EVERY LIFE HAS ITS OWN UNIQUE PLAYLIST: THE LULLABIES OF INFANCY, THE SILLY DITTIES OF CHILDHOOD, THE GRADUATION MARCH, THE FIRST WEDDING DANCE, AND ON INTO OLD AGE.

For Christians, much of that soundtrack includes music heard in church, from “Jesus Loves Me” in the nursery to the stirring anthem from last Sunday’s worship service.

Studies have famously shown how beneficial music is for the brain. People with advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s disease who no longer recognize their families can remember the lyrics and melodies of songs they knew in their youth. Scientists at the University of Utah, using MRIs, found that connections among regions of the brains of Alzheimer’s patients grew stronger when they heard music they found meaningful, according to their published findings in the 2018 edition of The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Since 2006, neuroscientist Kiminobu Sugaya and violinist Ayako Yonetani, who happen to be husband and wife, have taught a course called Music and the Brain at the University of Central Florida. Music can reduce seizures, boost the immune system, help repair brain damage, and increase intelligence, they say.

Many claims about music and the mind are based on anecdotes, however. To acquire more scientific evidence of the therapeutic effects of music, the National Institutes of Health is partnering with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and National Endowment for the Arts in an initiative called Sound Health. Its mission is to explore the impact of music on health, science, and education and to get a clearer idea of how the brain processes music.

“MUSIC IS THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL MADE AUDIBLE.”

— Don Saliers

One participant in Sound Health is Mickey Hart, best known as percussionist for the Grateful Dead. Motivated by his own grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease, he works extensively with scientists to delve into the physiological impact of rhythm. Music “goes to the brain, the master clock,” he told the National Endowment for the Arts in 2018. “Now we’re able to read the master clock. We’re able to see what neurons are firing when certain rhythms are played.”

But music has emotional and spiritual impact far beyond what scientists can measure.

Music is “the language of the soul made audible,” wrote Don Saliers, professor emeritus of worship at Emory University. As it accompanies us in ubiquity, music “presents to us the tensions and releases, the intensities and rests, the dissonances and the harmonies of life.”

“Nearly all religions employ the human voice, instruments, and acoustical images in their indigenous worship and devotional practices,” Saliers wrote. Sound, pitch, and rhythm “are found in what we human beings do in our work, our festivals, our solemn occasions of grieving or rejoicing.”

Like the biblical psalms, our music expresses heartbreak, lamentation, praise, hope, faith, and, of course, joy.

“Joy is a concept that seems to me to be central to the church life,” said Stephen Ray Miller, a professor of music at Sewanee: The University of the South, in Tennessee. “It spans every culture and even goes beyond religion itself. Going back in the Christian tradition, I think the most joyful word we have is ‘hallelujah.’ You find it in David’s psalms, and St. Augustine praised the singing of hallelujah.”

Augustine spoke of “Allelujah” (the spelling varies) many times. One of his pithiest quotes is this: “A Christian should be an Allelujah from head to foot.”

The style of Christian music varies widely, from bombastic baroque organ pieces to emotional jazz numbers sung by swaying choirs to old favorite songs accompanied by off-key pianos in little clapboard churches.

In the Episcopal hymnal alone, the range of sources of songs is “phenomenal,” said Miller, an Episcopal layman. “In general, the style probably doesn’t matter as much as people’s participation with it,” he said, “and that varies from culture to culture and congregation to congregation. The music I find most rewarding is music where the people engaged in making it are filled with spirit or filled with obvious reverence.”

Here, we go “behind the music” with five very different types of worship through song: traditional “high church” music, bluegrass, gospel, Sacred Harp, and changing bells.

Each is a form of discipline and devotion for those who practice it. Each speaks to someone’s soul.

Change Bells – St. James Marietta

Eyes turn upward. Lips move in silent calculation. Hands grasp, pull, let go, grasp again. Each member of the team at St. James in Marietta is fiercely concentrating on something most kindergartners do with ease: counting to eight.

From the floor above, invisible to the team, eight bells send a rolling wave of notes across Marietta.

