"I Will Sing the Wondrous Story"

Author: David W. Music

Publisher: Mercer University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 664

ISBN-13: 9780865549487

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Baptists have a long and rich heritage of congregational song. The hymns Baptists have sung and the books from which they have sung them have been shaping forces for Baptist theology, worship, and piety. Baptist authors and composers have provided songs that have made an impact not only among Baptists in America but also across denominational and geographic lines. Congregational singing continues to be a key component of Baptist worship in the twenty-first century. Beginning with an overview of the British background, this book is a survey of the history of Baptist hymnody in America from Baptist beginnings in the New World to the present. Its intent is to help the reader better understand the background against which current Baptist congregational song practices operate. Unlike earlier writings on the subject, this book provides both comprehensive coverage and a continuous narrative. It gives thorough attention to the major Baptist bodies in America as well as calling attention to the contributions of significant smaller groups. The British Baptist background is dealt with in an introductory section. The book also includes many texts and tunes as illustrations of the topics being discussed and focuses on some of the contributions of Baptist authors and composers to the repertory of congregational song. Book jacket.


Sacred Song in America

Sacred Song in America

Author: Stephen A. Marini

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 9780252028007

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In Sacred Song in America, Stephen A. Marini explores the full range of American sacred music and demonstrates how an understanding of the meanings and functions of this musical expression can contribute to a greater understanding of religious culture.Marini examines the role of sacred song across the United States, from the musical traditions of Native Americans and the Hispanic peoples of the Southwest, to the Sacred Harp singers of the rural South and the Jewish music revival to the music of the Mormon, Catholic, and Black churches. Including chapters on New Age and Neo-Pagan music, gospel music, and hymnals as well as interviews with iconic composers of religious music, Sacred Song in America pursues a historical, musicological, and theoretical inquiry into the complex roles of ritual music in the public religious culture of contemporary America.


Daniel Belknap (1771-1815)

Daniel Belknap (1771-1815)

Author: Daniel Warren Steel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-23

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 113562349X

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Daniel Belknap was a farmer, mechanic, and singing-master in Framingham, Massachusetts, who compiled four sacred and one secular tunebooks. These featured his own sacred compositions as well as those by other New England composers. While Belknap was not as flamboyant, prolific, nor as innovative as his contemporaries, he nevertheless provided fitting and eloquent religious and social music for his own and neighboring communities.


Strangers Below

Strangers Below

Author: Joshua Guthman

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2015-09-28

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1469624877

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Before the Bible Belt fastened itself across the South, competing factions of evangelicals fought over their faith's future, and a contrarian sect, self-named the Primitive Baptists, made its stand. Joshua Guthman here tells the story of how a band of antimissionary and antirevivalistic Baptists defended Calvinism, America's oldest Protestant creed, from what they feared were the unbridled forces of evangelical greed and power. In their harrowing confessions of faith and in the quavering uncertainty of their singing, Guthman finds the emotional catalyst of the Primitives' early nineteenth-century movement: a searing experience of doubt that motivated believers rather than paralyzed them. But Primitives' old orthodoxies proved startlingly flexible. After the Civil War, African American Primitives elevated a renewed Calvinism coursing with freedom's energies. Tracing the faith into the twentieth century, Guthman demonstrates how a Primitive Baptist spirit, unmoored from its original theological underpinnings, seeped into the music of renowned southern artists such as Roscoe Holcomb and Ralph Stanley, whose "high lonesome sound" appealed to popular audiences searching for meaning in the drift of postwar American life. In an account that weaves together religious, emotional, and musical histories, Strangers Below demonstrates the unlikely but enduring influence of Primitive Baptists on American religious and cultural life.