Liberty Baptist Church
Henagar, Ala.
July 5, 2008
Sand Mountain is a haunted house of a place. In his book Salvation on
Sand Mountain, Dennis Covington describes a snake-handling church where
members speak in tongues, drink strychnine and curse demons. The area
is nicknamed “Meth Mountain” for obvious (and frightening) reasons.
It’s also home to 74-year-old farmer Coy Ivey and his family,
upstanding citizens and Sacred Harp legends. Every year, singers from
across the country travel to Liberty Baptist Church for what’s widely
considered the best singing in the world. Before the opening prayer,
Coy’s cousin Loyd stands up and says, “If it’s your first time, don’t
act like a stranger. Act like it’s home.”
Later, Loyd and Rodney lead a song called “We’ll Soon Be There.”
When they reach the kicker, “Oh, who will come and go with me / We’ll
shout and sing Hosanna,” the crowd’s joy is tangible.
First-time Sacred Harp singers often think the experience will be
like church without all the preaching and kneeling, expecting someone
to stop them on the way out the door to ask if they love Jesus, and if
the answer is “no,” dunk them in the Tallapoosa River to seal the deal.
But while Sacred Harp music is hymn-based, and a religious experience
for most singers, it doesn’t call for evangelism.
Still, to many traditionalists, singing Sacred Harp music without
spiritual conviction is superficial. “Anyone who sings Sacred Harp is
to some extent religious, whether they admit it or not,” Johnson says.
“It’s hard to imagine someone singing those words and enjoying it if
they didn’t have some sort of religious component to them.” While some
feel this way (Sacred Harp is still heavily associated with the
Primitive Baptist church in the South), as shape-note finds its way
back into the American musical lexicon, people are becoming involved
for reasons outside of spiritual interest. “Our culture has become that
way—we don’t just have one religion anymore,” says Steel. “A lot of
non-religious people certainly get something out of the music and the
poetry.”
At Camp Fasola, participants attend a Christian devotional each
morning. “This probably makes a few people uncomfortable because
they’re not accustomed to it, but for the much larger majority, it’s
something they appreciate and like,” says camp director (and Rodney’s
brother) David Ivey, 53. “We don’t apologize for it, but we’re also not
beating anybody over the head with Bibles.”
McGraw doesn’t mince words: “I think anybody who sings Sacred Harp
should be a Christian.” But he welcomes people he considers
non-believers to singings. “I’m no judge of who is a Christian and who
is not,” he says.
Many modern forms of sacred music involve fluffy lyrics about God’s
unfailing love, and blessings pouring down like rainstorms, and how fun
it’ll be to dance in the golden streets of Heaven without having to
worry about pollution and getting hit by cars and all. That’s not the
case with Sacred Harp—sure, they sing about God’s love and protection,
but they also sing about the times when they need it most.
The morbid hymn “Jackson,” Hinton says, poses difficult questions:
Am I even born again? I’m a bad person—how do I deal with this? Is
there anyone like me?
The lyrics weren’t necessarily written for Sacred Harp tunes. Since
many of the songs were originally poems or hymns by English or American
wordsmiths going back to the 1700s, they have an old-fashioned language
and concept of religion. “Outside of Sacred Harp, people don’t really
use hymn books that old, so it’s a natural conservatism that keeps
those ways of speaking,” Steel says. “They don’t take out frank,
negative things like death.”
“Every tune I write,” says Hamrick, who has six songs in the
revised edition of the Sacred Harp songbook, “has a feeling about it—it
can be joyful, it can be sad, it can be religious. I look for texts
that exemplify the feeling I get from the music.” Some songs are both
joyful and solemn, as in Primitive Hymns’ “Christian’s Farewell,”
composed by Hamrick: “Brethren, farewell, I do you tell / I’m sorry to
leave, I love you so well / Now I must go, where I don’t know /
Wherever Christ leads me the trumpet to blow / Here I have worked,
labored awhile, / But labor is sweet if Jesus doth smile / When I am
done, I will go home / Where Jesus is smiling and bids me to come.”
At the very least, it’s a poem set to a tune, turning into
something holy when a hundred people belt it out in one big voice. That
voice isn’t always pretty, and it sounds different in Brooklyn than it
does on Sand Mountain, but it’s an instrument—a mighty sacred harp—and
it’s loud.