We reviewed Th. Metzger’s book, Strong Songs of the Dead, here. It may be purchased from Amazon here
96 You’ve been involved in Sacred Harp (A.K.A. shape note) singing for over a quarter century, and your recent book, Strong Songs of the Dead: the Pagan Rites of Sacred Harp takes the reader into some dark and deeply haunted corners of American religion.
Th.M. Haunted is not the same as damned, and intoxication comes in all sorts of forms. There’s a strong Christian foundation to Sacred Harp singing, but it’s the relentless raucous sound, the crypto-pagan communal effort, the plangent pathos, that draws new people in and keeps us coming back. Loud raw hymns in four-part harmony, some reaching back to the 1700s, are sung at full – at times crushing – volume, then followed by sprawling high calory feasts. The barbecue is sometimes called a sacrament: body and blood of pig.
96 And this multi-decade exploration has taken you beyond the formal gatherings that use the Sacred Harp as their primary source?
Th.M. Before my first sojourn to Alabama, I reread for the fourth time Salvation on Sand Mountain, by Dennis Covington, which chronicles his time among snake-handling Jesus-only religionists in the deep south. It starts with murder, follows Covington’s descent into near-madness, veers down the dark corridors of eros, and takes him out the other side, alive but deeply scarred. There’s no book that I know which delves as deeply into the ecstasy of dangerous religion. I visited every town mentioned in the book and took part in rites that lasted up to six hours, with blisteringly loud music and lots of pulled pork. (It was at one of these events, on Sand Mountain in Alabama, that I was told that pig meat is the closest in taste to human flesh.)
96 How have traditional Sacred Harp singers reacted to your book, which is part autobiography, part ethnography, and part renegado journalism?
Th.M. Those close to the center say it’s heretical, condemning its impurity and outré observations. Those far out on the periphery don’t have much context to inform their reaction, having trouble making sense of what some people call “yelling about God and eating pig.” Readers in the interzone respond best; some familiarity with religious ecstasy, folk hymnody, and loud outpourings of passion open the way into my book.
As with so many traditional practices, these days there’s a struggle for ownership, a fight for the right to tell the story. And while decades back, shape note singing really was the cultural property of a small group of rural southerners, that’s no longer the case. I stayed as a guest with a number of southern singers, and at my first big sing on Sand Mountain, I stayed back a few rows.
For the sings, the benches are arranged in a hollow square, everybody facing in. The tenors take the melody, keening in a folk mode somewhere between minor and major. Sitting to the tenors’ left is the bass section, old men and young bucks bellowing. The altos, making up the third side of the square, buzz like the drones on a bagpipe. And on the fourth side are the trebles, who wail a skyward rush of harmony.
I knew that the front tenor bench was reserved for men who’d been singing this music since they were children. But my host told me to move up to the front, “closer to the fire.” I demurred, saying I wasn’t the best singer, and he said, “you don’t got to be good. You just got to sing hoard, and you sing hoard.”
96 So, you were accepted by these people?
Th. M. No, not accepted, but welcomed. I’m an unapologetic Yankee. I live five minutes from the shore of Lake Ontario, and fifty miles across the lake is Canada. I never try to hide the fact of who and what I am. But throwing myself body, voice, and soul into the deafening melee went a long way to break down the Yankee/Southerner difference. The same host – an Alabama pig farmer – who’d said I sang hoard got out the corn liquor one night, a Mason jar half full with clear homemade whiskey, saying it was about 150 proof. It was not quite as corrosive as paint thinner, with a hint of corn flavor in there with the alcohol flame. At some churches, you can see a cluster of men on the far edge of the dirt parking lot, taking a break from the holy din, passing around the fruit jar.
96 Drunk in church?
Th. M Or drunk and church. One of my favorite shape note tunes includes these lines from Isaac Watts:
What noble fruit the vines produce
The olive yields a shining juice
Our hearts are cheered with gen’rous wine
With inward joy our faces shine.
Over a hundred of the hymns in the Sacred Harp have lyrics by Watts, who’s sometimes mocked as a priggish fuddy-duddy. And while I’ve read my share of grim, massive modernist fiction (Ulysses, Sound and the Fury, Magic Mountain, etc.), I’m the only person I know who’s also read Watts’ complete Psalms and Hymns. There’s much repetition and stiff-necked faith in these five hundred pages of poetry, but his devotion is unmistakable, and at times he reaches into the sub-rational depths (and the super-sensible heights.)
Then let the last loud trumpet sound
And bid our kindred rise
Awake ye nations underground
Ye saint ascend the skies
With no cynicism, no irony, I’m able to belt out these words along with other singers from all walks of life. (At one sing, I sat between a NASA engineer and a ditch digger, but among shape note singers, it’s an unspoken rule that you don’t pry into people’s social class status.)
