Preserving the art of hymn-lining

In hymn-lining, the leader recites a line and then sings it with the group.
ORLANDO SENTINEL
ORLANDO, Fla. -- At Mount Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church, Troy Demps joins four others who've congregated near the pulpit.
On a table rests a Bible and a Baptist hymnal. The moment has arrived, he decides, so he moves forward.
His dead mother's voice reverberates in his soul. First, she speaks it: "What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear!" Then, she sings the same verse, in a soaring alto.
He gathers the hymnal, announces the tune and recites the opening line. Then he sings in a baritone.
"What a friend we have in Je-ee-ee-ee-suh-uh-uh-us, all our sins and griefs to bear!"
Voices fill the tabernacle. The faithful sway. Someone shouts: A-MEEEEEN!
It's how generations of blacks sang hymns, before they could read and before they could afford instruments.
Preserving the art
As Demps sees it, hymn-lining -- a singing style in which a leader recites a line and then sings the verse along with the congregation -- is a tradition worth preserving.
He's the winner of a 2003 Florida Folk Heritage Award and tries to pass the art along to younger men.
"It's black history, really," says Demps, 76. "It's something that belongs to us -- and it's dying -- and I don't want it to die."
The art of hymn-lining has European roots and became established in the American Colonies in the 1640s. Few Colonists could read, so a literate church preacher or elder would recite a line from a hymnbook, then troll with the faithful. Read, sing, repeat, until the hymn was finished.
During the Great Awakening in the early 1740s, the first broad revival movement swept through the American Colonies. Not even slave owners were immune to the evangelical spirit; some permitted slaves to worship in segregated or separate church services. But as literacy and hymnals became more widespread, whites gradually abandoned hymn-lining.
What slaves did
Slaves, legally prohibited from reading, embraced the call-and-response style, which recalled African oral traditions, and infused the sacred with an earthy power that was at once sorrowful and expectant, elongating words, wringing rivers of pathos from a drop of word.
During the Dust Bowl, most of the men from Demps' childhood church -- Mount Sinai Baptist in rural Live Oak, Fla. -- would be miles away from home on Sundays looking for work. So Lillie and the other church "mothers" led the hymns.
Demps has been singing them all his life. In 1994, he met representatives of the Florida Folklife program in search of hymn-liners to record and teach the art.
As a master artist in the Folklife Apprenticeship Program, Demps researched the history of hymns, taught the art to an apprentice and demonstrated the technique in schools and at festivals.
"The old traditions are not only beautiful, they also help to connect us with a sense of where we came from and the ways of life that our forebears knew," says Tina Bucuvalas, a Florida state folklorist.
"If we lose this and other such traditions, we basically lose a part of our history and a step in shaping our identity."