Bob Sanders: All-day singings were socials

I find it hard to believe that a member of the Geneva Street Think Tank, by definition an intellectual, could be so ignorant about all-day singings.

Honest. This person asked if anybody at the table had ever heard of such a thing. He said he went to one one time, as if this were some rare form of entertainment. I’ve tried to explain this before, but for those deprived individuals who know nothing of the musical history of the state, let me try again.

My little home county is not the center of much, its main purpose being holding the world together. But it was, in the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, the very center of what is now called Southern Gospel.

Every country church, I mean every one — Fellowship, Morton’s Chapel, Oak Hill, Mt. Pisgah, Walnut Grove, Mt. Olive, Mt. Harmony, Pin Hook, Shake Rag, Shiloh, Pine Spring — had a certain Sunday, like carved in stone, for its all-day singing. The first Sunday in May, the second Sunday in July, the third Sunday in September, etc.

Kids went to little two-week summer singing schools at those churches to learn the rudiments of music and how to lead the congregation at those all-day singings. There was a cadre of good singer/leader/teachers who would be at the singings, ready to lead when called by the moderator. And there’d be a couple of piano players to accompany the singing, Ms. Adine Cross and Mr. Arlie Chandler, for example.

Companies that specialized in that kind of singing would put out a couple of new song books each year, new songs plus standard hymns. Vaughn and Stamps-Baxter were the main ones.

These singings were not only musical, but social events. In a Puritanical society where almost everything was sinful, people could dress up, sing their hearts out, and in the case of teenagers, do a little flirting.

Sometimes a name quartet would drop by to sing a couple of special songs after having appeared in concert the night before: the Speer Family, the Blackwoods, the Statesmen, the Florida Boys, the Stamps, etc.

Local singers would form quartets, too, to sing at singings and funerals.

There would be food. The church congregations prided themselves on putting out a good spread. Daddy always said those people at Mt. Harmony put out the best food of all.

Tables crammed with bowls and platters of homemade and home-raised vegetables and fried chicken and chicken pies, and custards and pies and cobblers and cakes. I never was one to eat much at these occasions, but it was tempting, you gotta “omit,” as cousin Artie used to say.

This, again, is not Sacred Harp singing. That’s a separate, very esoteric genre. What we’re talking about is just plain old Southern Gospel. I hadn’t realized there was so much ignorance about it, because my little home county was the very center of it.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.