Congregational Singing Traditions in South Carolina

Abstract

This article summarizes the role and function of congregational singing in South Carolina, identifies the complex of style elements heard, indicates which style elements predominate in which geographic areas, illustrates those regional styles with representative examples, and poses questions and strategies for further study. Congregational singing includes unaccompanied hymns and songs transmitted through oral tradition. My concern with lining-out hymns and spirituals in South Carolina has developed from three points of reference. The first is my experience of growing up in a Piedmont South Carolina rural community with the sound of the hymns and songs. The second is a brief yet intensive re-immersion in that culture when I served as project director and principal investigator for the 1981-1982 Pageland Religious Folksong Documentation Project. The work consisted of tape-recording services at thirty-three Piedmont-area churches and conducting seven informant interviews. The third point of reference has been serving once more as project director and principal investigator of Project Senior Culture, 1992-1994; this project surveyed congregational singing traditions through visits to fourteen churches in diverse regions of South Carolina. Pageland Religious Folksong Documentation Project (PRFDP) was sponsored by individual patrons and churches in Chesterfield County and was funded by the South Carolina Arts Commission. The churches whose services were documented in PRFDP were included because of

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