Gifts from Protestants: Hymnody

One of my tropes on this blog has been to rag on my evangelical background, and there's a lot of good material there. However, I have neglected to mention the good things. One of the best things that Protestant churches have to offer is their music.

To be clear, I'm not talking about this:

I'm thinking more about this:

Or this:

Or this:

If Catholics are looking for music to add to their repoirtoire, they could do worse than composers such as Charles Wesley, Isaac Watts, and the many anonymous authors of Negro Spirituals. Of course some lyrics may have to be tweaked for doctrinal reasons, but there is a wealth of musical and lyrical talent buried in the typical Protestant hymnal.

On another day I'll tell you why Protestants have such a rich history of music.

Soundtracks for seasons

One reason I joined the Episcopal church was to participate in a rhythm of faith: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost. It makes sense to worship in a rhythm because we humans do almost everything in rhythms. We celebrate birthdays and the New Year and the Beginning of School and spring because they are new beginnings. We happily set off firecrackers every Fourth of July, carve pumpkins every Halloween, roast turkeys every Thanksgiving, decorate trees and hang up stockings at Christmas. We all need liturgy and rhythm and tradition, no matter our religion. It made sense, though, to recognize this human need at church as well.

In addition to the church year and the secular holiday calendar, I find myself listening to different music cyclically, based on the seasons. Come fall, I always turn on the Cranberries. Don't know why, it's a thing. Today I found Linger stuck in my head, and it occurred to me that it's September, even if Savannah's still hot and humid. 

Fall in general has me nostalgic, and something about the 90s feels cold.  Maybe it was all those denim jackets? There's something particularly aching about the Cranberries that seems autumnal. 

This is one of my favorites. Don't you love the opening scene where she pops the CD in the walkman? 

My Relationship with Rap Part Two: Leaving the Old Neighborhood

For those of us who grew up in poor neighborhoods who managed to leave, there is constant inner tension. First of all, there is the survivor guilt. Why are our old friends still poor? Why are they still boarding their windows after break-ins and learning which gang colors to avoid? The unfairness of life is thrust in our faces, especially if we didn't "earn" our way out, i.e. if our parents were the reason we were able to leave. (By the way, this is one reason why those who escaped homelessness often end up back on the streets. They are constantly thinking of their close friends still suffering hypothermia and are crippled by that knowledge).

Second, there is the nostalgia. The love of home is sometimes strongest for those who grew up in hard times. It goes beyond mere nostalgia though: the passion for home is defensive in nature. The more one's home is mocked or hated by others, the stronger one's passion grows for defending her honor. Outsiders are viewed with suspicion because they don't understand. Think of the classic examples: Sicily, North Ireland, China, Myanmar, Russia, Cuba, Brooklyn, Appalachia, the southside of Chicago. The deadliest example of course is Nazi Germany, but it appears in subtler forms in American ghettos. We would rather be feared than condescended to, because with fear comes power.

Third, there is the shame mingling with the love. In her brilliant memoir The Glass Castle, Jeannette describes how she washed herself with snow before school to hide the fact that they lacked running water in the 70s. Underneath the bravado, there are parts of our old lives that we despise, that we never talk about with outsiders, that we wish we could erase. We tell lies about the past to disguise our self-hatred, to distance ourselves from the shame of growing up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because most of growing up poor is not cool, which is why it's so grating when middle class white kids try to be "gangsta."

In my own life, my parents had a stroke of luck which allowed us to move from the old neighborhood to a better part of town. Suddenly we had a two story house with a dishwasher, and I had my own bathroom. The ceiling didn't crack and shed; the kitchen didn't have mice behind the stove; I didn't have roaches crawling over my bed; the nighttime was dark and quiet. I was relieved by many of these changes, but I was also afraid. Change is scary, even good change. I couldn't sleep at night because I was used to noise. The streets were scary in a new way: there were no sidewalks, and these folks drove SUVs and huge pick-ups must faster than they should have. There were few pedestrians; the children played video games instead of street-ball.

I took walks every day because I believed in facing my fears, and the neighborhood seemed so empty - except for the speeding trucks of course. For one thing, I wasn't used to streets where everyone worked. Most of our neighbors either couldn't or wouldn't find work, and they sat on their porches getting drunk most days. These neighbors were busy even outside of work, and they had comfortable, air-conditioned homes to escape from the heat and mosquitos. The empty streets were lined with two-story houses, which seemed to tower over me. As I said in the previous post, we lived in a neighborhood with dumpy one-story houses, not the brownstones you would see in Brooklyn, and the "fancy" (to me, I was sheltered in that way) homes intimidated me. I was accustomed to tidy blocks with avenues and streets intersecting, and I was baffled by the rabbit warren of culdesacs and curling streets. They had almost identical names too, called drive or place instead of the more sensible street or avenue. Once I got so lost that I wandered for hours before finally making my way home.

