Black Church Music from Scotland?

I wondered if there was any truth to a news story from Religion News Service sent to me by David Mills: “Professor Traces Gospel Singing Style of African-Americans to Scotland” by Chuck McCutcheon, undated. David knows I’m half Scot (and therefore half sane) so when he sees something about Scots, he often passes it along. (My favorite pass-along story, though it wasn’t from David, had something to do with an injury, a broken window, and a flying haggis.) Anyway, the article had a link, where you can download a few clips from a CD, Salm 1, at the website for Traditional Gaelic Psalm singing from the Hebrides.

I downloaded a few files and played them at work. A coworker who grew up in the South heard the Psalm singing and said, “That's African-American, southern signing, isn’t it?” Well, I fooled him. After making sure he really thought that was the case, I told him these were recorded at a church in the Scottish Hebrides. White church music.

Would this play in America? Apparently a version of it still does, in a dwindling number of African-American churches. Tens of thousands of Scots Highlanders emigrated to the American South in the late 1700s and early 1800s, bringing their Gaelic psalm-chants. Many came to own slaves. And this is what the slaves heard in church (usually sitting up in the balcony). All this is according to the RNS article.

The CD Salm I was recorded in Back Free Church on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, over two evenings in Oct of 2003, with a congregation of approx. 350 on night one, and 500 on night two, these being led by 25 different precentors. Without rehearsal. Listen for yourself also to the clips from the Salm II CD.

They are done in a chant style that must be easy to pick up if you simply spend time in the church service and sing with everyone else. In this particular style of singing the Psalms, the sum is greater than the parts. I admit it’s a bit outside the range of our contemporary taste. But it’s different enough, some might even say otherworldly enough that, who knows, some of the younger generation might take to it instead of the quickly-dating contemporary music their parents are listening to. I would never have thought I would appreciate Byzantine Chant, but now I do.

The style of singing does give the lines of the Psalms, well, something like weightiness, even “soul.” The CDs, by the way, can be purchased through the website. It’s tempting. But it’s not like anything most readers have heard, at least not in church.