NEWS FEATURE: Make a Joyful Noise: Professor Links Southern Black, Scottish Singing Styles

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) 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 the Rev. Docary Ingram, pastor of the Presbyterian congregation in northwest Alabama’s […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) 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 the Rev. Docary Ingram, pastor of the Presbyterian 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.

On May 5 and 6, he will lead a conference at Yale bringing together theologians, historians and other scholars to discuss the issue, as well as congregations from Scotland, Alabama and Kentucky who will sing together.

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.”

“I can think of no musical tradition that can lend itself to be `blackened’ by these Africans as this,” said Ruff, who is black. “The basic stuff that would later be spirituals, blues, ragtime, jazz, bebop _ everything else that came later has some of this genetic DNA.”


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.

“When the slaves went to church, that’s the way they were taught to sing because the white people didn’t have any other way of doing it,” said Jamie Reid-Baxter, a research fellow at Glasgow University who studies Gaelic psalms.

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Gospel singer Bobby Jones of Nashville, who hosts a weekly show on Black Entertainment Television, is intrigued by the connection.

“It was interesting to listen to the tapes of the African-Americans singing the long-meter hymns and then listening to the Scottish versions,” Jones said. “Yes, they were very close to being the same, so who knows? We learn from each other, which is a good thing.”

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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.

But the connection between Scotland and America received little notice until the Scottish media began reporting on Ruff’s research. Several television documentaries have been filmed on the subject, and the Internet has helped feed a spirited debate over the possible links.


Some news accounts said his findings prove the Scots invented gospel, something Ruff called an overstatement. He noted that the lining-out tradition started in England and predates gospel by two centuries.

But if he is correct, he said, gospel and other American musical forms have an antecedent from somewhere besides the slaves’ native Africa.

“The remarkable thing to me is that in the 21st century, the only people in the English-speaking world that are still doing this in separate languages are the ones that are both the most marginalized _ the blacks here, and then these Gaels over in Scotland,” he said.

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.

“This music is so strong _ I reacted just like I did when I was a kid and I started bawling,” he said.


He began consulting experts at Yale and elsewhere. They 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, the Rev. 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.

After several Scottish singers traveled to Killen last summer to hear the singing there, they invited Mount Zion members to visit them. A Scottish documentary filmmaker contributed money for their expenses, and the singers put up their American guests in their homes.


“These people wear their hearts on their sleeves _ that’s what we liked about them,” said Calum Martin, a Gaelic singing teacher who was among the hosts and who runs a Web site, http://www.gaelicpsalmsinging.com. “I think they were overwhelmed by (the reception), but it was genuine.”

The Alabamians did let their hosts know that they don’t button up their emotions in church.

“Their preacher said to me, `You might have to tone it down _ we’re not used to saying `Amen’ and `Praise the Lord,”’ the Rev. Ingram recalled. “I said, `I don’t mean no harm, but we didn’t come 4,000 miles just to be quiet.”’

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To Ruff and Martin, the cultural exchange was a hopeful sign that the lining-out tradition can undergo a renaissance in both Scotland and the American South. They also hope it helps blacks understand their cultural roots.

“It’s important for black people in the American South who don’t know the history that well,” Martin said. “Everything that’s been written about their connection with the people from Scotland has always been written from a white perspective, rather than a black perspective.”

“My mama didn’t raise me to be a cultural anthropologist _ I’m a jazz man,” Ruff said. “But if this music can be used as a marker for some kind of cultural DNA, then I’d like that.”


KRE/LF/JL END McCUTCHEON

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