This is the very British art of change ringing—part team sport, part mathematical exercise, and part musical performance. Done perfectly, it results in a seamless sequence of sounds, but every tug of a rope has the potential to throw off the entire group.

“It’s a great activity for mindfulness,” said English teacher Symphony Romaine, 33. “You don’t think about anything else when you’re playing. You can’t.”

Romaine and her husband, Joe Anderson, 31, an architect, are rookies on the ropes. They’re working on applying the right amount of tension at the right time. A bell rings almost a second after the rope is pulled. Accounting for the lag requires serious mental pacing.

“We haven’t thought about a pattern,” said Romaine. “We’re just working on the fundamentals.”

“I’m just getting a feel for the bells,” Anderson said. “You can’t see the bell, so you have to go by feel. It takes a lot of practice.”

The couple became interested in bell ringing during a visit to Romaine’s ancestral homeland, England, where they discovered that Romaine’s great-grandfather, Henry Johnson, a decorated veteran of World War I, was a ringer. Back at home, they decided to give ringing a try as a way to connect with that line of Romaine’s family.

Like any sport, change ringing has its own culture, jargon, rules, and means of keeping score. Each of the eight bells at St. James has its own saint’s name and its own tone. Dunstan, a C note, is the runt at 247 pounds; Scott, an octave lower, is the heavyweight at 593 pounds. In between are Bridget, Mary, Catherine, Margaret, Michael, and James, the church’s namesake. The practice of naming bells, usually for religious figures, dates back to medieval times, well before change ringing, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Change ringing is done in patterns, called “methods”—and these, like the bells, also have names, such as Bob, Plain Hunt, or Grandsire, certified by the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, a British organization established in 1891. The team, or band, that first rings a method usually gives it a moniker based on the leader, characteristic of the pattern, or place, but fanciful names are not unknown. Consider Percy’s Tea Strainer.

The simplest ring is the scale itself—do, re, mi... That could be followed, for instance, with do, mi, re, then mi, do, re. With eight bells, multiplied to a factor of eight, the maximum number of patterns possible is 40,320. The St. James ringers have about a dozen patterns in their repertoire.

A “change” is the ringing of each bell once; a sequence of 5,000 or more changes constitutes a “peal.” To ring every possible exchange—a rare feat—is an “extent.” In keeping with the British sense of honor and propriety, no visual aids are allowed in change ringing. Writing cues on the back of one’s hand would be a grave offense.

As a highly collaborative art, change ringing often results in a closeness among ringers, said librarian Cathy Brown, 68, the current bell captain. That shared affinity among the team may also derive from the urgency of what this sound has meant historically. As Brown put it, “When bells are ringing, it tells the world something is happening at this church.”

Eighty-five-year-old Derek Wilsden, a St. James ringers mainstay, learned the bells at the tender age of 10, while growing up in Canterbury, England, during World War II. In 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered that the tower bells go silent, to be rung only as warning of Nazi invasion. As the Allies gained strength, the ban was eased, but by then many regular ringers were in uniform. Little Derek was recruited, and he has been ringing ever since.

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Later, grown-up Wilsden, an aeronautical engineer, landed a job with Lockheed Corporation in Cobb County. Until St. James installed its tower bells in 1996, he continued his musical pursuits by playing handbells (he had his own set of 20) and making presentations until he had enticed three other ringers who would play with him in one another’s houses.

As a Brit, Wilsden was following a national tradition. Change ringing developed in England during the 17th century and came to the colonies with the British settlers. Paul Revere was a ringer at the Old North Church in Boston.

Perhaps because of its association with the Redcoats, ringing lost some of its, ahem, a-peal during the American Revolutionary War.

The pastime continues to be popular in England, where thousands of new ringers signed up to help ring in the millennium. Bells rang along the route of the torch approaching the London Olympics in 2012, and a new set of eight bells in a floating belfry on the Thames marked Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee—60 years of reign—the same year.

Although ringing has rebounded somewhat in the former colonies, even today the United States claims only about 45 active towers, compared to about 5,000 in England, according to the North American Guild of Change Ringers.

