Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism

Abstract

Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism. By Kiri Miller. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Music in American Life Series. Pp. xx + 252, source recordings, acknowledgments, introduction, musical notation, photographs, illustrations, figures, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.)Imagine symphony orchestra musicians across America suddenly taking a personal interest in Dixieland jazz. They buy recordings, learn to play by ear, import musicians from New Orleans to teach them to swing, then show up at Mardi Gras and blow their hearts out as they march beside the regulars. Turn Dixieland into Sacred Harp, the musicians into Northern and Southern singers, and you have a true tale of insiders, outsiders, and tradition told by Kiri Miller in Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism.Early Sacred Harp scholars noted Northerners' increasing involvement in what had become a Southern institution. Miller brings their comments up to date and puts flesh on their bones. In an impressive synthesis of personal reminiscence, field observation, interviews, and Internet survey materials, Miller portrays the wide spectrum of contemporary participation in Sacred Harp tradition. She also provides a valuable, detailed account of the clashes and challenges inherent in the meeting of North and South, secular and religious, out-of-town-acolyte and lifelong local practitioner. Unlike the old days when Northern folk music aficionados learned new licks via recordings and the occasional festival appearance of traditional performers, contemporary Sacred Harp singers share a multichannel exchange. Southerners, eager to strengthen the tradition, come north to teach the newbies their ways. Northerners attend singings in the South to hone their skills and to soak up the emotional vibes of religious fervor and family affiliation that enrich many Southern singings. But the course of cultural exchange does not run smooth. Relations among the parties are fraught at every level - cultural, psychological, historical, and gustatory (singings always include a potluck provided by locals). Any notion that singing is a free-trade commodity runs up against what folk music really is - systems of specialized techniques, structures, behaviors, and meanings built up over time in specific places among specific people. Moreover, there is no easy path through Sacred Harp scaffolding into the complex culture that Southerners have built within it, a rich nexus of individual devotion, family history, community feeling, and regional identity. Even just the text can present difficulties. Liberal Christians bridle at the dour dogma underlying Sacred Harp lyrics; Jews can't bring themselves to sing the odd antiSemitic phrase that members don't even notice. On a practical level, both sides worry about dilution of the tradition: One Illinois singer described going to a Southern singing where 'There must have been ten of us or something, and about twenty-five people from Minnesota. …