These changes made me defensive of my home. Before I had avoided bringing friends home; now I bragged about my past. I was disgusted by the spoiled kids on my street, and I was eager to distinguish myself from those kids. I mocked my classmates that got new cars on their 16th birthdays, and I stopped trying to hide the fact that I still wore second hand clothes. Part of this defensive stance was delving into the music I had hated, but it was a long journey.

My Relationship with Rap: When I was little

I grew up in what some people would call "the hood." It was once a "good neighborhood" and live oaks laced with Spanish moss line the streets. However, our town was badly prepared for late 20th century economics. The employment rate went down and the murder rate went up. In the 80s and 90s, crack cocaine was a booming business. In the last 15 years, meth has replaced it in popularity. And so it goes.

This was in the South, so it's not the Bronx - there are so many azalea bushes that in the spring it looks like a painting. Besides the huge live oaks, we had dogwood and pine trees - old ones, big ones - so many trees that the light barely got through their shade. Beneath their branches were mostly old, dilapidated houses from the 30s and 40s (we lived in one of these). I won't lie: our house had some charm. The bathroom was still tiled in the original art deco black and white. There was a hole in the hall where a stove pipe used to be, and I guess nobody ever bothered to fill it in. We had a mud room that opened onto the concrete patio: as a kid I loved the cracked and broken concrete because it was more interesting than plain, flat patios. We had a dining room separated from the kitchen by a swinging white door like they had in To Kill A Mockingbird.

Next door to us was a group of duplexes. Imagine that a kid scattered a bunch of deep red blocks on the dirt: that was the duplexes. They were separated from our house by a screen of trees and vines, and I wasn't allowed to go over there. But you can't cut out a kid's eyes and ears, so I heard and saw plenty anyway. I was an only child without friends, so I used to climb the vines and play with the kids in the trees. We all knew the same hand games so it was all right that they had rotten teeth. But they never stayed: their parents were always running from something, so the turn-around was quick.

I remember when I realized that I was white. I was talking to a girl about my age and her little brother. The brother touched one of the freckles on my face, asked if I was sick. I laughed, but his sister called him an idiot. "He's not used to seeing white people."

I think most white people have it the other way: at some point in life, they realize that the other person is black. I had to learn that I am white, that I myself have an ethnicity too. We don't talk that way though do we? The black women's hair section is "ethnic." The white women's panty hose are colored "nude." Y'all, we act like "white" is the default, and that all these other people are a departure from the norm. I hate to break it to you, but we're the aberration. Look around the world, and you'll mostly see people of color.

The norm was rap; the norm was 1980s Cadillacs (we had an old car too, because we were fly like that). The norm was poverty and broken homes, whether people were white or black. My family was super weird because my parents were married and college-educated.

The public high school for our district was down the street, and on Friday night it was a street party. Cars lined the streets, and the whole world was loud. I hated the rap but I loved the marching band, so I would push my way to the high school to watch them march around the stadium. My two white friends and I would stand on the concrete wall across the street and above the fray, and we just thought we were the stuff. This was ours! It wasn't much, but it was big and bad and it was (at least) not as ghetto as the county school. We weren't like those kids in the county over, with their small-town peanut festivals and such. We were downtown.

Oh how I hated rap then. It was the reminder that I would never fit in, that I was different. It was the soundtrack day and night, from boom boxes and car radios with busted speakers; it rattled and doors and windows. It was scary and different, and I thought that it encouraged the violence and crime. What I didn't understand I hated.

And now for something completely different

As a girl from the South (Georgia to be specific), I grew up with classic American folk music. And by folk music I don't mean Bob Dylan and hippies; I mean Little Brown Jug, You Are My Sunshine, Poncho and Lefty, I'll Fly Away, Were You There?, Angel Band. The kind of song you learn to sing harmony to with your mama while your uncle plays the harmonica. If you don't know about field hollers, Negro spirituals and Appalachian folk ballads, you really should check out the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack for a beginners' course.

Thankfully, this artistic form didn't end with the 21st century. Not only are modern musicians keeping the classics alive, but others are composing their own haunting pieces in homage. My personal favorite is Gillian Welch and her guitar-pickin' partner, David Rawlings. There is no weak link: the singing, songwriting, and instrumentation fit together beautifully.

But enough talking - on to the music! Here are a few of my favorites.


One Morning, from Hell Among the Yearlings. A mother's lament for her son.

Hard Times, from The Harrow and the Harvest. Some enterprising soul created a video mixing the song with scenes from Paper Moon.

Winter's Come and Gone, from Hell Among the Yearlings. This might be my favorite of hers.

Annabelle, from Revival. This is a heartbreaking song of the Depression.

Rock of Ages, from Hell Among the Yearlings. I adore this creative rendition of the hymn.

Scarlet Town, from The Harrow and the Harvest. One of her more upbeat pieces.


I could go on, but I need to cook some cornbread. Enjoy the music!