Interest on both sides of the Atlantic may have been helped along by Dorothy Sayers’ popular 1934 bells-themed murder mystery, The Nine Tailors. (Spoiler alert: The bells did it.)

The Sayers novel piqued the curiosity of Jay Williams, now 77, who joined the St. James team ten years ago as a novice. He has been blind since birth and rings through rhythm and sound.

“IT’S A GREAT ACTIVITY FOR MINDFULNESS. YOU DON’T THINK ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE WHEN YOU’RE PLAYING. YOU CAN’T.”

— Symphony Romaine

Williams had wanted to learn change ringing since reading The Nine Tailors in his early 20s. Who knew that a move to Marietta from Washington state would afford him the chance, at last, to follow that pursuit?

Now, he’s hooked for life. “Until God stops me, there’s no way I’m quitting,” he said.

St. James’ bells are rung for regular worship services and for weddings and funerals. Traditionally, bells announced deaths to the community through different numbers of tolls for men, women, and children, but with more modern ways of communicating neighborhood news, that particular practice has been laid to rest.

Ringing at St. James is also a multigenerational undertaking—one that gets passed down through generations in the parish.

“I needed a couple of boxes to stand on when I started,” said 17-year-old Aiden Fortenberry, a seven-year veteran of the group, who considers ringing “a way to show my faith.”

His younger brother Jared, 14, followed him into the tower.

“We come together as a group, and we can spread the sound,” said Jared. “It’s what God would want.”

Sacred Harp – Holy Trinity Decatur

To the uninitiated, Sacred Harp singing might seem a bit unworldly—voices with no instrumental accompaniment verbalizing nonsensical-sounding syllables, often in a minor key. Emphatic hand gestures—repetitive slow chops—slice through the air to keep the rhythm.

The syllables will give way to lyrics that often tell of sorrow, death, and the hope of glory land. This kind of message was fitting for the American colonists, who, as they were carving out a life in this new and often harsh land, found enticement in songs that promised a brighter realm beyond their dreary labor.

Sacred Harp is also known as shape-note singing because each of the notes in the tune has its own shape: fa is a triangle, sol an oval, la a rectangle, and mi a diamond. That’s it. Four notes easily distinguishable on a page to make sight reading easier for people with no musical training. Before vocalizing the words to a song, participants “sing the notes,” or the fa-sol-las, to become familiar with the tune.

Despite some somber messages, Sacred Harp singing brings an abundance of delight to practitioners, including a small, diverse group who gather regularly at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Decatur.

For Holy Trinity’s associate rector, the Rev. Jenna Faith Strizak, Sacred Harp was an acquired taste. She attended her first singing, a big event with hundreds of singers, in 2002 while studying at Hampshire College in western Massachusetts, and found it at first overwhelming. “I was overcome by the sound of it. I didn’t really like it,” she said.

A few months later, however, she went to a small gathering held to introduce people to the music genre, and, this time, she was captivated. “I talk about it being the first place I can point to explicitly knowing the movement of the Spirit,” she said.

The “rawness” of the sound combined with the words’ often “clear-eyed” look at death, she said, felt radically spiritual.

“I think we’re a culture that wants to deny death,” she said. “We think if we exercise and eat the right superfoods, we can stave it off. I love that Sacred Harp doesn’t let us maintain that illusion. It tells us that each and every one of us is going to die, but death is not the end. It’s death in the hope of resurrection in Christ.”

After moving to Atlanta for seminary at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, the Rev. Strizak connected with the group that now meets at Holy Trinity.

“It’s a spiritual practice that’s outside my parish work,” she said. “There’s something powerful about singing with people, full-throated and looking them in the face.”

The eye contact comes from the typical configuration for Sacred Harp singing—chairs or pews in lines forming a square, all facing a “hollow” space in the middle. Singers of each of the four parts, treble, alto, tenor (or lead), and bass, sit together on one side of the square.

Jesse P. Karlsberg was sitting with the basses at a singing in New York when he locked eyes across the square with Lauren Bock, who was singing treble. They formed their own romantic duo, married, moved to Atlanta, and found the Holy Trinity singers.

Karlsberg doesn’t just sing; he’s an expert on Sacred Harp and edited the Centennial Edition of the Original Sacred Harp songbook.

