Jesus comes
To gather his loved ones home.*
These songs were rudimentary in verse and music, and generally fundamentalist in teaching. Preachers and congregations alike wanted to keep them that way, along with prayer and preaching to maintain the simplicity of doctrine and congregational control. Anything newfangled was a threat to belief. Any sign or symbol would be as much a symptom of a return to Rome as a cross on the altar or steeple.
Camp meetings helped perpetuate both doctrine and emotional worship. In a remarkable outpouring at a revival meeting at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August 1801, people sang and prayed and shouted in a religious fervor that critics called demented and fundamentalists called a herald of the Second Coming. Out of this came the camp meeting movement, a religious-social gathering that fostered moments of transport bordering on the fanatic and, inadvertantly, aided in the creation and distribution of white spirituals, especially spirituals bouncy in rhythm, infectious as people danced and sang together for the Lord. These songs traveled from camp meeting to camp meeting, from brush arbor to brush arbor, into the most isolated settlements.
Waves of revivalism eddying out from Cane Ridge touched settlers, one generation to the next, as they moved west toward Missouri, south through Tennessee into Georgia and Alabama, southwest through
Arkansas into Louisiana and Texas. Whichever direction they went, they could sing feelingly of toil and danger, and tell of meetings held in log cabin homes, under such fear of Indians raids that men knelt in
prayer with one hand holding a long rifle. A sense of their mortality was always with them. It was ever-present in sermons, prayers, and songs like the one that begins"
And am I born to die, to lay this body down?
In "lining out" singing, as in the early revival songs, the melody was sung in unison, with harmony appearing in the octave or in the ornamentations of individual singers. Singing masters, itinerant or local, advanced the knowledge of music and four-part harmony. The singing school, usually two or three weeks in length, usually in summer, though not allied to a church, met in a church and concentrated on religious songs. To make learning the notes easier they used the solmization system and adapted ancient shapes into a shaped note system with a different shape for each note with "do" repeated for the eighth.
do , re U , mi O , fa < , sol , la 0 , ti a ,
Roughly simultaneous with the development of the singing school was the publication of "harmonies," religious songbooks with songs collected from old hymn makers and revival meetings. As towns grew, as town churches became more formal in their services, printing hymnbooks became an industry. Congregations could choose, from among others, The Missouri Harmony, The Kentucky Harmony, The Southern Harmony. Accent on the south was intentional. These books brought together songs from the oral tradition, usually with the traditional tune, at times with a new tune from a local tunesmith. Some were adapted to fit the four-line stanza, the common meter. Songs set in the responsive pattern were likely to be left unchanged. Hymns from Watts and other hymn makers at times appeared with tunes from the oral tradition.
Tunes that might have come from a square dance or a country twostep, tunes that set hands to clapping, feet to tapping, were often omitted as too old-fashioned. The old-time religion also meant old-time shouting and dancing for the Lord, and, as fun makers said, on a hot night was hard on the clothes. Congregations in town churches became more reserved and more aware of appearances. Deacons were known to have helped out the door old women who lost control of themselves and "got happy." The era of the nineteenth century hymn makers with their balanced sentimentality and optimism was under way.
In the decade when Texans were fighting against Mexicans, American inventors were remaking the European harmonium into the reed or parlor organ, a keyboard instrument less expensive than the piano, lighter in weight, and easier to transport by boat or wagon. The larger country churches could afford them. Singing school teachers could add classes in instrumental music. If the fiddle was the voice of the devil, the organ was the voice of angels, and the country music master was in rank close after preacher and teacher as cultural sponsor. My first music teacher was my mother, who had learned what she knew from the Skaggs brothers-Will, John, and Lonnie-itinerant musicians from a farm family who lived in the Crossroads community north of Detroit. After crops were laid by, the brothers taught singing schools in Lamar and Red River counties and any other place where they could organize them. Pin Hook was one of the places. My mother went to singing schools taught by Mr. John and probably one taught by Mr. Lonnie.
It was Mr. Will who taught her to play the reed organ. He was a salesman for the Adler Organ Company in St. Louis and traveled country roads with an organ in the back of his wagon. About 1900, when she was twenty, married, and thrice a mother, my parents bought an organ from Mr. Skaggs. As part of the sale he included a book on the rudiments of music, a keyboard chart, and a few music lessons, to be given whenever he passed through Pin Hook. He must have been a good teacher; he was certainly a dedicated musician. According to stories from his daughter he would get up early in the morning, get dressed for a public appearance, and give a concert or a demonstration on the organ while his wife cooked breakfast. Then he would change into work clothes and go to the field. My mother did not have many lessons from him but she learned enough to play church songs for brush arbor revivals.