And ev’ry limb and ev’ry joint
Stretches for immortality
Our spirits shake their eager wings
And burn to meet thy flying throne
We rise away from mortal things
T’attend thy shining chariot down
I’ll take that any day over self-indulgent post-modern gabble.
96 It’s clear that there’s an element of mysticism running through these texts.
Th.M. I wouldn’t use the word “mystic” to describe Watts, or Covington, and I’ll leave it to others to uncover the mysteries in Strong Songs of the Dead. Still, this strain of writing – at its best – is rich with otherworldly power. Watts conjures a strange cosmology:
Angels, whom his own breath inspires
His ministers, are flaming fires
And swift as thought their armies move
To bear his vengeance or his love.
But all is not glory and heavenly delight in the Watts’ poetic world. One of my favorite tunes, inexplicably named “Plenary” makes this clear:
Hark, from the tombs of doleful sound
Mine ears attend the cry
Ye living me come view the ground
where you must short lie.
Great God is this our certain doom
And are we still secure
Still walking downward to the tomb
And yet prepared no more.
96 This gloom and doom seems to contradict the ecstasy you’re drawn to.
Th.M. It’s not contradiction, but complexity. I’ve heard singers say, “Let’s do this one dripping with drear,” and still there comes that uprush of power. Likewise, Covington plunges deeply into the snake-handling world, drawn to something – darkness and light – that he struggles to understand, declaring, “The entrance into ecstasy is surrender.” He doesn’t hedge or hide from the truth. “It occurred to me that seeing a handler in the ecstasy of an anointing is not like seeing religious ecstasy at all. The expression seems to have more to do with Eros than God, in the same way that sex often seems to have more to do with death than pleasure. In both sexual and religious ecstasy, the first thing that goes is self. Handlers talk about receiving the Holy Ghost, but the expression reads exactly as the opposite – as though someone, or something, were being violently taken away. The paradox of Christianity is that only in losing ourselves do we find ourselves.”
96 You’ve said that Sand Mountain is best known for three things: snake-handling Baptists, the Sacred Harp singing tradition, and the Louvin Brothers. In all of these, passionate religion is manifested in unapologetically fearsome music.
Th.M. The Louvin Brothers’ most notorious album, Satan Is Real, makes no reference to snake-handling. And the direct source of none of its songs is the venerable book full of old scarifying shouts of praise. Yet the Louvin Brothers, in the grooves of Satan Is Real, dove as deeply as they ever would into hell and holiness, liquor, loss, and love. Damnation and salvation both get their due, raised up in the Louvins’ soaring vocal harmonies.
From the first words we hear – a plaintive cry of “Satan Is real!” – through a drunkard’s doom, dead infants, weeping mothers, forgotten wives, the affliction of leprosy, and glimpses of eternal punishment, the Louvins hold back not one whit of fiery exhortation. Yet sweetness suffuses this album, sweetness mixed with genuine fear and guilt. Some have said that southern Gospel music has at its core an erotic ache, a longing for a “land of pure delight” where saints “drink endless pleasures in.”
96 You’ve said that of all southern country singers, Ira Louvin is the one who fascinates you the most.
Th.M. Yes. If I could trade voices with any other person, it would be Ira Louvin. But his plaintive cry came from a potent brew of suffering and exaltation that I’m sure I could not endure. Writing most of the brothers’ songs, Ira spent his life veering between bouts of whiskey-fueled rage and religious bliss. Killed in a car accident at age 41, he had lived the rock star’s life, though he often said he’d been called to be a preacher. A notorious drunkard with a sizzling, smoking anger always present, he married four women, the third famously having shot him in the chest after he had assaulted her. At the time of his death, a warrant for his arrest on a DUI charge was outstanding. He was, said his brother Charlie, living “under conviction;” that is, knowing he was called to the path of righteousness but perpetually heading down the road to spiritual ruin.
Besides the haunted and haunting beauty of the brothers’ voices twining together, it’s the cover of Satan Is Real that has given it near-legendary status. It shows the brothers in snazzy white linen suits, with their arms out, imploring listeners to flee the powers of darkness. Behind them is a twelve-foot-tall plywood Satan, standing proudly amid the fires of hell. Charlie explained later that “Ira built that set. We went to this rock quarry and then took old tires and soaked them in kerosene, got them to burn good. It had just started to sprinkle rain when we got that picture taken. Those rocks, when they get hot, they blow up. They were throwing pieces of hot rock into the air.”
