Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 22, 2005|Volume 33, Number 27|Two-Week Issue

Event explores unique singing tradition
shared by disparate groups

The link between a centuries-old form of psalm-singing in the Scottish Highlands and a similar tradition among descendants of African slaves in America and the West Indies will be explored in a conference at Yale on Thursday and Friday, May 5 and 6.

Singers from the Scottish Hebrides, Kentucky and Alabama will join scholars for two days of talks, demonstrations and "A Jubilee Conjoining," in which the groups perform together.

The "Yale Conference on Line Singing" was organized by Willie Ruff, professor (adjunct) at the School of Music, who uncovered the connection among far-flung and seemingly disparate congregations. Long intrigued by the claim of his old friend, the late jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, that black slaves in North and South Carolina spoke and worshipped in Gaelic, Ruff visited the Scottish Hebrides islands in 2003. There he found remote congregations worshipping in a manner similar to what he had heard growing up in Alabama.

Ruff contends that Scottish settlers in America passed on their religious musical traditions to their slaves, with remnants of this tradition still heard among isolated congregations on both sides of the Atlantic. Consequently, "presenting the line," the unaccompanied singing of psalms in Gaelic by Presbyterians of the Scottish Hebrides, is itself at the root of "lining out," a practice found among many black congregations in the American South.

The connection between the Scottish and American traditions has stirred enormous interest in Great Britain and the United States. In addition to a number of newspaper articles, three television documentaries have already been made for Scottish television (one version in Gaelic), filmed partly during a visit to Alabama by Scottish line singers last year.

Participants in the conference will explore the connections between the two forms of singing, covering such topics as "The Scottish Diaspora and an American Journey," "Colonial Scottish Preachers and Their Influence on African Slave Preaching" and "Religion and Life in the Gaelic World of Colonial North Carolina." The event will begin at 10 a.m. on Thursday with a welcoming talk and an overview of the origins of line singing by Ruff. Other participants include Kai Erikson, Robert Forbes, Glenda Gilmore and Frederick J. Streets from Yale; Katherine Smith of Dundee University in Scotland; and Douglas Kelly from the Reform Theological Seminary in North Carolina. Lectures will take place in Morse Recital Hall of Sprague Memorial Hall, 470 College St.

A highlight of the event will be a singing service, in which practitioners will join in "singing the lines" from the Psalms of David on Friday at 8 p.m. in Battell Chapel, corner of College and Elm streets. The performers are members of the Free Church Psalm Singers of the Isle of Lewis, Scotland; the Indian Bottom Old Regular Baptists of southeastern Kentucky; and the Sipsey River Primitive Baptist Association of Eutaw, Alabama.

Admission to the conference is free, and the public is invited. Admission is also free to the singing service, but tickets are required. For tickets, call (203) 432-4158.

The "Conference on Line Singing" is sponsored by the School of Music, the Duke Ellington Fellowship at Yale, the Chaplain's Office and the Office of New Haven and State Affairs. In conjunction with the event, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Wall and High streets, will place on exhibit the 1640 Bay Psalm Book, the book from which the earliest New England settlers sang for the next 200 years.

For a complete conference schedule, visit www.yale.edu/music/linesinging.

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