It’s in the opening battle scene of Cold Mountain and it does go perfectly.

It's in a civil war movie

@@KyleEricksonPoetry1617 that is where I first heard this song. Battle of the Crater. Absolutely gut-wrenching and powerful scene.

Agreed. Her voice has a wild, untrained quality which is just perfect for this kind of rustic heartfelt folk music.

@@TomorrowWeLive Have you heard Cassie Franklin? kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ms9zqsSXnti8gKs.html

I hear her, too. It's incredible....

higher register harmony

I know what you mean... I really miss it in the original tune. Props to the lady.

Ulster-Scots

I WOULD TRULY LOVE TO ATTEND A CHURCH AS SUCH

Primitive Baptist was started by melungeons_ 300 groups of people's in Appalachian come from.mixed races some pre date colonies. They are mixed 5 race or 3 races and can look like any European or Scot due to mixing with townsfolk though they went to the mountains when German settlers refused to live near them in MD and other immigrants. Due to mixing race and cultures they were all skin shades __ they didn't put race in home birth bibles, it was irrelevant. From mixes of Portuguese slaves one could already be African or Syrian or such by 1600. Then they wed native tribes and French and so on in forts. Then they wed shawnee or German and Swiss and whatever. From the beginning they mixed without care but by the time bigger settlements left the mountains and forts for Tenn and VA starting towns and post civil war_ the northern lawyers wanted one drop laws_ one drop black made one unable to vote. And they forced birth certificates on them, assigning them race tho most had green and blue eyes _ many looked European. It became a political pawn game to make one white or black (and ignoring the other ethnic ancestors) In todays world ignoring all 300.groups helps the woke pretend there was only white and black and no mixed. But we have Jewish_ Portuguese _ Blackfoot _ shawnee_ sub sah African and German Irish English_ every nation. It behooved the political post civil war to revise the northern upper crust disdain of anything but English blood__ old Boston and NY families went a long way to creating a narrative that the south was all slavers and white ethnic because of eugenics up till Hitler. So the southern mixed _ mostly poor, got the political shaft and today the acidemia and social culture uses the term colonizee for white__ whereas skin tone and eyes doesn't relay ethnic and races _ nor would dna by placename tell one what mixed they were in that country _ Primitive Baptist and the mountain way of burial traditions are mostly kept by elders. It's also streamlined in history books that mountain folk are Irish or scott__ however that largely came from the Hatfield and McCoy stories. Pre those stories, you had the virgina fort dwellers. Many mixed settling towns in KY WV Tenn and South VA. The DC suburban now were the slave plantations and WV succeeded from the union for that reason, they had wealth and influence _ mountain potato farmers had no representation in Congress _ they were the poor mixed who became miners and neigh slaves for the northern industrialist. So song like food and traditions are from immigrants mixed the settled down for trappers and explorers who were _ as you trace family trees already assimilate people's from Europe and swiss, Celts and those conquered migrating from earlier wars with Romans, Frank's whatever. Contrary to some comments of those not knowing migration of peoples from Mesopotamia and Arab slave trade__ people are all mixed. And the south and mountains particularly hold mixed. Due to the earliest transport ships, indentured and Portuguese slave ships _ though Canadian French often mated with American natives and settled in those territories. Highland clearances and Irish potato famine brought an influx of those people and they were keen to be the pioneers and were the fresh labor class__ also treated horribly in the north cities _ in slums and factories and many took to the landscape _ and people's of the mountains. A resurgence of class caste system followed the civil war under eugenics up to the 1940s. By then the elites and old money owned the forms of media and academics__ the history so to speak. As is today's narrative. But... People have their bibles and journals _ancestry noted and know the way of it. One place that mixed races and cultures found joy and strength was their songs, and their worship. So it's a joy to see the mix of voices singing in all the countries that made a unique America__ the heart and soul of it. We mutts from the first people's enjoy the unity and traditions from salt of the earth.

She makes this clip, ever since the first I heard it. There's something so incredibly human about how there is chorus in the chaos of our voices - even despite or perhaps especially because of the outliers that step in and out of the tune on their own time.

@@DeusExMalto There's something about the song that makes me want to play it over and over and over

That lady's descant is the reason I keep coming back to this video!

@@PDXVoiceTeacher for sure 👌

Listen to Cassie Franklin in this video: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ms9zqsSXnti8gKs.html

Actually it's origins are in Italy...………..

