Downhome Gospel: African American Spiritual Activism in Wiregrass Country by Jerrilynn McGregory (review)

In what was clearly a labor of love and a personal journey, over which the spirit of Zora Neale Hurston hovers, Jerrilyn McGregory has produced a significant and insightful, but flawed, ethnography of African American spiritual life in the region known as Wiregrass Country. According to McGregory, the Wiregrass comprises much of the southern third of Georgia and nine counties each in southeastern Alabama and the Florida panhandle. She describes the region as "a marginalized space within the South," "less well known than Appalachia, Cajun Country, or the Black Belt" (xv). Since emancipation, African Americans there have formed a rich, unique set of interrelated communities in which religious and quasi-religious activities, marked by "reciprocity" and "collective economics," make up an important part of the culture. Protestant Christianity dominates, and African Americans participate not only in the region's many churches, but also in extra-ecclesiastical associations, some dating back to the Civil War, in which they sing and play sacred music and engage in what McGregory calls "spiritual activism." These are the activities and people she chronicles.

McGregory has been studying Wiregrass cultures since 1991, producing a general ethnographic study of the region in 1997 (Wiregrass Country, Folklife in the South [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997]). She apparently knew as early as 1994 that her follow-up monograph "would have to focus on the region's African Americans and their sacred music preferences" (xvi). She has made this personal as well. Instead of the normally detached observation, she describes the cultures subjectively, in part, often referring to her own embrace of their values. As for the term "downhome gospel," McGregory states, "[it] is not intended as a misnomer. This study engages a variety of African American sacred music traditions, beyond just gospel music." She cites as her precedent Jeff Todd Titon's "blues-oriented formulation. As he defined it, downhome does not reference a place but 'a spirit, a sense of place evoked in singer and listener by a style of music'" (xix).

My own survey of the musical traditions and styles McGregory discusses shows that she observed music-making with spirituals, moaning, Dr. Watts or Long Meter singing (I think), songs from The Sacred Harp (Cooper Edition) and The Colored Sacred Harp, hymns and songs from the predominantly Anglo-American traditions represented by everyone from Isaac Watts to gospel songs from both northern and southern publishers, and traditional and contemporary gospel (both of the latter being subgenres of African American gospel). Performances of spirituals and the songs and hymns from the Anglo-American traditions, she tells us, are usually "gospelized," that is, performed in the "gospel blues" style established by Thomas A. Dorsey (64, 103).

In the opening chapter, McGregory describes the Emancipation Day celebrations held on the "Twentieth of May" and their associated musicking, including the performances of "liberation songs" (9). In chapter 2 she discusses burial and other fraternal societies that gather regularly to perform ritualized movements and sing spirituals and gospel songs (seemingly African American). Denominational meetings that take place on "Fifth Sundays" (the four times per year when a fifth Sunday falls within a month) are the focus of the third chapter. The most ubiquitous of these, reports McGregory, are Baptist union meetings (59), at which the types of songs mentioned above are performed, with the exception of contemporary gospel (64-65). In chapter 4, she considers "the shape-note tradition," focusing primarily on the singing conventions of the famed Wiregrass Sacred Harp Singers, who read four-shape, or fasola, notation. In the latter part of this chapter, however, she describes those singing conventions in which songs and hymns are sung, without instruments, from books employing seven-shape, or "dorayme," notation—the tradition she describes as the more common of the two among African Americans (93). Chapters 5 and 6 address those conventions in which choirs sing...