The all-time roster of Tuney Award winners for the best in Billings music is located here. I'm not a huge music fan, but I found the list pretty interesting in not quite definable ways.
I also enjoyed the Tuney Award celebration itself, especially the soulful and rustic performance by the Smoothgrass Boys. Afterward, a few fancy-pants modernists (who shall go here unnamed) complained that the Boys weren't exactly in tune. Harumph.
I grew up in steeped in old-timey gospel music. Give me a few minutes, and I could sing you the first verse of at least 100 gospel songs, without getting a single measure in tune. That ain't the point.
My father, the itinerant preacher, hauled us kids to meetings in South Texas churches so rural that even locals hadn't heard of them: Ezzell, Nursery, Fordtran, Bazette, Prairie Point. The notion that singing should be in tune was not only foreign but mildly suspect, unAmerican and possibly even ungodly. My church permitted no instrumental music, and I remember serious theological disputes over whether the use of a pitch pipe to get the congregants in tune violated the will of the Lord. The pitch pipe backers won out, leading directly to the breakdown of the family, pornography and George W. Bush.
In my later youth, a friend and I shared a Sunday pulpit in Fordtran, Texas, halfway between Victoria and Halletsville. One Sunday after church, we decided to take a ride through the community of Fordtran itself, up the road from the church. We drove around aimlessly for a half-hour or so, then pulled up by a boy in bluejeans who was standing all alone on a road bounded by barbed-wire fences and flat, treeless pasture stretching as far as the eye could see.
"Where's Fordtran?" we asked.
"You're in it," he said.
But when Wesley Stevens led the singing on Sunday mornings, his powerful voice blasted through the open windows and echoed among the pecan trees. We grabbed our songbooks and just held on. And when the whole Stevens clan gathered on Sunday afternoons for a full-fledged singing, the sheer musicality of it was the talk of Victoria County. But was everybody always and exactly in tune, following some dictatorial priniciple laid down in hymnal law? What are you, some kind of communist?
My friend Tony Rohne put it best, years later and in a different context, during choir practice for the Methodist church.
"Those notes," he said, "those notes are just guidelines."
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5 comments:
When I was living in South Texas I'd slip a copy of "Industrial Fire World" magazine in my hymnal and read it during the hymns...pretending I was singing along with the congregation...
Interesting. A friend of mine edits Industrial Fire World. You could do a great testimonial: "I would risk the fires of Hell to read Industrial Fire World."
So, do you enjoy reading books by people who can't spell and don't understand English? Do you like watching hockey players play baseball? Do you find it adorable when a man giving a speech begins mumbling incoherently into the microphone? Sorry, I just don't get it.
As for those services when you were a kid: I think your tin ear is the problem again. Those people probably were in tune and you didn't know it. Even very small children, when they sing as a group, have a way of "correcting" one another, and the resulting sound is generally very close to in-tune harmony. And if kids are a bit off, it is adorable. But adults? No way.
Ed, I probably would pay to watch hockey players play baseball, at least once. As for the rest, my tin ear may indeed have something to do with it. I've often said that if people talked in musical notes instead of words, I would be illiterate. One advantage of having a bad ear is that it allows me to enjoy music I probably shouldn't, just as some people enjoy Tom Clancy novels.
Eloquence actually was a bit suspect in my church -- not so odd an idea, really. Socrates felt that fancy words hid the truth, too. But arguments against eloquence were undercut by two realities: One, we had to listen to preachers for a couple of hours a week, and if their eloquence wasn't pleasing to God, it certainly helped keep the congregation awake; and two, the King James Version of the Bible, an unspeakably eloquent book, was the cornerstone of our faith.
Music was a lesser, shabbier art, dangerously associated with moral looseness and even dancing (a forbidden art). We had to sing because the Bible said to, but, by God, we didn't have to be good at it.
So we had no choirs, no instruments, no rehearsals. Music came from the heart and went straight to God, and the less contact it had with the body on the way out, the better.
Lol! David, I made that comment about Industrial Fire World Magazine because I thought you Brother or another relative owned that magazine.
It is a very good magazine, BTW.
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