The Introduction

                                                                                                                As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt
                                                                                                                charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items
                                                                                                              of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I
                                                                                                        might be held personally responsible if
                                                                                                                even a small one were to be lost.
                                                                                                                                                   -- E.B. White
                                                                                                                                                   “The Ring of Time”

“It is to me curiously unsatisfying,” the letter said, “that one comes away from this fine work without knowing more about who the Sacred Harp singers are.”

The writer was a gentleman from Maryland I had met at a singing in northeast Alabama in the summer of 1991. He had bought a copy of my 1978 book, The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (from this point on, just “my book”), and then had ordered another for a choir director he wanted to introduce to the tradition. He liked the book in general, he had made clear in phone conversations and follow-up letters, but he had found something lacking in it and now wanted to register the point.

“More and fuller biographical sketches” would have been helpful. And this among other questions: “Are singers usually farmers, lawyers, or cooks?”

Well, all of that and more, I could have answered. My push-back in a letter of response, though, was a bit feeble. I mentioned the portraiture, including occupation, of a few representative figures: “Hugh McGraw as factory manager, Ruth Denson Edwards as a former teacher, Joe S. James as lawyer, E.J. King and family as cotton planters, etc.” But I knew he was right, and said so.

In trying to tell the story of a tradition, I had failed to particularize the people, the individuals who carried this tradition on and were themselves carried along by it. Where, I could join my critic friend in asking, were the narratives about individual characters? Where, the dozens of sketches I had framed in my mind over many gatherings over many years?

“Overall, I can’t regret having written the book when I did,” I replied, “and yet when I look back at it now, I also can’t help thinking how much better it might have been if I could have brought to it then what I now am and what I now know. . . . I sometimes toy with the idea of rewriting, or writing anew – so much has changed since the book was first published. . . . In any case, your commentary has given me a focus should I decide to do so.”

The seasons passed. But the burden of that correspondence stayed with me and rankled. A life work not yet completed. The unwritten pages called out to me, and called me to account. Though I had shared tales and impressions in conversations with singing friends through the years, the stories of any number of Sacred Harp figures I had closely observed, talked with, sung with, stood at the tables and sipped lemonade with, remained disembodied. The music and the tradition of Sacred Harp had changed my life for sure, but the individuals I had come to know through it had enriched that life beyond the telling.

Something else had been missing in my book – by design, in this case: my own Sacred Harp story. But telling the stories of these memorable characters inevitably meant sharing my own, and setting up the points of intersection between our lives, our communings.

It first became clear that I must undertake the writing of this book when I was asked by John del Re and Kelly Macklin to serve as honorary chair for the 2007 annual June singing in Virginia’s northern Shenandoah valley. Traditionally it had been incumbent upon the honoree to “make a few remarks.” “A few?” I remember asking John as the date approached. If I knew it was challenging for me on that occasion even to scratch the surface of a near lifetime of Sacred Harp experiences – and felt a little sting of frustration from that – I came to see in the weeks following the event that such a thing was possible only by writing it all out, and that doing so was probably the only way I could find peace from the narratives, restive, unquiet, crammed back into the corners of my brain. (An analogy that should be familiar to Sacred Harp folk came also to mind. Unable to shake a melody running maddeningly through their heads, singers find that the best remedy is to lead the song at the very next opportunity, to “sing it out.”)

But how exactly was I to do that? Well, first a few words about memory. It is, surely we come to know, a slippery provider. On some things, I look back to a fairly secure set of images. I have revisited many choice happenings so frequently as to have long ago locked them in. So what I remember well I have reconstructed, sometimes word by word. On other experiences, the loss is now all but complete. On others still, what I have thought I remembered – before a check of the facts – turns out to be off just a bit.

I have, in truth, found my memory mechanism not always as responsive about the verifiable facts of a scene as about its overall color, a distinctively melodied string of words that emerged from it, the poignancy of certain moments or some irresistible twist of humor – even a few throw-away lines I had scooped up at the time and then hoarded for years. My narrative bent is just inclined that way.

For many of the scenes I would have lost entirely or would have been able to remember only sketchily, a fortunate thing had happened. Over a period of years, long before I thought seriously about this book, I contributed to two Sacred Harp newsletters, the National and the Chicago, describing particular singing sessions or sharing details or impressions about notable Sacred Harp figures just passed from our midst. Along the same lines, in the 1990s and early 2000s I contributed a few lengthy posts to an online discussion group created by fellow singer Keith Willard. I sometimes printed out these posts as they appeared, before that discussion train vanished in the ether. That material, along with copies of letters I had written, provided – when I came to the project – a trove of detail, footprints still clearly visible on a path I, in many cases, could otherwise but vaguely recall. With light editing, these reproduced notes, I hope, bring an immediacy to scenes now otherwise faded from view.

A few words about my writing process here: and in trying to describe it, I will lean on a fanciful metaphor left over from my childhood. When I was a boy, the hours of summertime boredom wore on me. (At that stage, I found my brothers – three, six and ten years younger – generally unhelpful playmates.) To contend with the sun’s slow-clicking clock, to bridge the interminable time till supper, I plied a desperately motivated and far-ranging imagination. One day, poking around in a rambling field at the edge of our neighborhood, I unearthed a rough but beautifully speckled rock, shaped and sized like a large potato or pine cone. Fool’s gold it may have been; it did at least have bits of glittery gold and lustrous pink mixed in with its overall sandy color. I had never seen its like. It took my fancy, and I readily imagined it as magical.

Letting my mind play, I tied a long cord about the rock tightly and, out in open ground, twirling it round and round above my head, would release it extravagantly, with cord billowing behind, to see where it would land and what it would lead me to. Some nifty prize, surely.

And in fact, each time as I investigated the area where the rock had fallen, I found, among the grass blades or partially covered in dirt, a marble, a nickel, a beaten-down penny, a tiny plastic soldier or some other thing of interest or use. Sometimes the search had to be extended beyond the small circle I would first assign it. But that only stretched the truth; it didn’t overturn it.

From the start, as I guess children typically do, I approached this exercise on two tracks simultaneously: the fantasy I was playing with and the less exciting reality underlying it. Early on, though, I recognized that it was the search itself that produced and not the special powers of my rock. (Fool’s gold indeed.) If I had to sweep wider and wider, something of use or value would always at some point turn up. I didn’t, in fact, need the rock or the spin-toss at all. It was the search itself that brought me to the prize.

In little time, I lost or laid aside the rock (I wish I had it still!), but the application of that exercise stayed with me – and reemerges now as symbol for a method that has characterized my writing for this book (and may characterize something essential about me, a prospect I haven’t yet plumbed): looking, searching intently for the right thing, the apt word, the better sound.

In taking on my project – so much wide-open ground for trying to create an authentic, telling portrait of Miss Ruth, Ed Thomas, Japheth and Pauline and Ruth Jackson – I have thrown my rock and waited for revelation; peeled back the layers of green blade, finding at last the remembered anecdote, the necessary detail, the hidden coin, the faded remnant of valiant soldier.

So, from memory and from notes or letters written immediately after certain events – and with a halting, hoping, search-and-wait writing method – I have reconstructed many of the high points along my Sacred Harp journey, portraits of people or descriptions of episodes I hope may speak to an audience who never knew or experienced them. If I have met my challenge even halfway, no reader should at last be wondering, “Who are these people, the Sacred Harp singers you’re writing about?”

I have said from time to time that there are many thousands of people who love Sacred Harp but who just don’t know it yet! My hope is that this book will contribute to the expansive goal implicit in that bold claim.