Strong Songs of the Dead: The Pagan Rites of Sacred Harp

Down In The Flood

We sing for the dead and we sing with the dead. Untrained, unamplified, unrestrained, our voices are raucous and reverential at the same time. Our necromantic gospel songs are filled with equal parts delight and dread.

Hark from the tombs a doleful sound

Mine ears attend the cry.

Ye living men come view the ground

Where you must shortly lie.

The lyrics speak from a long-gone era. Likewise, the melodies and harmonies are throwbacks to an earlier time. But this is no bogus reenactment or fakey spook show. The dead don’t rise in the flesh, but in sound and spirit. Their voices, their words, their cry, fill the air and reverberate in our bodies. Lungs, larynx, tongue, and skull.

Another leader gets up, takes his place in the middle of the hollow square, and calls out, Let’s sing on page 397. Quickly, everyone flips through their books, we get our pitches, and throng in together.

There is a fountain filled with blood

Drawn from Immanuel’s veins

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains

What troubles me aren’t the words. I’ve been singing about ancient blood and veins, sin and stains, since I was a little kid. What scares me sometimes is the feel of being sucked in, as if the music is a relentless riptide. At big sings, it goes on all day, and when the power comes down, it seems that I have no place to breathe. At its best, it feels like a wild flood, with waves breaking, reforming, breaking again. And it scares me that I might disappear into it, a little fleck pulled under the surface, never to come up again.

I hear the summons—my name and home state—and getting up to lead, I call out, Page 108. The Traveler. Fearful and elated, I face the iron-hard men on the front tenor bench. The church is arranged in a hollow square, everybody facing in, so that sitting to the tenors’ left is the bass section, old men and young, mostly Alabamans, a few from Georgia and Mississippi. The altos, making up the third side of the square, buzz like the drones on a bagpipe. And on the fourth side are the trebles, who wail a skyward rush of harmony.

It’s the first time I’ve ever led in the Deep South. I’m a Yankee, born and bred in New York State, and I make no apologies for that. Yet when the rough-hewn sound starts up again, there is no North or South, no old friend or older foe.

Storm is gathering in the west, and you are so far from home. I’m singing as loud as I possibly can (and that’s pretty damn loud) and I still can barely hear myself. Rising tempest sweeps the sky. Rains descend, the winds are high. I’m the Traveler in the heart of the storm. Waters swell and death and fear, sets thy path no refuge near.

We reach the end, and relieved to have gotten through this initiation, I return to my place. The next leader takes her place in the middle, facing the front bench tenors. She calls out the song she wants and with no count off, just the slight downward stroke of her hand, she plunges us into her tune.

To outsiders, Sacred Harp singing appears to be a crazy musical babble, the way it was in the old scripture days when true believers were known to speak in a hundred different tongues. Each song starts with meaningless syllables (fa, so, la, mi) which tangle together, weave and overlap. Then comes a pause lasting a heartbeat or two, and the words pour out.

Though many singers are introverts, there is a necessary we-ness, a crucial sense of us to Sacred Harp. It can’t ever be a solo form. To make vocal harmony, we must have others, the physical presence of a group. We (and I, despite all my resistance, am part of this Great We) sit close: men shoulder to shoulder and women hip to hip. We, and only we as a group, can make these churning chords and whirlpool fugues.

Another leader, another song. Page 70. Save, Mighty Lord. Within a few seconds, all the voices unite in a rising gospel storm. I’m lost again in the rush and roar, a retro-neo-pagan shouting once more to bring the ancestors back into our presence.

Glossolalia

When I was a kid, I heard people speaking in tongues in church. It was supposedly the overflow of the Holy Spirit’s power that made worshippers gibber and twitch, babble and shake like holy drunkards. It was scary and it was fascinating, watching people lose control. Sometimes they let loose with faked-up Bible names: Bahash shabala. Sometimes it was even more absurd: Hundala shundala. Worst was Shicketta, Shicketta, which sounded to me like angry insect noises.

