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Traditional Musics of Alabama Volume 4: African American Sacred Harp Singers- Wiregrass Notes:Black Sacred Harp Singing From Southeast Alabama

Thought it was only Native American culture that suffered extinction in the U.S., armchair ethnographer? Not so, as detailed in the extensive notes to this compilation of hymns and spirituals harmonized in a sonic and social manner that looks to be dying a slow, but tenacious death. Sacred Harp singing, where singers in four vocal ranges face each other with a leader in the middle of a square the a capella choir forms, derives its name from a songbook first published in the mid-19th century. On this reissue of 1982 vinyl , these rural, mostly elderly Alabamans make it a sometimes mildly martial, sometimes organically trancey expression of faith and divine dependence. Stylistically, the form falls between more sharply annuniciated jubilee singing and the more inidividually expressive soul gospel pioneered by Thomas Dorsey. That was your roots music lesson for today. We call it "roots" because somehwere therein germinated rock'n'roll.
[Alabama Center For Traditional Culture] JAMIE LEE RAKE

©2005 HM Magazine - All Rights Reserved

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