to a 'magical' discovery
An NPR interview with School of Music professor Willie Ruff on a worship service called line-singing led to the discovery of Native American Baptist congregations where the centuries-old Scottish tradition is still practiced.
In Oklahoma, Jane Bardis listened to Ruff as he gave NPR host Juan Williams a description of this unusual form of chanting the words of psalms, which he had found was common to remote churches of the Scottish Hebrides, the Deep South and Appalachia.
The interview took part in conjunction with a May conference on line-singing that Ruff had organized at Yale. As part of the event, there was a performance of line-singing descendants of slaves, rural parishioners from the Kentucky hills and a remote congregation from the Hebrides -- notably 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 from Eutaw, Alabama.
When Bardis heard excerpts of the eerily familiar a capella singing, she decided to contact Ruff.
"I am of Muskogee Creek descent and live in Tulsa, Oklahoma," Bardis wrote in her e-mail to Ruff. She informed him that in the churches she attended, Muskogee Creek congregants sang hymns in their native language.
"They sound very very much like the Black/Appalachian/Scottish versions," she wrote, referring to the recorded excerpts she had heard on the radio.
Bardis then went on to give the historical explanation for this unique syncretism, tracing the Creeks from their homelands in Alabama, Georgia and Florida to Oklahoma. The forced resettlement of Creeks and other Native American tribes, known as the Trail of Tears, was accompanied by mass conversions to Christianity. Traders who had lived and intermarried with Native Americans were, Bardis explained, predominately Scottish, thus accounting for the large number of Scottish surnames that are common among Creeks today. "I wish the Creeks could be represented at your conference ...," Bardis wrote in her e-mail. "They come out of the same mix of culture that existed prior to 1836," she added.
While it wasn't possible for congregants from the Little Cusseta Methodist and Friendship Baptist churches of Tulsa to perform at the Yale conference, it was not too late for Ruff to hear a live performance of lining in Creek, said Bardis, noting that an all-day "sing" was going to be held at Tulsa Creek community center a week later.
Ruff accepted her invitation, and a week later had the opportunity to hear and record Muskogee Creeks raising their voices to God in their native language in an age-old tradition that traveled by way of the Trail of Tears from the Scottish highlands to the Oklahoma plains.
"Magical" is the word Ruff used to describe the experience.
-- By Dorie Baker
T H I S
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Baccalaureate Address
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Campus Notes
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