Our preacher said it was a way to reach unbelievers, miraculously speaking their language. But I never once heard any real words in any real languages, just repetitive jabbering. Others said it was the tongues of angels given to mortals, literally the words of praise sung in heaven around the Great White Throne. Even as a kid, I thought this implausible. Why would angels make the sound of giant swarming cockroaches?

The only explanation that makes much sense to me now is that the Gift of Tongues was an out-flooding of subrational power. You cry out for the spirit to come with quickening (that is: life-giving) power and your mind will overflow with wild music and magic words.

Decades later, I heard a twisted echo of those glossolalic tongues. The voices rose from the grooves in an old vinyl disc, a recording made in Alabama in 1942. I’d stumbled onto this record at the library, one of a long series capturing nearly lost American folk music. Bringing this treasure home, I placed the needle with great care onto the first cut and out came a strange throw-back sound.

I knew a few of the songs from church. But I was mystified. What was this babble?

Then the singers paused, and started in again, with recognizable lyrics, and the song came into focus, taking form like a human figure coming out of a fog. I listened to the next tune, equally as mysterious, and I was hooked.

That was my first exposure to Sacred Harp singing. One taste, like my first fiery taste of Alabama moonshine, and I had to have more. Soon enough I’d sought out others like me who had a thirst for the lost and found gospel sound.

Pentecost—fifty days after Easter—marks the beginning of the Christian church. As described in the Book of Acts, believers from a dozen countries had gathered and were filled that day with the Holy Spirit. A great noise from the sky filled the whole house and tongues of fire descended. With this came a wild uproar of voices, a dozen different languages babbling together.

Some people watching asked What does it mean?

Others said, These men are drunk!

I’ve never seen literal tongues of fire when Sacred Harp singers gather (and the liquor stays mostly out of sight), but the crazy confusion of voices gets reenacted on a regular basis.

Every time the square erupts in song, it’s a mini-Pentecost. Even for Buddhists, lapsed Catholics, Quakers, Jews, and hard-shell atheists, doing the old Primitive Baptist songs means bringing down the holy wind and fire. Neo-pagans are also often represented at sings. I’ve seen T-shirts at sings that declare Gimme That Old Time Religion. Below the slogan: a picture of Stonehenge with naked primeval worshippers dancing wildly under a full moon.

Many people, on first hearing it, say shape note music sounds ancient and primitive, something resurrected from the tombs of the ancestors. This is due partly to the style of the singing: unbridled and buzzing with discords. It’s also the result of the open harmonies; that is, the chords missing their defining inner pitches. More than one person has said it sounds like a huge human bagpipe: basses groaning, altos droning, tenors and trebles keening the melody in a folk mode somewhere between minor and major.

On the most basic level, The Sacred Harp is just a book. But that’s like saying that Moby Dick was just a whale, or the payload dropped on Hiroshima was just a bomb. It contains over five hundred hymns, first published in 1844 and never out of print since. However, when people say Sacred Harp, they usually mean the entire musical phenomenon, the social organism with ten thousand voices. It has a continuous life, an unbroken chain of singers carrying the tradition all the way from its birth in colonial New England.

The reason it’s called shape note is obvious when you take a look at the actual music on the pages. The note heads aren’t ovals as in standard musical notation, but have four shapes: a triangle, a circle, square, and a diamond. These have names—fa, so, la, mi—and these names get sung before the words.

Originally, the shapes were there to help learn the music. But even if a song has been done a thousand times, singers still go through the shapes. It’s said by some that this helps tune the group, bringing it into a greater harmony. There may be some truth to this. But singing the shapes has far more to do with primal outpouring than with good order and proper sound. In a six-hour sing, I’ll spend over two hours wailing pure gibberish. That does something deep and permanent to the human brain, opening up the inner gates.

With all those voices driving the songs as hard as they can, usually a lone voice gets buried in the four-wall mass of sound. That’s a part of the allure. Lost in the din, the ego falls away. The line between my body and everyone else shimmers and blurs to oblivion. At its best, I have the sensation that my voice is coming out of other people’s mouths, and their voices are issuing from mine. This isn’t just metaphor nor sound-drunk delusion. The resonant chambers in the head, throat, and lungs truly are affected by sounds surrounding and supporting them. The bones of my skull vibrate like a set of interlocking gongs.