@@simonwilde9683 Actually 18C England.

Will Rice Try listening to Gaelic Psalm Singing from the Hebrides in Scotland where my ancestors came from in 1787 to Canada. A very unique form of music going back to when most people were illiterate and possibly to Early Christian times. It also has some similarities to some Appalachian singing too. I also have ancestors going back to the beginning of New England who probably would have sung this very song. I too feel something ancestral and primeval about this music. Soul touching. Absolutely Amazing.

@@Wotsitorlabart Actually this song was composed by Ananias Davisson from Kentucky in 1816.

@@ericweaver2088, you mean the tune? The words themselves were written by Charles Wesley.

Same! 💕

the reason this is my favourite rendition of this song is because of that lady's voice singing above the rest.

@@ianbirchfield5124 Check out Cassie Franklin in this video: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ms9zqsSXnti8gKs.html

@@dbadagna i gave it a listen. i see what you mean, that lady sings almost the exact same way as the lady in this video. i think i prefer this version, though. i prefer these song to be sung by a whole choir, not 1 or 2 people.

@@ianbirchfield5124 There are also some strange recordings of this repertoire done with piano accompaniment, from old 78-rpm records, which I think have been released by Dust-to-Digital. Cassie Franklin grew up "in the tradition" (in Alabama) rather than being a revivalist, and can probably sing many if not most of the Sacred Harp songs from memory. www.jsu.edu/news/jan_june2004/04122004a.html

That's Aine Ui Cheallaigh singing those ornaments. Check out her Irish Sean Nos Singing.

From a commenter here that was there her name is Magdalena Gryszko and is the young woman in a pink hoodie here in an earlier recording kzfaq.info/get/bejne/b8xlo86r39PMfn0.html

Love your Virginia Woolf username. And likening the plaintive singing of the one singer to one of my favorite songs from Sinead O'Connor, favorite because of the passages you select "For myself I ask ..."

Lucky!

MY HATS OFF TO YA, TRULY GOD IS AMONG YOU.

Me too.

For me, it was 'Cold Mountain'. I came across the Battle of the Crater scene earlier this year (2020) and still think it's amazing. I haven't watched any of the rest of the movie, though.

@@fishofgold6553 I hope you've remedied that! One of the best film of all time. Killer cast, amazing acting, and great representation of the book.

@@fishofgold6553 same film introduced me to this lovely stuff It is a brutal opening. Worth following through with the rest of the film. The entire sound track is insane. *I wish my baby was born" is my favourite I think. Another memorable/grim scene.

Glad I found it too.

Faith in Christ =/= religion. We were never instructed to form religions and practice man-made rituals. If something resonates with u then please deeply consider why. It’s spiritual, and your spirit is crying out for truth. It’s unimaginable just how much God will change u if u let him in. I suggest u read the KJV Bible and I hope it resonates with u. God bless you, Brother :)

Same here, I’m an atheist but as a music lover I enjoy songs of worship and devotion as well, it speaks to something beautiful in the human spirit. But most of all hearing people singing together is always moving, it’s far more ancient than any religion.

It opened my eyes to this music and I think I'll just listen with constant tears

My father was a minister in Missouri (close to the Ozarks) and in Oklahoma. I still love the Sacred Harp and Acapella traditions--there are some very powerful singers who come out of that tradition. (Not me--I just have serviceable baritone.)

OAKLEY!!!!

I don't need to see some movie to appreciate this song. Most people wouldn't have even heard it if not for the movie.

TEEEEACH

+PABWECG, yes, you are right. It always sounds differently, too, when you're singing with the group. It's an indescribable experience.

I want to go and get healed! Does anyone have a spare ticket to Ireland?

I wish! :D

I couldn't agree more! And it's worth noting this isn't basically "church music" in the sense that it's used in regular worship services--although it can be--but rather recreational music. It had its roots in early American "singing schools" where people learned to read from "shapes" and solmization.

It reminds me of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland I used to attend occasionally with my gran here in New Zealand. They practice Exclusive Psalmody, without accompaniment. Quite a different style of singing, but the effect was striking similar. Even though there were a declining congregation, you could almost feel the air vibrating when they sang. There's something about acapella singing that forces you to give it all you've got, since you haven't got the artificial sound of instrument to cover you, so to speak.

