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178 ‘’ ‘’ Legacy and Meaning in the Changing Sacred Harp Tradition of the Okefenokee Region laUrie k. soMMers on May 4, 1958, singing school teacher silas lee, froM hoBoken, Brantley County, Georgia, took a small group of Sacred Harp singers to the stage of the Florida Folk Festival (FFF).1 The singers had traveled from their homes in the Okefenokee region of southeast Georgia and northeast Florida to the festival site located in the north-central Florida community of White Springs. They sang three songs from the B. F. White Sacred Harp, Revised Cooper Edition, to the polite applause of the audience.2 This was the first of two late 1950s appearances at the festival by the Hoboken group and the only one recorded for posterity. The 1958 recording is an important sonic benchmark in the history of this significant local variant of Sacred Harp. Silas Lee pitched the singing quite low, so the singers could sing the melodies slowly in a richly ornamented style influenced by their own tradition of Primitive Baptist hymn singing. These two intertwined musical traditions—Primitive Baptist hymnody and Sacred Harp—have been defining genres for this small rural region for well over a century. Although Sacred Harp became a mainstay of the Florida Folk Festival, the Hoboken FFF appearances were an anomaly. Hoboken singers rarely sang with or for outsiders again for nearly fifty years. Instead, this singing community became more insular and influenced by conservative Primitive Baptist beliefs, especially those of the Crawfordites, the most conservative of local Primitive Baptist subsects who take their name from the nineteenthcentury south Georgia elder, Reuben Crawford. By the 1990s, participation had shrunk to a small cadre of Crawfordites, and the nondenominational, community legacy of local Sacred Harp was in jeopardy. In 1994, cousins and 179 The Changing Sacred Harp Tradition of the Okefenokee Region current song leaders David and Clarke Lee of Hoboken, Georgia, launched a deliberate effort to open up and change their Sacred Harp tradition in order to save it for future generations. Hoboken and the Lee family subsequently achieved celebrity status among the national Sacred Harp Diaspora;3 many viewed visits to Hoboken’s monthly Sacred Harp sings as “pilgrimages” to the wellspring of “the ultimate traditional Sacred Harp singers.”4 The Hoboken annual All-Day Sing in March5 “has swelled to become one of the largest Sacred Harp gatherings in the country, drawing several hundred singers a year, an exceptional number for a one-day singing.”6 Members of the national Sacred Harp singing network and scholars (myself included) now inextricably link this Sacred Harp variant with Hoboken, Georgia, and with the Lee family as its exemplar and cultural ambassador. For local folks who have always sung this music, it is simply “Sacred Harp,” four-note singing, or singing from the “note book” (as opposed to the words only hymnal, Primitive Hymns by Benjamin Lloyd, which many use at local Primitive Baptist churches). I first met the Lees and attended my first Hoboken Sacred Harp sing in January 1997, just a few years into the remarkable transformation of this singing community. As a folklorist and ethnomusicologist then based in south Georgia, I began to document the singers and sings as part of the South Georgia Folklife Project at Valdosta State University (1996–2006). My tape-recorded interviews from this period, combined with participant observation at many singing events, provide the primary source material for this article. I also involved Hoboken singers in several public programs, including their return to the Florida Folk Festival in May 2000. Nearly fifty members of the Lee family from Georgia and Florida joined with other singers for the Silas Lee Memorial Sing, an event that I instigated as part of a special Okefenokee section of the swampways-themed folklife area. I previously had shared with David Lee a copy of the 1958 festival recording discovered in the Florida State Archives; he deliberately repeated history (and created another sonic benchmark) by opening the sing with the same three songs led by Silas Lee in 1958, three years to the weekend from the death of the elder Lee at age eighty-five. As Johnny Lee, Silas’s nephew and David’s father, remarked that day, “A lot has changed since 1958, the year we were down here . . . . One thing has not changed: this book (the Cooper revision of The Sacred Harp), the heritage, the legacy, the memory, and the meaning. The deep spiritual meaning has not changed.”7 This chapter...

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