Preface

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226109633.002.0005

Front Matter

Preface

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https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226109633.002.0005

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vii–xiv

Published:

September 2011

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In 2001, two vanloads of twenty-and thirtysomethings drove from the small towns of Western Massachusetts to the much-smaller towns of northeastern Alabama. Staying four to a motel room and arriving en masse at little country churches, they were a highly visible contingent contributing to an electrifying weekend of participatory singing. Of the Fuller Cemetery singing, Alabama singer Susan Harcrow said, “I know that something happened there that night that is a once in a lifetime thing.” That visit solidified a new tradition of travel between Western Massachusetts and northeastern Alabama, allowing members of both groups to develop pathways connecting the locations so that future journeys have become easier, for themselves and for others.
In the late 1990s, at a mid-Atlantic singing organized by relative novices, the one man from Georgia was accorded pride of place as he audibly deployed his southernness. In fact, he, too, was a relatively new singer, but his southern accent and religious demeanor brought him deference, as it was assumed to bespeak Sacred Harp authenticity and expertise in a room where he was far from the most experienced or knowledgeable.
Throughout their sixties, Coy and Marie Ivey opened their Henagar, Alabama, home to Sacred Harp singers from around the country. Their four-bedroom ranch house and their son's small garage apartment, and sometimes even their younger son's house down the road although he does not sing Sacred Harp, were stretched to accommodate visitors from Alabama and Georgia, from Minnesota and Illinois, and from Maine and Rhode Island. In addition to bringing food for an army to every day of singing—barbecue, fried chicken livers, coleslaw, potato salad, deviled eggs, punchbowl cake—Coy and Marie fed their visitors morning and evening. Their hospitality was boundless in service of bringing people in from afar to sing Sacred Harp on Sand Mountain.
At the Huntsville, Alabama, stop of the Great High Mountain tour, Alison Krauss, Ralph Stanley, and other greats of bluegrass shared the stage with nearly a hundred Sacred Harp singers, amateur musicians of highly variable levels of talent and experience, many of them children who had only recently shown interest in the old music sung by their parents and grandparents. The previous December, they had watched family members and friends appear with Nicole Kidman and Jude Law at a televised concert of music and readings from Cold Mountain and with Alison Krauss and Elvis Costello at the Academy Awards. And now they had the chance to be onstage with the stars of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Cold Mountain sound tracks. Suddenly Sacred Harp was more exciting.

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