in two lest one side overbalance and you slide to the floor. The damp cold seeped into me as I lay watching the dark like a cat at God’s mousehole. Part of me delivered rational comfort: it will be warm in a minute, I’ll be asleep. Another part wailed, “There’s been a mistake! I’ve been buried alive in Birmingham, and this is the cold of a deep grave I can’t whine my way out of!”
Yoga mediates between these two voices. This moment is as it should be. This moment is my teacher. If I struggle against this moment, I struggle against the flow of the universe.
Finally I got out of bed and found my long underwear and a stash of those overwashed community blankets that lie on you like tacos, letting in drafts from all sides. I hoped the homeopathic fright pills were specific for being buried alive. Then I slept or fell down a coal chute till 5 A.M. truck traffic on the Bristol road committed me to the day. The pillow jammed under my head repulsed me with its smell of exotic hair oil, male and tropical. I pushed off the hump and made for the shower. The water was lukewarm, and I caught, shivering, the scent of a peculiarly British brand of disinfectant. Olfactory sensations go right to the glands of memory; I was back in an English youth hostel, adventurous, displaced, and twenty-four. On the skylight above me a spongy, plopping sound began and I sensed the peculiar light of snow.
But I was not twenty-four, I was unstuck in time, and in a few hours I was due to be in Manchester to meet the man who has been the companion of my life for some fifteen years.
The one given me to love, I think, fondly—sometimes—when he drops his socks on the floor. For to have someone to love is worth the price of admission to life; not even Birmingham could shake my soul on that point. Robin and I met in church, as Abby Van Buren recommends, or rather at Quaker meeting. And then we met again, singing. Both of us belong to a group that sings in a colonial American tradition called Sacred Harp or shape note. In fact, it’s music business that brings Robin to England: he will be teaching Sacred Harp singing to English choral groups and directing a national convention. Let me try to give you a picture of how strange it will be to transplant this raucous, unsubtle music into the ironic idiom of British choral singers.
YOU CAN HEAR the singing at a Sacred Harp convention twelve blocks away, I’m told. My children say twelve blocks isn’t far enough—death metal folk, they call it. For my part, I think it sounds best when you are standing in the middle of the hollow square, with one hundred fifty singers around you in full voice.
Sacred Harp, or shape note singing, comes out of a religious music tradition going back to early New England singing schools. If you look into the big red Sacred Harp songbook that Robin and I carry with us everywhere, you may think you’re looking at medieval chant, because the music is notated in triangles, circles, and squares (hence “shape note”); each shape represents a note in a modified solfège system. Sacred Harp was devised to teach music quickly to those unaccustomed to sight-singing and it contains, in contrast to the usual do-re-mi system, only four syllables (fa-so-la-mi). Unlike chant, the music is polyphonic and unsubtle; its conventions, indeed, are unlike any mainstream Western tradition. Singers belt out the pieces at full volume, singing first the shapes, then the texts; academic musicians often tell me contemptuously that it contradicts everything they were ever taught. Maybe that’s because it’s not precisely—or not only—music. It has elements of religion, therapy, sport, and catharsis.
How does one describe a sound? “Death metal folk” is one attempt. I’ve heard it called “white gospel” by those trying to get across the flavor (though black people sing it, too). It has a medieval feeling in its minor tonalities, its resonant fourths and fifths. “Wondrous Love”—a song that often makes its way into modern hymnals—is a typical Sacred Harp piece. If you’ve heard William Billings’s eighteenth-century American music, you’ve heard a bit of the shape note style—though probably not at the volume and level of idiosyncrasy that characterize a Southern country “singing.” For it was in the rural South that this music survived, often in Primitive Baptist communities where, today, the average singer is likely to be over sixty. It reflects a religion so fierce and elemental that its only other objective correlative (alternate Sundays) might be snake handling.
The conventions of Sacred Harp singing are many and subtle. I don’t know what goes on in other sections—treble, tenor, and bass: I can only describe the contours of my alto world. Altos need to be big (in some physical or metaphysical sense) and loud; they tend to squabble over the front row of seats. Singers sit in squares, by section, facing a song leader who stands in the middle. Conducting a song—which any member of the group may do—is something of a collaboration between the one who has gotten up to lead and the front-bench singers. The front benchers are responsible for keeping the beat, roaring out the part, and communicating, by means of some psychic energy, the song leader’s intentions. These singers are not appointed, anointed, or elected: they assume their places with a sense of noblesse oblige.
In a weekly singing group, rank is barely discriminated. Strong singers, responsible for carrying the part, tend to head for the front seats, but at weekly meetings, a beginner may sit up front without incurring the wrath of some senior alto. At a regional convention, by contrast, confident indeed would be the new singer who seated herself in the front row, unless she were simply, as I was at my first convention, ignorant of the forms. Many singers have national reputations and carry themselves with the dignity of majas. A southerner at a Yankee convention would always have pride of place, of course. Or an elderly singer, even if the voice is gone.
Still, an innocent youngster may break for the first row, perhaps assuming that newcomers learn better in front of a rank of good singers; this reasonable assumption happens to violate Sacred Harp etiquette. By the first coffee break, she will realize—something deep inside will tell her—that she must take a lower place.
I had come late to my first big Midwest convention, back in the 1980s, and took the only chair available: row six. A steady row-two singer at home, I wanted to get a little closer to the front. Returning from lunch, I saw that a vacancy had opened in the middle of row one. Tempting, but out of my league. Still, most of the other singers had already taken their places …
“Does anyone want this chair?” I ask humbly, for humility becomes my station: a slight presence among these goddess altos. People seem to smile encouragement, so I place my big red book on the first-row chair.
There is a tense silence.
Then a great voice soars from the area of the coffee machine. “Oh, are you going to take that place? I suppose I should have put my book on the chair.”
She is a tall, hawk-nosed, red-haired woman in ebony silk; she is from Detroit. Waters of treble part before her as she sounds. I leap to my small feet. “Do you want this place?”
“There are some very strong singers here.” It is blackly spoken. High Noon on the alto range. But she chooses to toy with me. “Maybe you’d like to switch at the break?”
“Sure,” I say, but my submissive whinny goes unheard as the front-row singer next to me rises and cedes her own place to the alto from Detroit. The psychic space she requires scrunches me up against the bass section.
Her voice is a great dark bell. There will be no contest here, such as contentious tenors might engage in. Certainly no splendid entente, as when two mighty altos play off each other. She will simply punish, vanquish, and destroy me with sound, like that poor pickpocket caught in the ringing of The Nine Tailors.
Lord, when thou didst ascend on high
