Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 71 Judge Johnson’s contributions. Finally, his use of testimony from witnesses confirms the reality of the segregated South and African Americans’ effort to free themselves from Jim Crow’s constraints. Often we tend to think of the civil rights movement only in terms of national groups who organized local people into action. Landsberg’s work highlights the activism of black Alabamians working on their own to change their communities through the assistance of federal attorneys. Through the experiences and testimony of people such as Joe Bizzell, Margaret Campbell Brown, Lula Belle Townsend, and Ella D. Stewart, the narrative reveals multiple layers of the grass-roots struggle for black freedom. Finally, his analysis of the three Black Belt cases points out the social nature of the law and how court proceedings can become agents of change. Transformation of the region’s unjust voting system required the efforts of determined local people who believed that federal laws should be enforced, skillful Department of Justice lawyers, and committed federal officials. Through these case studies, Landsberg helps us understand the complexity of segregation and why it was so difficult to dismantle. This book makes an important contribution to civil rights history. It is useful for today’s undergraduates who often find it hard to grasp the everyday realities of a segregated society. Graduate students will also bene fit from the author’s legal analysis, and his skillful writing will grab the attention of the general reader. SUSAN YOUNGBLOOD ASHMORE Oxford College of Emory University Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism. By Kiri Miller. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. xvi, 245 pp. $45.00. ISBN 9780 -252-03214-1. In Traveling Home, ethnomusicologist Kiri Miller writes knowledgeably about Sacred Harp singers and singing. Her clear, readable style, her solid scholarship, and her reflections upon the social, cultural, and religious aspects of the tradition make the book rich and worthwhile. Sacred Harp singing began in 1844 when the Georgia editors B. F. White and E. J. King published The Sacred Harp. Traveling Home is not a historical study, however, but a look at contemporary Sacred Harp singing , mostly focusing on The Sacred Harp 1991 but also with reference to the 2006 Cooper revised edition of White and King’s work. Having roots T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 72 in Georgia and Alabama, this singing—as Miller will argue—has grown into what she calls a Sacred Harp diaspora. Miller assumes a reader knowledgeable about both music theory and Sacred Harp practice. Although not talking down to the reader, she still assists a novice, suggesting recordings, for instance, and explaining the hollow square; but after such a description she adds, “this scene is probably a familiar one to my readers” (p. 2). Traveling Home has integrity born from the fact that Miller has made herself a singer, spending years attending singings throughout the country, not just observing but participating . Experienced singers may find themselves or their friends in the book. Miller offers sympathetic but astute analysis of singers’ conduct, both at singings and in such settings such as listservs (e-mail based discussion groups). Traveling Home looks closely at the singing community while raising questions about what constitutes that community. Anyone seeking thoughtful, detailed studies of Sacred Harp singing does not have a large shelf of books to turn to. George Pullen Jackson’s White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (Chapel Hill, 1933), Dorothy Horn’s Sing to Me of Heaven (Gainesville, 1970), Buell Cobb’s The Sacred Harp (Athens, Ga., 1978), and John Bealle’s Public Worship, Private Faith (Athens, Ga., 1997) certainly belong on the shelf, but excepting these, and a few other books and articles, most writing about Sacred Harp singing is by journalists who are not singers, who know little about music, and who perpetually retell some version of “how I went to my first Sacred Harp singing and discovered an activity that I did not know existed.” Miller comments on this journalistic approach and fits it into her exploration of “traveling,” the...