When I was twelve or so my mother taught me what she could remember from her lessons. With the help of Mr. Lonnie and a cousin of mine, also my mother's pupil, I have been able to reconstruct some of his essential rudiments. It was a solmization system with an eight-tone scale- do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do--printed on a five line staff but with the same shapes still to be found in hymnbooks. It was based on chords, each with three notes-never more, never fewer-for the right hand and either bass chords or octaves for the left. The treble chords, to be played with the little finger of the right hand on the highest note, were-
do: do sol mi
re: re ti sol
mi: mi do sol
fa: fa do la
sol: sol mi do
ti: ti sol re
The bass chords, played with the little finger of the left hand on the lowest note, were-
do chords: mi sol do
do mi sol
sol mi do
sol chords: re sol ti
sol ti re
ti re sol
fa chords: do fa la
la do fa
fa la do.
As she no longer had book or chart, my mother made a two and a half octave keyboard chart from a box lid, drew the shapes of the notes, and wrote the names above them. After I had memorized the names and shapes of the notes she had me memorize all the chords, treble and bass. Then I was ready for my first song: "Jesus, Lover of My Soul." Thinking the key of C easiest, she set the chart with do on middle C and wrote out the words and notes about as they are reproduced here. From then on I was mostly on my own.
This music, the music I had grown up with, was uncomplicated, the sound heavy-handed, but good background for gospel singing. Either white or black keys could be used. For transposing, the player moved
the keyboard chart up or down till he found a singable pitch. Most of the songs were in common meter, the notes either whole or half or quarter. There were no sharps or flats, no augmented or diminished chords. Such fancy sounds belonged to round notes. Round notes were not only hard to learn; they were also capable of combining into sounds not in keeping with the way church singing ought to be. Shaped notes, some Pin Hookers argued, were as much a part of the old-time religion as the Bible-they meant the King James version, of course.
Before they passed out of use, the Skaggs music and similar systems had their place in the adaptation of the mostly unwritten, unaccompanied camp meeting songs to music for keyboard instruments-an adaptation most clearly marked by the shift from the minor sounds of the "gapped" five- and six-tone scales to the predominantly major sounds of the seven-tone.
Fifty years ago Henry Nash Smith sent me to the library to check out a copy of White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands by George Pullen Jackson. As I read I was excited by recognition and then by enlightenment on both white and Negro spirituals-recognition of words and tunes that had been a part of my growing up, enlightenment through his understanding of them as a significant religious and cultural development on the frontier. I thought of them as Baptist revival songs; he called them camp meeting songs and the two were very much the same. A part of my family had been Baptists for at least four generations,
long enough for Jackson to have included them as "old Baptists," the people he credited most for creating and shaping the white spirituals. It is possible that ancestors of mine who belonged to Baptist churches in Nelson County, Kentucky, took part in that great camp meeting at Cane Ridge in August 1801. The first in the camp meeting movement, it brought people together for days of preaching, praying, singing, and shouting. At times people threw themselves to the ground in contortions that they called "the jerks." Whether or not they were
at Cane Ridge, we inherited from them a wide streak of religious emotionalism and enough spirituals to connect us with the "old Baptists." As for the Negro spirituals, Jackson confirmed what I already knew: many of them had images, metaphors, lines, and stanzas borrowed from white spirituals. I had heard the white at brush arbor revivals at Pin Hook, the black at baptizings on Pine Creek. At the time I knew of no borrowings by white from black.
Among the white spirituals Jackson intermingled discussions of Sacred Harp singing, a name I had not heard before. The words and tunes, he pointed out, had borrowings from old Baptist, but musically they were only distantly related. There was another major difference: camp meeting songs were a part of regular church worship; Sacred Harp songs, though religious, belonged to singing schools and conventions. The name was derived from one of the harmonies, The Sacred Harp, published in Philadelphia in 1844.
Later, when I heard it at Sunday singings in the country, I felt at home with sounds that could be traced through brush arbor songs to old ballads and laments. I also felt at home with the slow-paced rhythms of Watts and Newton hymns, but not with the running rhythms of jump-ups faster than anything I had heard from whites or blacks.