Sacred Harp singers from various backgrounds meet monthly at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Decatur to share the tradition of shape-note music.

His 2015 doctoral dissertation at Emory University’s Institute for the Liberal Arts focuses on what he refers to as the “whitewashing” of Sacred Harp’s roots. “Although The Sacred Harp tune book features music with racially diverse origins whose composers span a vast geography, scholars in the twentieth century came to associate the tune book with Anglo-Celtic whiteness,” he wrote. But in the raised consciousness of the post-civil rights movement, some singers are beginning to acknowledge and explore the deep roots of the persistent whiteness of the tradition’s revival.

Karlsberg, who is Jewish, acknowledges that at first it did feel strange to be so focused on overtly Christian music. “At times, early on, when I’d be singing a song, it would seem kind of jarring to me,” he said. “But when my grandfather died, I realized I was processing grief through the words of the songs. They became more meaningful to me.”

Some practitioners of Sacred Harp say they appreciate that there are no concerts, no rehearsals, and no professional directors. Singers take turns stepping into the center to choose and lead the songs. Volume is encouraged.

“This music is for singers, not listeners,” wrote Lisa Grayson in A Beginner’s Guide to Shape-Note Singing. “We don’t perform; we sing as an end in itself. And loud singing provides more catharsis, more instant gratification, more visceral pleasure than controlled singing.”

Four-note singing dates back centuries, as evidenced by the singing of “fa, sol, la, mi” by Edmund, a villain in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Grayson points out. The shapes came about a couple of hundred years later when singing-school teachers William Little and William Smith of Philadelphia introduced them as a sight reading aid.

The most widely used Sacred Harp songbook today is published in Carrollton, Georgia, where its publisher, Sacred Harp Publishing Company, also hosts a museum that contains photographs and recordings of singings, letters to and from singers, music manuscripts, and original copies of historic shape-note books.

“THERE’S SOMETHING POWERFUL ABOUT SINGING WITH PEOPLE, FULLTHROATED AND LOOKING THEM IN THE FACE.”

— Rev. Jenna Faith Strizak

The Holy Trinity singers’ thick books are well worn. Some were packed in their owners’ bags for Camp Fasola, a weeklong immersion experience sponsored by the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association and held at Camp McDowell, an Episcopal center in Alabama. These musical tomes are frequently hauled to all-day singings, which can draw from a few dozen to several hundred singers to sing in the morning, break for a potluck lunch, and then dive back into singing until mid-to-late afternoon.

Lisa Bennett, 57, a faithful singer at Holy Trinity, has traveled to all kinds of events, including a singing in Japan. She was hesitant at first to attend rural gatherings. She’s a vegan with short, bright blue hair that had multicolored streaks seven years ago when she and her husband, David Smead, began singing Sacred Harp.

“I wasn’t sure how people were going to accept me,” she said. “But the community is so welcoming. We were just embraced. They didn’t care that I had blue hair. They didn’t care that I was vegan. They just cared that I loved the music.”

She describes herself as “sort of an agnostic person.”

“A lot of what I sing I don’t literally believe,” she said, but she appreciates that the theme of many songs—“we’re going to die, but our afterlife is going to be way better than this”— has sustained generations.

Sacred Harp has a tradition of the “memorial lesson.” Singers hear the names of those who are ill or shut-in, those who’ve died, and those who are mourning and sing a song in honor or remembrance.

Bennett leaned not on the message but on the music itself and her fellow singers through the loss of both parents and a nephew’s suicide. After each death, she said she drew strength from the knowledge that the tradition would be followed.

“I knew that people who cared about me were singing for my parents,” she said. “They were singing for me. They were singing songs that I loved for me.”

That, she said, was enough. “Sacred Harp is my church.”

GOSPEL — Gospel Music Workshop, Atlanta

Even without their heavy purple robes, some of the 100 or so members of the Atlanta chapter of the Gospel Music Workshop of America Inc. are working up a sweat. They’ve practiced hard, standing and swaying for over an hour, sometimes repeating a single phrase over and over, until it’s just perfect.

