Songs running like good wine

We have, in the past year or so at All Saints Honolulu, begun reaching into the richness of what is called the Sacred Harp Tradition (it goes by other names as well). These are folks tunes from the British Isles and Appalachia and the American South which have been diademed with Christion verse.

The past two decades(ish) have seen a revival of this song tradition: folk artists like Tim Eriksen (among others, but preeminent in my judgement) have helped to bring these back to a culture awareness (e.g. “Idumea” appearing in the score for the major motion picture Cold Mountain), and there are sacred harp singing groups all across the world who gather to sing through the trove (as proof I present this register of local singings). And while all this recovery is great it must be noted that it has in large happened outside the church. Having been largely displaced in the 20th century by other forms of Christian music, this treasury was essentially erased from church life after the rock’n’roll revolution.

Passing-over much of that conversation for another time (or, actually, directing you to the magnificent John Ahern, my colleague at Theopolis, for a better conversation on that theme), I want to point to two features of the Sacred Harp tradition that make it especially suitable for a church’s musical life before offering a short list of songs that I think are excellent additions to any church song list.

Those excellent features are: (1) the way in which these hymns are composed “for the people of God to actually sing” and (2) the way in which they are composed for the people of God to actually sing “in harmony.” I’ll unpack those a bit.

1. “For the people of God to actually sing…”
   The parts are written for the full range of human voices, not merely for professional pop-star-grade humans who can reach vocal levels which outstrip the normal Christian capabilities. In contemporary pop music, including its Christian variants, the melody line is often composed for high male leads or sopranos —leaving the average Christian man and low-registered women a perpetual sense of straining or being left-out. Even for men with a higher register, like myself, there is a very technical pop-music style that is not actually “popular” in the truest sense —not written for a kind of fraternal sharing and cooperation in the making of the song. They are written for audiences to listen to and for noise-cancelling headphones to play. The average human is a problem to be solved in pop-music, not a participant to be included.
   Not so with Sacred Harp. Sure, several of the songs are complex, but that complexity is one that attends to the different strengths and unique features of the whole human vocal range. Many of the Sacred Harp songs actually give the melody to the Tenor, the higher of the two male voices, instead of the Soprano, setting the female voices to soar as they were made to without making them bear the weight of “carrying” the piece. Tenors “carry”, Sopranos “soar”, Altos “burn” like fire between them, and Basses “shake” standing, as it were, with one foot standing in the sea and the other planted in the places below the depths. The human vocal range was made to musically gather the whole creation in worship to the Living God: the heavens, the firmament, the earth, the depths.

2. “In harmony…”
   These songs, also, are written for actual harmony —harmony that breaks through the simplicity of pop-music’s “1-3-5” style of doing harmony (which means every harmony line basically follows the melody, differing only in degree of note —-meaning the goal is to make the voices perpetually sing a power cord, it reminds me of a line from Jersey Boys in which Nick Massi teaches Frankie Valli about “thirds and fifths”). “Actual harmony” means the voices working in concert but with mutual melodic parts. The harmony parts aren’t merely shadowing the melody; they have their own lives. To keep the entry brief, my friend John Ahern explains this better here (watch it, then rewatch it, then share it).

The song “Idumea” or “Am I Born to Die” (watch Tim Eriksen’s and Cassie Franklin’s excellent recording here, or listen to the full SATB version from the Sacred Harp folks in Ireland here) originates as a folk melody from somewhere in England (Isaac Watts recuperated it and set it to his own words). Later Isaac Watts’ words were replaced with words by Charles Wesley (one of my heroes —we share a birthday with Brad Pitt). It is Charles Wesley’s words under which the song is famous. This song draws it theme from the book of Job, and thus achieves its title, “Idumea,” as Job was an Idumean king.1

It is the song of Edom (Idumea is the Latin form of the Hebrew “Edom”): what’s the point of life? What happens when I die? Was I just born to perish? What do good things mean if they fail after death? Certainly, there’s gotta be more after death —but what? Look, where’s the Judge? I want to talk to Him.

Job has suffered at the hands of the Devil, he is struggling to discern God’s inscrutible goodness amidst life’s suffering, and his three “friends” have turned their counsels against him —seeking to scapegoat and blame him for the woe. Job, faithful but broken, refuses to become the scapegoat. He appeals to a greater and higher court “I know that my redeemer lives, / and that in the end he will stand on the earth. / and after my skin has been destroyed, / yet in my flesh I will see God; / I myself will see him / with my own eyes—I, and not another. / How my heart yearns within me!” (Job 19:25-27).

And that’s where the song ends: “Waked by the trumpet sound / I from my grave shall rise / And see the Judge with glory crowned / And see the flaming skies!”

It is a song about the common destiny of all humanity, as we proclaim in the eucharistic liturgy: “bring us with all your saints into the joy of your heavenly kingdom, where we shall see our Lord face to face.”

