Word: harping
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...Dylan made a pilgrimage to Woody Guthrie. Decades later, Southern Sacred Harp royalty generously embraced the wild-eyed newcomers--many of whom were nonbelievers--in what Awake My Soul co-director Matt Hinton calls "red-state, blue-state harmony...
Nothing is weirder than Sacred Harp. Its favored subject matter--the pilgrim, the grave, Christ's blood--is stark; its style--severe fourths and otherworldly open fifths--has been obsolete for more than a century. Its notation, in which triangles, circles and squares indicate pitch, looks like cuneiform. Yet it exudes power and integrity. Five people sound like a choir; a dozen like a hundred. It is one of the most democratic choral forms: no audience, no permanent conductor--just people addressing one another...
Almost every revived American folk-music form was once recorded for the Library of Congress by musicologist Alan Lomax. He taped Sacred Harp in 1942 and '59. Unlike other finds such as Leadbelly, it failed to spark during the 1960s folk revival, but musicologists were infected. Now the form had imitable LPs and an academic beachhead...
...early 1990s, punk rockers, says singer Tim Eriksen, "were looking for that kind of intensity in other music." Eriksen's band, Cordelia's Dad, and other postpunks seized Sacred Harp and exported it to trendsetting places from Northampton, Mass., to Portland...
...Bone Burnett, who shaped the sound of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, did the same on Anthony Minghella's Civil War film Cold Mountain. Minghella hired Eriksen to sing a non-Harp song but was lured to Harp mecca Henagar, Ala. One result, Idumea, plays hauntingly over a battle scene--and won a new batch of fans. "I went in because of Jude Law but left with Sacred Harp," says New Yorker Anna Hendrick...