When 10 members of the all-black choir at Mount Zion Church in Killen, Ala., flew to Scotland in January on their first overseas trip, they were treated like long-lost family members.
“They really, really loved us,” recalled Docary Ingram, pastor of the congregation in northwest Alabama's Tennessee River Valley. “Everything we did, they paid for. We did more kissing in one day than I did in the U.S. in my whole life. … I pray to God we can go back.”
The warm cross-cultural reception occurred because the Alabamians and the Scots share an obscure, and virtually extinct, musical tradition-one that some experts say influenced the evolution of American music.
Jazz artist Willie Ruff, a Yale University music professor, is convinced that “presenting the line”-the unaccompanied singing of psalms in Gaelic by Presbyterians of the Scottish Hebrides-is the direct ancestor of “lining out,” a hymnal singing style of 19th-century slaves still practiced at a dwindling number of black Southern churches.
Ruff-a reknowned bassist and French horn player who played with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington-believes “lining out” evolved into the call-and-response of spirituals and gospel music that, in turn, influenced other American musical styles.
In traditional line singing, a designated person sings a line solo from the biblical Book of Psalms, inviting congregation members to follow in their own time and with their own harmonies.
The result is an echoing, surging and radiant chorus that critic Jo Morrison, writing in the arts magazine Rambles, compared to “waves of music crashing against the walls of the church, washing the entire congregation in a sea of sound.”
As many as 50,000 Gaelic immigrants from Scotland settled in the 18th and 19th centuries in North Carolina's Cape Fear region and other parts of the South. When they worshipped, their slaves sat in the balcony while they sang below.
Historians have noted the lining-out practice continues not just in the American South and Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland, but in the English-speaking West Indian countries such as Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. London's sizeable West Indian population also still uses it.
If Ruff is correct, he said, gospel and other American musical forms have an antecedent from somewhere besides the slaves' native Africa.
Ruff, 72, got interested in the issue two years ago when visiting his hometown of Sheffield, a few miles from Killen. Hearing about a place that served tasty catfish suppers, he found his way to Mount Zion.
Once there, he was stunned to hear Presbyterians lining out the way he remembered Baptists singing in the churches he attended more than 60 years ago. Experts at Yale and elsewhere told him the form of psalm singing did not survive among white Presbyterian churches in the United States, but a handful of Scottish churches still practiced it in the original Gaelic.
When he traveled to the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides and heard the similarities, Ruff was convinced he had stumbled onto something. He later found evidence of Southern black churches worshipping in Gaelic up until 1918. Today, he said, the lining-out tradition in English is dying out along with older church members.
“It's very hard to learn,” Ruff said. “There's no way to do it except through repetition, and kids today are not going to do that.”
At Mount Zion, Ingram and his wife, Carolyn, said they both have been lining out hymns since they were children five decades ago. The congregation does it about once or twice a month.
“This is the way our parents sung, and it just came natural to us,” Carolyn Ingram said.
Religion News Service