On a summer night in 1940 I went to a home in Austonio, where Lemuel Jeffus had brought three or four families together to sing for me, some from Austonio, some from a country community called Bug Hill. The women were in long country dresses, the men in denim duckings and blue chambray shirts, the shirts faded almost white where plow lines had crossed over the shoulder. Quietly they looked at me and the recording machine. Quietly they passed a blank aluminum disc from hand to hand. Quietly they said, "I ain't never heered my own voice," and "I ain't neither."
When dark was coming on and a lamp was lit Lemuel Jeffus stood before them, his odd-shaped book in his left hand, his right lifted for marking time. "Forty-seven, Sacred Harp," he said and there was a rustle of people
coming closer, followed by silence as the singers, grown-ups and children, waited. Without pitch pipe or tuning fork he sang la and held it a full measure. With a down beat of his hand he began solfaing the melody, the others joining in as they found the pitch:
la la sol la fa sol fa la
la sol la mi la sol la
la sol la sol la sol fa la sol la sol
sol la sol la fa sol fa la.
Words came immediately after: INDUMEA. S. M. Davison. Alto by J. W. Watson.
And am I born to die,
To lay this body down,
And let my spirit take its flight
Into a world unknown,
And let my spirit take its flight
Into a world unknown.
They were singing from the W. M. Cooper edition of the B. F. White edition of the original Sacred Harp. Many of the songs had been perpetuated for a century. So had the instructions on the rudiments of music that prefaced the original edition. The song that Lemuel Jeffus selected first appeared on page 428 of the first edition, with a different tune and the title "World Unknown." The words were by Charles Wesley; Cooper printed only one of the six stanzas. The illustration is a facsimile of the song in the Cooper edition. In Texas "Indumea" is more frequently pronounced "Idamee."
Traditionally the melody is printed on the tenor line. Traditionally every singer learns every part, and well-sung harmony is the pleasure of both singers and listeners. This approximate transcription of the Jeffus group indicates that singing-by-ear variations may occur even when singers have books in hand.
The key was minor, the tonal effect that of a lament skillfully matched with the words. It was sung in unison with an occasional male voice dropping to the low note of an octave, or a voice off key or searching for harmony. Contrasted with nineteenth-century sentimental hymns it was spare in lyric, unadorned in music. People called it oldfashioned and it was: the perpetuation of a special kind of singing school, in which the stress was less on the meaning of the words, more on creating agreeable harmonies.
It is a fasola system and antedates the doremi. It was popular in seventeenth-century England and was brought to America by the earliest settlers. Scales in early editions are "gapped"-five-tone or sixtone. The illustration is from the Cooper edition. There are four shaped notes-fa (triangle), sol (round), la (square), and mi (diamond), placed on three five-line, four-space staves, bass, tenor, and treble. The staves represent the three-part harmony in the first edition. The gamut is fa sol la fa sol la followed by mi when it was needed to
complete the diatonic scale. The voice parts were soprano (treble), tenor (air), and bass (burden), with counter as an occasional fourth. Later the alto was substituted for the counter and four-part harmony became predominant. "Wondrous Love" is the scale without the mi.
Historically authentic, Sacred Harp singing is incompatible with modern church music or with the music printed in later singing school books. More and more it is confined to small troups dedicated to keeping it alive and to listeners who, after the first shock of the sound, find in it a satisfying and beautiful experience. Though chiefly confined to the Deep South, it became prominent in rural East Texas, and East Texas may be its final repository. That would be fitting. On page 422 of the 1844 edition there is "A Song of Texas":
Away here in Texas, the bright Sunny South,
The cold storms of winter defy,
The dark, lurid clouds that envelope the North,
Scarce darken our beautiful sky.
Away here in Texas, the sun shines so bright,
The stars in their beauty appear;
The full moon in splendor illumines the night,
And the seasons roll around with the year.
Why do Anglo-Texans, especially in East Texas, cherish and perpetuate musical forms that go back to Shakespeare's time and earlier? Is it reaction against the new? A holding on to the old, the tried, the trusted? Is it that through the generations the folk mind has shaped into comfort and beauty words and tunes that, no matter how often they are repeated, continue to lighten the human condition: two parts-poetry and music--coming together in the soulness of a spiritual:
There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.
In that soulness strong elements of the Texas character can be found.