96 Charlie’s autobiography – Satan is Real – was published after his death?
Th.M. Yes, and in it he devotes an early chapter to singing from the Sacred Harp. His mother was a member of the Wooten clan, one of the most venerated families to carry on the musical tradition that stretches back to before the United States was a nation.
Charlie points to this tradition as one of the most significant shapers of the Louvin Brothers’ sound. It was at a Haynes family reunion sing, in Shady Grove, Alabama, that he and Ira first heard the lost and found sound. Manifested in Ira’s singing, the tenor voice has an unnerving, an unearthly, quality. Charlie explained that Ira had taken some of his crying passionate style from a girl he’d been drawn to at the Haynes singing.
“Sure enough, from then on after he saw that girl, there’d come a time when we were singing together that he’d slip into one of those high parts and then come back down, just like she did. He built it right into our act. In a way, our entire career was built on doing unorthodox things like that, things no sensible person might do, and we learned a lot of them from Sacred Harp.” No sensible person. That phrase might have described me too, traveling nine hundred miles to sing on Sand Mountain.
96 But it wasn’t just the Sacred Harp that drew you back?
Th.M. I called these trips pilgrimages, and getting a tour from my moonshine-and-hoard-singing host, I found the link to the Louvin Brothers. Deep into the backcountry, he came to a full stop at a quiet crossroads. Pines and farmland stretched off in every direction. The rusted sign said, “Loudermilk Road.”
“Loudermilk,” I said, half to myself, “that was the Louvin Brothers’ real name.”
My host turned to look at me. “How’d you know about that?”
“I’m a big fan. I’ve got a stack of their records.”
“That so?” he asked, clearly surprised.
“Yeah. They’re my favorite country singers.”
“Well,” he said, “then you’re okay by me. A Yankee who loves the Louvin Brothers. I went to school with them. They’re the biggest thing that ever come out of here.”
“I’ve got a friend in Detroit,” I said, “who’s going to die with envy when I tell them about this. He was the one who introduced me to the Louvins.”
We made a detour to see the place where the brothers grew up. “Charlie started a summer music stage right here. He wanted to make it big, so people would come from all around. It was supposed to be like another Nashville.” The place looked desolate, empty, lost. No one had performed on the wooden stage in years. “Didn’t work out. But they’re still famous here.”
Melancholy leaked into the moment: we were thinking about Ira, long gone, and Charlie’s failed stage there at the end of Loudermilk Road.
When we got back to his place, my host announced to his wife that I was a Louvin Brothers fan. This got me points with her too. She dug out a stack of battered old records and we took turns picking favorites and placing the needle in the groove. She leaned toward the sweetest tunes. I was more partial to the ones where Ira sings like a man who knows he’s heading for a car crash, and then the fires of hell.
“How long you been listening to the Louvin Brothers?”
“Years.”
“What’s your best song?” She meant my favorite. It wasn’t a test; she genuinely wanted to find out.
It would’ve been easier if I’d told her “I Like the Christian Life,” Ira’s most famous tune. But I was honest and said, “In the Pines.” It’s the standout track on their first album, Tragic Songs of Life. Ira wrote most of the Louvins’ repertoire. “In the Pines,” however, got handed down from singer to singer on Sand Mountain before the brothers were born. Unlike most of the Louvin’s best material, “In the Pines” has no religious content. It’s mostly ancient shadow, cold wind, and the high lonesome wail of sinful erotic mania that turns into murder.
96 But no ecstasy?
Th.M. Not in the religious sense. There’s raw lust and its consequence: the song ends with a dead girl who was carrying the murderer’s baby. Covington is more bold in telling us the truth about the entanglement of eros and the surrendering of our lives. Many of the handlers who he becomes close to were bitten and die of snake bites. Farly early in his journey – both inward and to far-flung gatherings of handlers – he is drawn to a woman whose ecstatic worship is overwhelming. As the snakes are brought forth, she goes into a kind of holy trance, emitting “the strangest sound I had ever heard. At first it did not seem human. It sounded like the voice of a rare night bird, or some tiny feral animal.” As the woman descends – or ascends – “the voice got louder, mounting up on itself, until it started to sound like that of a child who was lost and in great pain. But even as the hairs on my arm started to stand on end, the voice turned into something else, a sound that had pleasure in it as well as torment. Ecstasy, I would learn later, is excruciating.”
He doesn’t need to tell his reader that the word “excruciating” is linked directly to “crucify.”
The most famous hymn of Isaac Watts begins, “When I survey the wondrous cross,” and ends with this quatrain:
Were the whole realm of nature mine
That were a present far too small
Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my soul, my life, my all.