[Granville-Hough] 29 Jan 2009 - Country Sangs
Trustees for Granville W. Hough
gwhough-trust at oakapple.net
Sun Jan 29 08:33:39 PST 2017
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Reply-To: gwhough at oakapple.net
Subject: 29 Jan 2009 - Country Sangs
COUNTRY SANGS. SullivanÆs Hollow had a long tradition of good singers
and singing masters. Singing masters went around the area holding
singing schools during the summer, in which they imparted the
fundamentals of following shaped notes. In an ordinary church hymnal
today, the notes are round or oblong, and their place on the scale
determined how they were sung. Square notes was the country name for
shaped notes, and you picked up the tone from shape of the note, though
you could also pay attention to the scale. There were eight notes to the
scale, do, ra, me, fa, so, la, te, do. In my time, song books were
available in round or shaped notes, and everyone could read the words
and learn to follow the notes.
There was an older way to do singing, coming from the days when few
persons could read and write, and it depended on memory and an
enthusiastic song leader. Though I never learned much about Sacred Harp
music, I did get to attend a Sacred Harp Sang when I was a teen-ager. It
came about this way: my grandfather, Jim Richardson, read in the Smith
County Reformer that his old chum from boyhood, ôSi Barfoot,ö was to
lead a Sacred Harp Sang at one of the old churches, probably Hardshell
Baptist, in the Strong River section of the county (up near Scott and
Rankin counties.) He wanted to go but he could no longer drive. I was
about sixteen and could drive well enough to follow the road to the
church. I was not a singer, but I was willing to take ôGrandpaö and
listen to him sing, as I had never heard him sing a single note. We got
to the unpainted longleaf-pine timber church, and Grandpa met several of
his old buddies, all in their early eighties. Soon they all settled down
to singing. There were no songbooks. Si Barfoot (really Bearfoot, or
Barefoot, I suppose) walked back and forth reading the words, which
sounded like psalms, then blew the pitch pipe for the key, and everybody
sang the words, using about four notes. It was more like a chant than
the church music to which I was accustomed. Apparently the songs were
well known, and my grandfather took part as I had never heard before. As
the temperature and the tempo rose in the church, I looked around and
discovered behind me one of my Mize grade school classmates, Douglas
Gibson, who had brought his father, ôOld Man Ed Gibson,ö to the sang.
Doug motioned me to go outside with him which I did, and we had our own
reunion, as I had gone to Magee High School and he to Mize. We let the
old folks have their day and we had ours. We did not learn any more
about Sacred Harp Singing, but we did catch up on all our mutual
activities. I never saw Douglas again, but he was a great friend.
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The subject of Country Sangs came up recently in a meeting of our
Lutheran Promise Keepers, and I could relate some history I experienced
before we had electricity and the few people who had radios had to use
batteries and erect high poles to pick up the signals. We began to get
different forms of music by radio. The first Catholic mass I ever heard
was by radio from a New Orleans church. What we really liked were the
Saturday programs from Grand Ole Opry and the Sunday singing of new
gospel songs such as "When the Saints Go Marching In," As soon as we got
electricity, everyone tried to get a radio so we could hear the new
songs. Soon we had communities organizing country sangs to take part in
the new music. My uncle, Coley Richardson, became a regular performer
over the Jackson radio, and his gravestone is marked with the key of C.
Regular church ministers became alarmed and condemned the country sangs
as works of the Devil. What has happened in our Lutheran Congregation is
that we have two campuses, one in the basketball court of our grade
school, and the other in our regular church adjacent to Leisure World.
At our grade school in Aliso Viejo, we play and sing the new Christian
songs heard and seen on TV stations, and we clap, wave, more or less
dance, and keep time. In our Leisure World location we play and sing
with profound dignity the more conventional songs, the very ones I first
heard by radio in the 1930 decade. Of course, we have songbooks at the
Leisure World location and we can even get back as far as the Doxology.
Many of my elderly church associates who come to our Aliso Viejo
services are baffled by the new music and never come back. It doesn't
sound or look Lutheran to them Well, I suppose I am the only one in the
church who had a son get his college degree in music in Rock and Roll
Guitar and who composed his own graduation lyrics.. And I suppose I am
the only one who still does not know one note from the other unless they
are shaped
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