“Make sure you have enough air in your diaphragm that you can get this,” coaches choir coordinator Reginal Jefferson. He turns from side to side, spreads his arms wide, and makes strong pulling motions as if to manually extract the sublime from these soaring voices.

“Oh/give/thanks/un/to/the/Lord,” the choir sings, chopping each syllable as cleanly as a cleaver.

The choir is preparing for their annual convention—the “workshop” of the Gospel Music Workshop—in Washington, D.C. The national organization now has chapters in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, all of which are represented at this one giant event every year.

The workshop was founded in Detroit in the late 1960s by the legendary Rev. Dr. James Edward Cleveland, pastor, pianist, singer, composer, arranger, and producer, who won three Grammy awards and recorded with the likes of Billy Preston, Aretha Franklin, Elton John, and Ray Charles among others; was the first gospel musician to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; and was credited with writing and arranging more than 400 gospel songs. Upon his death in 1991, the New York Times obituary declared that Rev. Cleveland was “regarded as the world’s foremost gospel musician.” He considered the workshop to be his greatest accomplishment, according to the Times.

The Atlanta Chapter of the Gospel Music Workshop of America (GMWA), shown mid-rehearsal, often performs songs composed by fellow choir members.

Brandon Gray, 14, is a songwriter and soloist who has been attending GMWA with relatives since he was a toddler. He says he has tapped into “a gift God has given me.”

Rev. Cleveland was “regarded as the world’s foremost gospel musician.” He considered the workshop to be his greatest accomplishment, according to the Times.

This annual gathering is special for members of the Atlanta chapter, who plan to present songs from their soon-to-be-released first album at the event. Although they have backed up other artists, all the music on the upcoming CD was written and performed entirely by choir members.

The Atlanta chapter, like others, is made up of people from various churches and denominations with one thing in common: an enthusiasm for the genre of music that grew out of African American spirituals and went on to influence—and be influenced by—rhythm and blues, soul, rock ’n’ roll, and even country.

The music is hard to define, but people know it when they hear it. The Library of Congress puts it this way: “African American gospel music is a form of euphoric, rhythmic, spiritual music rooted in the solo and responsive church singing of the African American South.”

Emory University Professor James Abbington, author of several books on music in the African American church, describes it as having “emotional and jubilant improvisation” and a “full-throated sound.”

“It has more of a beat to it” than traditional hymnody, says Atlanta chapter representative Evelyn White, 83, who grew up listening to the great Mahalia Jackson and has been singing herself since childhood. She approves of improvisation. “If I forget the words, I just ad lib,” she says. “I sing whatever the Lord gives me.”

Many people trace the birth of modern gospel to the 1930s and Thomas Dorsey, the Georgia-born son of a Baptist minister who was a successful jazz and blues musician when he turned to sacred music. His best-known compositions are “Peace in the Valley” and “Precious Lord,” the latter of which was written after the death of his young wife and infant son.

Dorsey said he “wasn’t trying to change” church music, “but I was just struck with something...that God gave me.”

Like many innovations, gospel had its critics, mostly among black scholars, church musicians, and preachers who favored more sedate, traditional forms. One was the late Dr. Joseph R. Washington, a widely published professor of religious studies and director of the Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. As the genre was coming into its heyday in the 1960s, he complained in his book Black Religion that gospel music “turned the freedom theme in Negro spirituals into licentiousness” and would “lead the masses down the road of religious frenzy and escapism.”

“IF I FORGET THE WORDS, I JUST AD LIB. I SING WHATEVER THE LORD GIVES ME.”

— Evelyn White

The emergence of gospel music had “important sociological consequences,” according to the seminal work The Church in the African American Experience, by C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya. With it came the establishment of specialized ensembles and soloists.

Whereas congregational hymns “united worshipers through the collective activity of singing and declaring theological and doctrinal commonalities, the new style required the congregation to assume the role of audience,” Lincoln and Mamiya wrote. “In essence, worshipers became bystanders who witnessed the preaching and personal testimonies of singers.”

The electric organ, developed as a smaller, less expensive alternative to the pipe organ, “laid the soundtrack” for gospel music, according to National Public Radio.