When the chairman stands up to say we’ll take a ten-minute break, it’s like I’m waking from a trance. Time itself vanishes in the lost and found sound.

The chairman is a big guy, in every way. Extra loud, tall, broad in the chest and belly. His brush cut is more gray than blond. He adds, We got a fine lot of singers today, and some people from far away, so make sure you move off the front benches to give everybody a chance to drink straight from the well.

Front Bench

William Blake, in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, got it right: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Having made my first pilgrimage to Sand Mountain, I was a wiser man.

The churches where I sang were hardly palaces in the standard sense of the word. At one, straddling the Alabama-Georgia state line, I could see daylight through cracks in the cinderblock walls. Another, much smaller, church had six piles of rocks for a foundation. No electricity. No indoor plumbing. No screens on the windows. There was an outhouse for the ladies and a clump of bushes for the men.

Still, these places have a kind of majesty. No crowns nor thrones are present—only the brilliant glow of human voices.

Northern Alabama is where, more than any place in America, the Sacred Harp tradition survived the onslaught of progress and so-called musical improvement. While fashions came and went, Sacred Harp stayed the same, sung week after week and year after year in little Primitive Baptists country churches.

Some people compare this area to the Holy Land, a place where saints, martyrs, apostles, and disciples once walked and prayed. For me though, it’s more like ancient Greece than Palestine. And Sand Mountain, in the far northeastern corner of the state, is Olympus.

The gods there drive shiny Cadillacs and mud-spattered pickup trucks. They drink moonshine and iced tea doused with handfuls of white sugar. They fight with their fists (sometimes in church), gossip, hold grudges, get divorced a lot, and vote Republican. And they sing, as their parents and grandparents and great grandparents had sung.

They also ingest an amazing amount of heart-stopping food. Dinner on the Ground, as the feasts are called, is laid out like an offering to some corn pone God of Plenty. The endless tables, made of rough concrete, are like time-scoured ruins. Over them arches a crude shelter, the roof of an open-air temple.

At one singing, I paced off the serving tables. Over a hundred feet of food: the tables packed with scores of heaped dishes. Fried okra and fried pie, slaw, cardboard boxes lined with foil and overloaded with greasy fried chicken, pickled beets, BBQ by the bucket, thick slabs of cold bacon, butter beans, field peas, chicken dressing, red velvet cake, and a hundred other high-calorie delights.

On my first trip to Sand Mountain, I stayed with a guy named Kester Vines, who’d been singing from The Sacred Harp for most of his seventy-plus years. At his house I got another, more personal, taste of Alabaman excess. Kester is a big man, as fine a cook as he is a singer. For our first breakfast he made up a mound of cathead biscuits and a half gallon of sawmill gravy.

That night, he seemed tickled that I had an interest in his corn liquor. So out it came, a Mason jar half full with clear homemade whiskey. Kester said it was about 150 proof. And the burn stayed much longer in my throat than ordinary whiskey. It was not quite as corrosive as paint thinner, with a hint of corn flavor in there with the alcohol flame.

That same night Kester got out his hot pepper sauce too, which he claimed had been aged twelve years. He’d found it way in the back of a pantry closet, the big jar all covered with dust, and thought to throw it out. But knowing he’d soon have Yankee guests, he’d tried it and decided, It’s just like moonshine. It gets better with age.

Much of the time, Kester’s speech was difficult to understand. Partly that was because of how few teeth he had left in his head. He was as big around as a 55-gallon drum and wore overalls and no shirt. He sent me a letter after my first visit. It looked like the scrawl of an eight-year-old who’d already dropped out of school and started plowing his daddy’s fields. Dwelling on this may seem like the sneering of a snotty northerner, confirming all the clichés about Alabama pig farmers. Nonetheless it’s true, and none of it prevented Kester from becoming my friend and mentor. He was a genial and welcoming host. He put his guests up in his home on Sand Mountain and seemed to enjoy our visit. Yankees or not, we came to sing from The Sacred Harp and