It puts to music both the common destiny of mankind (standing before the face of Jesus) and the hope of all those who are baptized into Christ “and see the Judge with glory crowned.” It also exposes the condition of our hearts as we sing. It leaves us, so to speak, standing in the presence of the future: “what do I think about standing before the Judge in glory?” It leaves that question for us to walk with the Spirit in our following the way of Jesus.

Another song who gets its first line from the Book of Job. But this setting places Job’s words in the context of Easter. It proclaims “Job was right all along! My Redeemer does live!” (You can watch a great recording from the Sacred Harp folks in Cork, led by Ewan Patterson here).

One of the key features that sets the song apart is its refrain “Glory hallelujah” an inspiration of African-American Spiritual Songs. It’s like an expanded “Amen!” at the end of each half-verse. This refrain even carries into the chorus. It’s a small musical foretaste of the promise from Habakkuk 2:14 “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” The “glory hallelujah” do int he song what the glory of the Lord will do: fill everything.

The chorus is also majestic in its musical arrangement and simple in its language. “Shout on pray on we’re gaining ground / [refrain] / the dead’s alive and the lost is found.” This is not wishful thinking, friends. The church has done nothing since the Ascension except gain ground. Things can be dark or difficult in particular times and places, but the “gates of Hell will not prevail against it” (cf. Matt 16:18). Lift your heads-up, remember who you are, you already have seen these things happen in your life: you were raised from the dead, you were the lost thing that was found. Tell the good news.

Margot Adler once implied that Christianity was joyless. That was chief among the reasons she gave for the neopagan resurgence of the past century: “the Pagan community is one of the only spiritual communities that is exploring humor, joy, abandonment, even silliness and outrageousness as valid parts of spiritual experience.”2

While I do not necessarily question her critique of the vacuity and vapidity of a certain brand of mid-century American protestant Christianity, I do believe her assessment of the Christian Faith, taken as a catholic and historical whole, was either blind or willingly ignorant. She obviously had never read, among many other things, the poetry of Robert Herrick.

Church music need not aways be somber. It must be solemn. But solemnity does not rule-out jubilation. One can be both merry and solemn. Green Street is such a song: Hailing the victorious royal king with bright gaiety, falling prostrate even while we stand to shout, laughing while we strain to hold out the long notes at the end of each versicle. (You can watch Sheila Girling Macadam and Edwin Macadam lead the Cork Sacred Harp folks here —truly glorious, I simultaneously get choked-up and laugh every time I listen to it).

The altos get this incredibly playful role of concluding each of the repetitious parts which allows them to flex their unique vocal strengths gloriously and without competition. If such a thing as “holy teasing” can be conceived of, this is it. It’s a coy, witty, self-forgetting service of the other parts, continuing to “tease” or “coax” the other parts deeper into the music.

Additionally, the song moves between a metrical carefulness to a free and unmetered holding-out of notes. We wait on the jubilant whim of the conductor, never twice the same, to tell us when to drop back into the martial array of voices. This dropping-back only serves to deepen the grandeur of out unity.

Modernity often leads us to believe that the “private experience” takes priority over the “public.” What folly. What useless fabrication of a civil war: the self constantly warring between its inner and outer forms. Abandon such hopelessness, beloved.

The first line of Africa (you can hear it here and find the full musical score here) troubles such illusions on both a lyrical and musical level. “And now shall my inward joys arise and burst into a song” —a song shared corporately in which the soul sees its own experience of the goodness of God reflected and refracted in the thousands shards of goodness in its brothers and sisters. It is the experience of “oh you too?!” Joy is not full until it is shared. It is in the breaking of the bread of gladness that we have more of it (Mk. 6:30-44); in the throwing it upon the waters is the bread multiplied (Eccl. 11:1).

Musically, the splitting of the four parts initiates the song in a countenance that suggests it may be slow and plaintive, but as soon as the voices coalesce and reach the “into a song” there’s a kind of explosion of joy —the song has literally burst, raising all in a height unmatched in the rest of the song… even the basses explode in their ranch. They explode because that’s what the grace of God makes us do. It makes us more than we are.

If morning prayer in the Anglican tradition begins each morning with Psalm 95 warning us against the militant stance of complaint and testing (as at the day of temptation in the wilderness), this song is the response: “Why do we then indulge our fears, / Suspicions and complaints? / Is He a God, and shall His grace / Grow weary of His saints?” No, we do not need to test Him. We already have. He has always proven faithful… let us therefore enter into His Rest (Heb ch. 3-4) —the rest of the one who has always will be faithful.. who is Faithfulness Himself.

These songs are not “new” or “cool” maybe. They are more like well-aged wine. They’ve been vinted in God’s great wine press of the ages and I think he’d like to serve them to a church who has lost, perhaps, its taste for well-aged delights.