But, they wrote, gospel music is now widely accepted and has taken its place among other forms.

If Thomas Dorsey helped birth gospel by bringing his blues and jazz background to church music, gospel has in turn spawned some of secular music’s most famous artists. Before assuming the throne as the “Queen of Soul,” little Aretha Franklin belted out songs in her father’s church in Detroit. Before he became “the King,” young Elvis Presley grew up on the music of African American congregations in Tupelo, Mississippi. And before he was christened the “Godfather of Funk,” James Brown sang about salvation with the Starlighters.

A worldwide audience of more than 18 million was exposed to gospel-style music in 2018 when the Kingdom Choir sang “Stand by Me” at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. That particular song represents the cross-pollination of gospel and secular music.

Sam Cooke, whose long list of hits includes the civil rights anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come,” co-wrote a religious song called “Stand by Me,” addressed to God the Father and based on Psalm 46. Inspired by Cooke’s work, Ben E. King and collaborators wrote the most widely known and secular version of “Stand by Me,” the iteration sung at the royal wedding. The lyrics “when the mountains crumble to the sea” retain imagery from the psalm.

Some members have literally grown up in the workshop.

Brandon Gray, 14, played with cars and trucks under the pews as a tot while his mother sang. Now, he’s both a soloist and a composer and performed solos before two breakout sessions of the 2019 annual gathering in Washington, D.C. “Music is my place where I get closer to God,” he said.

And Otis Byrd Jr., 23, came with Miss Evelyn, his aunt, as a little boy. His composition “Proclaim” was one of the biggest hits of the Atlanta chapter’s performance before the assembly of thousands of gospel singers at the national convention.

The music “is a way of life for us,” said associate chapter representative Ralph Davis. “It’s our connection with our experience of God.”

“We walk it, we talk it, we breathe it,” said Kenneth Love, 65, chapter worship director. “Gospel music proclaims and expresses the gospel of Jesus Christ. It will be the only Word some people will hear.”

Bluegrass – St. Anthony’s, Winder

The sound floating through the air from the fellowship hall of St. Anthony’s Episcopal Church in Winder, Georgia, pulls you in from the parking lot like a tractor beam: the twang of banjos, the lyrical whine of old-fashioned fiddles—not a “violin” in the bunch—the ringing melody of mandolins, the strum of autoharps, the deep plunk of big basses shoring up the tune. And 20 or so voices raised in joyful song.

“Come to this fountain so rich and sweet, cast thy poor soul at the Savior’s feet; plunge in today, and be made complete; glory to his name!”

The crowd at this bluegrass “picking” varies month to month, attracting everyone from complete novices to members of the Atlanta Country Music Hall of Fame. A doctor, a nurse, a trucker, and a mechanic. Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, none of the above, and nothing at all. Democrats and Republicans, perhaps, although the subject never comes up. In this circle of black folding chairs, all are equal and all are welcome.

“Nobody’s ever talked about politics or religion when I’m there,” said Ed Kellough, a professor of public policy at the University of Georgia who plays guitar and mandolin. “We just play the music and have a good time.”

“Everybody parks their politics and profession at the door,” said Lizabeth Weber, who with her husband, Scott, organizes the gathering. “Here, we’re all on the same level.”

Lizabeth plays bass, Scott plays mandolin, and their only child, Zack, 25, plays banjo but can hold his own on anything with strings. Together, they are the Weber Family, specializing in bluegrass gospel. When they’re not picking, they run an electrical contracting business.

The trio started out about a dozen years ago after Zack developed a fascination with banjos that didn’t seem to fade the way childhood obsessions are prone to do. “We decided to get instruments and learn to play too,” said Lizabeth.

Asked why he plays bluegrass instead of another genre, Zack says simply, “It makes me smile.”

“O come Angel Band, come and around me stand, O bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home…”

Bluegrass enthusiasts began gathering at St. Anthony’s for the monthly pickings in 2007. Church members Tony Ianuario, a luthier who specialized in the craftsmanship of mandolins, and his wife, Ann, arranged use of the space. Both were killed in a car accident in 2009, but their memory lives on in an annual bluegrass festival held in their name every September.