I've also heard that in other recordings. I finally got a look at the music, and there is a divisi line in the altos, and they're higher than the sopranos, and that accounts for some of what's going on. I'd like to find out more about the 'performance practice' of this. After all, the music is not on the page, it's in the soul.

Frank Zimmerman She's great, that type of singer usually takes away from the recording quality but she's like the seasoning on a refined dish!

Frank Zimmerman She's great, that type of singer usually takes away from the recording quality but she's like the seasoning on a refined dish!

It’s the lady on the back left of the altos behind the direction the leaders are facing. I’ve sang with her often, she has a powerful voice and a beautiful connection with the spirit and sound of Sacred Harp.

Her voice is so angelic and really lends a haunting beauty to the song.

Greetings back to Greece ✋🏻

In a minor scale it's la-mi-fa-sol-la-fa-sol-la. So the people singing the melody line of "And am... I born... to die..." are singing, in the warmup, "la fa..., mi la sol..., so la..." and so on. Hope this helps.

+Belligerent Stag If you google 'sacred harp' and the name of the song or the song number in the title, you might be able to find an image of the page they're singing from. Quite a few pages from that hymn book are online somewhere or other. Though the fa sol etc wouldn't be written as such, rather the notes are each given a shape which means either fa, sol, la, or mi... Look up 'shape note singing' if my explanation doesn't make sense :)

That is exactly how one sings Sacred Harp songs. The original warmup is to get everyone on line, so to speak. It is very similar to "lining" hymns in the black churches--this method goes back to the 18th century England and Methodism when most parishioners were illiterate, I would add. I grew up singing this in rural Missouri, although only in the rural churches--and I mean rural, at least in the view of most of you here.

Has anyone here heard the version with the extra part at the end? The now deleted youtube video "Native American(Sacred Harp Singers Idumea" sounds like the version used in the movie "Cold Mountain" but had an extra part at the end (something like "For I must go and see..." or "So I can see...") but I can't find that complete version anywhere. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

fasola.org/indexes/1991/?p=47b This website has all the lyrics to the 1991 Denson edition of The Sacred Harp.

That's exactly how I started looking it up too.

You wanna really get the best out of this kind of music, you should hit up an actual singing like this. Nothing compares, seriously.

Find a singing near you and come along and join us. Google shapenote uk and you are in!!!

Same. I just did

Казачьим повеяло,нашим)

I love "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" so much!

More like human hopelessness without Christ.

Try both

Christians don't have a monopoly on suffering. This is raw human emotion. Stop excluding for no reason, bub.

You are 100% on it

Suffering is pointless outside of Christ. Repent and believe

are you implying our modern style of different concrete boxes and glass are inferior? just look at all the different types of concrete boxes we have!

+Richard Denney Someday! You've got lots of time ahead of you! :-)

Agree 100%

That's Aine Ui Cheallaigh, a traditional Irish Sean Nos singer.

From a commenter here that was there her name is Magdalena Gryszko and is the young woman in a pink hoodie here in an earlier recording kzfaq.info/get/bejne/b8xlo86r39PMfn0.html

wat

​@@bignasty389 ermelon

William Walker thank you for posting these lyrics. Fantastic to learn more and to get a full view of the poetry.

This was a great read, and very interesting - can you explain a bit more about what you mean by 'singing the shapes' preceding the main verses? Is that something that's unique to sacred harp music?

@@IBBangin19 it is unique to shape note music, which is not exactly redundant with Sacred Harp. Sacred Harp is just the most common and best known shape note book. But yes, it is part of the shape note tradition, where each shape is assigned a solfege name (fa, so, la, mi) and the song is sung through once using just the solfege before starting the actual words. It is one of the oldest parts of the tradition. Seven shape systems such as used in the Christian Harmony use the modern do, re, mi, fa, so, la, so solfege with seven shapes and seven syllables, but the Sacred Harp uses the older 4 note system where the scale is rendered using only 4 shapes and syllables, ie fa, so, la, fa, so, la, mi (or la, mi, fa, so, la, fa, so in the case of a minor scale song). I like shape notes as a learning system, and I find singing the shapes highly enjoyable and much easier than singing the actual poetry, for me personally).

SnOoKiE SnOoK trying to do the same thing

Back row, left side of the alto section (behind the leaders). You can see her tip her head back and belt.