Still, an innocent youngster may break for the first row, perhaps assuming that newcomers learn better in front of a rank of good singers; this reasonable assumption happens to violate Sacred Harp etiquette. By the first coffee break, she will realize—something deep inside will tell her—that she must take a lower place.
I had come late to my first big Midwest convention, back in the 1980s, and took the only chair available: row six. A steady row-two singer at home, I wanted to get a little closer to the front. Returning from lunch, I saw that a vacancy had opened in the middle of row one. Tempting, but out of my league. Still, most of the other singers had already taken their places …
“Does anyone want this chair?” I ask humbly, for humility becomes my station: a slight presence among these goddess altos. People seem to smile encouragement, so I place my big red book on the first-row chair.
There is a tense silence.
Then a great voice soars from the area of the coffee machine. “Oh, are you going to take that place? I suppose I should have put my book on the chair.”
She is a tall, hawk-nosed, red-haired woman in ebony silk; she is from Detroit. Waters of treble part before her as she sounds. I leap to my small feet. “Do you want this place?”
“There are some very strong singers here.” It is blackly spoken. High Noon on the alto range. But she chooses to toy with me. “Maybe you’d like to switch at the break?”
“Sure,” I say, but my submissive whinny goes unheard as the front-row singer next to me rises and cedes her own place to the alto from Detroit. The psychic space she requires scrunches me up against the bass section.
Her voice is a great dark bell. There will be no contest here, such as contentious tenors might engage in. Certainly no splendid entente, as when two mighty altos play off each other. She will simply punish, vanquish, and destroy me with sound, like that poor pickpocket caught in the ringing of The Nine Tailors.
Lord, when thou didst ascend on high
Ten thousand angels filled the sky.
Those heav’nly guards around thee wait
Like chariots that attend thy state.
The piece—a great collaboration between Isaac Watts and William Billings—has lots of wild ornamentation and the leader is taking it at warp speed. Sight-reading, I miss notes and fuguing entrances. The Detroit alto runs over me like an earth mover; she sings every shape no matter how fast the runs, how strange the rhythm—none of your la-la-la cheating.
One of our tenors, renowned for giving out the opening pitches, gets up to lead.
Will God forever cast us off?
His wrath forever smoke?
Against the people of his love,
His little chosen flock?
This is meat for his little chosen altos, lots of big round fifths. We claim our ground. The leader smiles at me as he cues our side. “I think we have not heard as much as you can give,” that tenor once said to me.
No prophet speaks to calm our grief,
But all in silence mourn;
Nor know the hour of our relief
The hour of thy return.
I give it away.
I did not always have this alto voice. Does that sound like the beginning of a folktale? It came about in this way. Seven years ago, my dad died after a long illness. He was a great tenor—though he always complained that the Air Force had ruined his voice by making him yell too much—who used to stand in the front doorway on summer evenings and sing “Jerusalem” for the edification of Roseville. Music meant a lot to him; in the course of his last illness, he chose his funeral music with precision and one of the songs he wanted was “Amazing Grace.” In the end, however, the priest wouldn’t allow it. “It’s a Protestant song,” he told us. My sister and I didn’t fight the decision. My dad had wanted a lot of things from us: that we be ladies, and sopranos, and married, and Catholic. Here we were, failing him again.
Public occasions in our family tend to tumble into black comedy. For starters, the undertaker had to explain to us, with a great deal of pausing and shuffling, that there seemed to be no place to bury my father. One of our relatives had gotten hold of the deed to the family plot at Calvary and sold it. So, on short notice, we had to take dad out to the national cemetery. In the end, he fell back into the arms of the Air Force. My sister and I got out of the funeral limousine, teetering on our unaccustomed high heels, and were surprised to meet five old men in uniform with rifles on their shoulders.
“Do something,” my Quaker children whispered.
“Don’t make a scene,” said my mother. Across dad’s slick blue cadillac of a coffin, my son caught my eye: his look said, give it away. By then, guys in jets were staging a screaming flyover, veterans of my father’s generation, maybe, or young pilots getting a day’s pay.
It’s hard to sing “Amazing Grace” over five jets and a volley of rifle fire. But that’s the way I got my alto, and thank God for the brave cousins who came in before I crashed in flames. Before that I had—to quote one of my choir directors—“a very little voice.” My dad, smitten with sound, had tried to remedy my weakness with singing lessons, but the music chosen for instruction embarrassed me into diffident trilling. It was all romance and foolishness. At some level back then I was longing for a good wailing Sacred Harp text:
Must death forever rage and reign
Or hast thou made mankind in vain?
A question worth answering, a song worth singing out the front door. But my music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me—the humiliation of it—as a soprano.
These, by contrast, are the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto: rage, darkness, motherhood, earth, malice, and sex. Once you feel it, you can always do it. You know where to go for it, though it will cost you.
In Sacred Harp we are always singing for our fathers, our mothers, our lost. We altos hug the ground, splay out our legs, and cry from the belly; we are suspect even among our own. “I can’t sing next to one of them,” complains a pretty treble, moving down the square.
And did He rise? Did He rise?
Hear it ye nations, hear it all ye dead!
They can’t miss it. The trebles—who sing a descant line composed of ecstasy, light, purity, jet contrails, and self-surrender—have by now burst the bonds of earth. They will all call in sick on Monday.
An old singer has come up from Alabama for our convention and tells us how southerners feel about Sacred Harp. “This is not pretty music,” he says. “The people who first sang it had hard lives.” Did the music make them feel better, I wonder, did it provide a metaphoric encounter with plague, starvation, mania, and passion? An encounter they could win, until the voice broke? Sometimes I leave the singings exhausted, sometimes energized for days, occasionally scared. Is it something about the breathing? Something Zen? Is it that music affects your synapses? I’m told that listening to Mozart makes you smarter. I’m told that when some communities of Catholic monks stopped chanting plainsong in the wake of Vatican II, they began to suffer depression and lethargy.
After dinner—a two-hour banquet of fried chicken and meat-balls and pie (tofu available on request)—we stop for the Memorial Lesson, remembering those who have died that year. Midwesterners are a new community, mostly under forty years old. We have only Winston’s grandmother to remember. The southerners, by contrast, have a long list and sad stories. Harper, who gave out the opening pitches, has passed on. Harper who never looked up and you better be ready.