St. Anthony’s member Jerry Ash attends when he can, playing guitar or fiddle. He said he quite enjoys the contrast between Sunday mornings in the sanctuary (with the traditional Episcopal hymns) and the decidedly more casual and raucous Sunday afternoons with his bluegrass buddies in the fellowship hall.

Bluegrass is a potent elixir brewed up from cultural ingredients that have shaped the rural South over the last several centuries. Early white settlers brought English ballads and Celtic fiddle tunes to the new land. Enslaved Africans wanting to retain the cultures from which they were kidnapped and sold sang spirituals and early blues with their own distinctive rhythms and tones and built “banjars,” the forerunners of the banjo, out of gourds and animal skins. Inevitably, the musical styles melded over time.

“Fiddle and banjo both seeped into the development of black spiritual music,” wrote Stephanie P. Ledgin in Homegrown Music: Discovering Bluegrass. “Later, the dual sounds of fiddle and banjo would become entrenched in the white traditional playing known as ‘old-time’ music, a rough-edged, raw sound reflective of the simple country life.”

Much of the subject matter of bluegrass, like that of many genres, is love lost and found, along with “a lot of cheatin’ and drinkin’ and dyin’,” said Bill Long, an inductee into the Atlanta Country Music Hall of Fame who plays a range of instruments, from guitar to washboard. But when the message is about sin and salvation, the music becomes bluegrass gospel.

The spirited sounds of bluegrass appeal to people who rarely darken a church door and to those who are there the minute the doors open. When one of the non-church-going St. Anthony’s pickers died a few years ago, his family and friends held a bluegrass and barbecue funeral with nary a Bible involved. Pickers turned out in force.

Mary Brown, a.k.a. “Lady Outlaw,” and her fiancé, Mark Etheredge, are not churchgoers, but she shows respect for St. Anthony’s by leaving her pistol in the car to attend the picking. “It doesn’t seem right to bring it into a church,” she said.

Brown is an Internal Revenue Service employee whose stage name came from a speeding ticket on I-85 that netted her eight hours of community service as punishment. Etheredge is a software developer who plays in Coldwater Bluegrass Band.

Despite their lack of religious affiliation, they enjoy singing bluegrass gospel and often perform at churches. As they prepare to leave for a gig at a Tucker pizza parlor, the group around the circle starts to sing.

“Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power? Are you washed in the blood of the lamb? Are you fully trusting in his grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?”

Many of the musicians acquired their taste for bluegrass in small Southern country churches and still hold fast to their faith.

Retired elementary school art teacher Zane Brock, who plays banjo and piano, was a Baptist preacher’s kid who was “dragged to church three times a week” as a child, once on Wednesday and twice on Sunday. His daddy, the preacher, played old hymns on a guitar. Despite his resistance to hard church pews as a child, Brock still goes to church and loves playing hymns bluegrass style.

Organ Music – Cathedral of St. Philip, Atlanta

Five minutes before church services begin at the Cathedral of St. Philip, Patrick Scott sits down at the console of the Aeolian-Skinner organ like a jet pilot entering the cockpit and prepares to achieve the effect of an entire orchestra single-handedly—or rather, with two hands and two feet.

He has all the symphonic instruments he’ll need, right at his fingertips in four families of organ stops. With 32 pedals, 244 keys, and 5,140 pipes that range from pencil-sized to 32 feet long and as big around as the seat of a stacking chair, the varieties of sounds seem infinite.

For this performance of “Nimrod,” a section of Edward Elgar’s late 19th-century masterwork Enigma Variations, he calls up the strings, which start softly but with an underlying tension that builds through repetitive dissonance and resolution. Pulling and pushing stops, he mimics the wind instruments, adding depth and volume, then conjures up the timpani, rolling like thunder. When the energy seems at its peak, the sound sinks to a whisper of violins. A final note travels down the long nave until it dies out as quietly as the last beam of sunlight leaves a summer day.

“Nimrod” is the prelude at this Cathedral service, signaling the beginning of a worship experience filled with different varieties of music, from chants to hymns to anthems. Each piece is the product of careful thought and planning, selected to complement and enhance the other components of worship.

After a welcome from Dean Samuel G. Candler, Scott plays again as four dozen robed choir members process in, two by two, with the clergy, acolytes, and other participants in worship.

Preparation for Sunday worship began on the Thursday night prior. At precisely 7 p.m., choral director Dale Adelmann stepped onto a small platform in the rehearsal room and intoned, “The Lord be with you.”

Chatter among choir members halted immediately, and four dozen voices—bass, baritone, tenor, alto, and soprano—replied in unison, “And also with you.”

Every choir member has passed muster with Adelmann. He has vetted them all on their ability to read music, stay on pitch, and follow directions.

Rehearsal starts with the chant that will be used for Sunday’s psalm. Voices fill the room, rich and resonant, first singing only numerals to memorize the tune as Adelmann guides them, his arms floating as gracefully as a ballet dancer. He will let them read the notes for the hymns and anthems, but he insists they know the tune to the psalm so that they can devote their full attention to bringing out the underlying meaning of the words as they sing on Sunday. Otherwise, they’ll be too distracted “thinking about what note comes next,” he said.

“Remember, we want to bring up what God is doing, what God has done, and the attributes of God,” he instructed the choir.

Adelmann holds a doctorate from the University of Cambridge and has served as canon for music at the cathedral for the last 10 years. Although he started out as an organist in a master’s degree program at Yale, “somewhere along the way, I realized I like the choral aspect even more,” he said. “I like the marriage of the text and the music, and the way music enables the text and brings it to life.”

An organist controls the sounds of an entire orchestra with stops.

An additional keyboard is played by the organist’s feet.

He grew up immersed in ministry. Both of his grandfathers and his father were ministers in the Evangelical United Brethren, a denomination that merged with the Methodist Church in 1968 to form the United Methodist Church.

His first exposure to Anglican choral music occurred the summer after he graduated from high school, when he attended some concerts at the national convention of the American Guild of Organists. “I was completely blown away,” he said. When he moved to England as a student, that love grew deeper.

The music led him to the Episcopal Church. The baptismal covenant, he said, “really resonates with me.” Especially the promises to “seek and see Christ in all persons” and to “respect the dignity of every human being.”

At the cathedral, Adelmann likes to feature different types of music, from plainsong chant dating back more than a millennium to modern-day living composers.

“I think the Holy Spirit will never run out of ways to speak to us through music,” he said.

In the rehearsal room on Thursday night, the choir turned to the upcoming Sunday’s offertory anthem, singing vigorously, “Thou, O God, art praised in Sion,” the opening lines to the Malcolm Boyle composition performed at Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee celebration. Scott accompanied them on a piano.

A BASS SOUND LIKE THE RUMBLE OF A SMALL EARTHQUAKE SHAKES SOME OF THE OBJECTS SITTING NEARBY.

Adelmann stopped the music one line in to make a polite correction. “On ‘praised,’ ” he said, “can we make that a little less note-y and a little more dynamic?” Then, he added: “Careful, please, on the top of page 6, ‘choosest’ and ‘receivest.’ There are wonderful acoustics upstairs, but they swallow up some consonants, such as the ‘st.’”

The choir went on, smoothing out “praised.” They refined the ends of “choosest” and “receivest” until the “st” sounds were as crisp as a pile of autumn leaves. After an hour and a half of practice with the piano, they drifted upstairs to rehearse with Scott at the organ.

Growing up Southern Baptist in Alabama and Mississippi, Scott acquired an affection for old hymns. He enjoys improvising on hymn tunes, but he also loves the music of Herbert Howells and Edward Elgar. “And what organist doesn’t love Bach?”

Like Adelmann, Scott fell in love with the Episcopal Church through the music and now is an avowed Episcopalian. As for the organ, he waxes as effusively about the potential of the largest pipes as a sports car enthusiast boasts about the horsepower of the latest line of Aston Martins. To demonstrate, he sets the stops and presses a key. A bass sound, like the rumble of a small earthquake, shakes some of the objects sitting nearby. “It’s all about the power,” he says with a smile.