Longing for Death in Shape Note Hymns

     When I moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, and lost my Alabama music connections, I posted my phone number on a bulletin board in a music store. Years later, when the paper must have been yellowed, an old country fellow contacted me—an ironic twinkle in his eye at the door of my historic downtown house as if he recognized our mismatch but was determined to play the game out. It was less about economic class—he did own land—than culture and education. I was a town boy--from a university town at that--and he was pure country. I often visited grandparents deep in the country, so it’s in my bones, but my professorial dialect—whitewashed to standard American—belies it. The old boy proudly held the whip hand, auditioning me, and I foolishly sang an original on the theme of Faust, my accent reverting as it does when I sing country.

Mention my soul to the devil.

I might want to make an exchange.

Mention my soul to the devil,

But don’t tell him my name.

I might want to meet him at the crossroads

After the sun has set.

I might meet him at the crossroads,

But I’m ‘fraid I might get et.

I sure do hope to see you up in heaven.

My soul means a whole lot to me.

But I’d give a lot for a Jagermeister shot

And a big HD TV.

     By the end of my song, he was frowning and began a grim inquisition. Clearly, this fellow understood soul-selling midnight meetings as real. Wasn’t I a Christian? he asked. It didn’t help that I was Catholic, a cultist of the Whore of Babylon. For me, the Faust tale is fiction, my version a trope for consumerism, but my faltering explanations got nowhere. The name Faust didn’t register, nor did Robert Johnson’s meeting at the crossroads (alluded to in my song) or Paganini’s alleged pact. It crossed my mind to mention the two Bedazzled movies, but all of that—including Goethe Faust and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus—would have rung as pagan claptrap. I sat patiently while he quizzed me and, failing to elicit gospel answers, testified as to his own blessed assurance of meeting his loved ones in the sweet by and by and left abruptly. This had nothing to do, I thought, with my comic song. It did so traumatize me that, fifteen years later, I still haven’t performed the song again. Maybe I should. Most of my audiences will have heard of Faust.

     Prompted by memories of this, I’ve set out to use my highfalutin academic skills to revisit images of Heaven in gospel music. For this I turned to A. J. Showalter’s 1905 Songs of Triumph, a copy of which was in the old reed pump organ (in my studio today) that Grandmother sold a cow to buy. Showalter (1858-1924) was a Virginia-born songwriter and music teacher (known for “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”), who moved to north Georgia and established Showalter Music Company in Dalton, a major publisher of shape-note music. “Professor” Showalter traveled all over the South to teach singing schools and presided over a bloom in shape-note songwriting at the turn of that century. Songs of Triumph showcased new talent, especially his star student J. D. Patton (1868-1932). Most of the songs are copyrighted 1905–first published in this book—so it’s a microscope slide of evangelical compositions in that era.

     Some of the songs in Songs of Triumph do celebrate the earthly joys of Christian fellowship, salvation, and knowing Jesus, but almost half long for Heaven. The afterlife is contrasted to an earthly existence almost as nasty, brutish, and short as Hobbes’ state of nature. Life is a time of cares, trials, worry, tears, fears, sorrows, grief, pain, and temptations, a weary way of labor, work, and toil in in storms, noonday heat, and dark shadows, full of briars, conflict, battle, strife, bleeding, affliction, and sadness. Even for the saved, it's a weary burden to lay down. Some of this hellishness may be rhetorical, a glorifying Heaven by contrast, but very few hymns popular in middle-class churches today express such a dark vision. Around 1905 seems to have been a time of hopelessness for the Southern poor who were the market for Showalter’s book.

     The Civil War and Reconstruction had so crippled the regional economy that, in the words of Wayne Flynt’s Poor but Proud (1989), when the Great Depression hit, “We didn’t know the difference.” From the Civil War to WWII, sharecroppers of both races survived in a cycle of debt on the edge of starvation, under threat of crop failure no matter how hard they worked. Children as young as ten labored in cotton mills and coal mines to feed their families. The working poor suffered chronic bad health from diets of cornmeal, fatback, and molasses and a lack of health care alongside as the stresses of powerlessness, and economic insecurity. America was just emerging from the Gilded Age, an era of then-unprecedented inequality when the top ten percent owned most of the nation’s wealth and the bottom forty percent none—a situation worse for workers than today’s comparable inequality because the country was poorer and public relief was lacking. The unemployed had to take any work, however exploitative, unsafe, and irregular, or face starvation. 

     Widows, the old, and the disabled were banished to county alms houses. When my grandmother spoke of folks “endin’ up in the po' house” (an anachronism then), I heard horror in her voice. Wayne Flynt describes county poor houses early in the century as ill-kept shacks down rutted roads. Care was contracted to the lowest bidder at as little as $7.00 monthly per inmate ($6.00 a day in current money), where the elderly, crippled, tubercular, widowed, and mentally deficient—anybody without income or a home—were warehoused, their status so erased that the races lived together in white supremacist Alabama. Farmers and day laborers in shape-note evangelical churches might well have seen their lives as endless toil—what scant security and status they enjoyed hanging by a thread over the terrestrial hell of the po' house. What hope for improvement was there this side of the grave? Like the stevedore in "Old Man River," the Jordan was the only river they longed to cross.

     Over 75 of the the Songs of Triumph paint a consistent picture of Heaven as an eternal home in a gated, shining city on the golden shore of a body of water—sometimes the River Jordan, sometimes a stormy sea that is glassy by the shore. The city is also said to be on high, on a hill or in the air. There are crystal streams, golden streets, and jasper walls, and, of course, pearly gates leading into a city called Zion, Jerusalem, or Beulah Land. It is eternal day in a cloudless land lit shadowless by the presence of the Lord himself. The light is intense. The dead are welcomed by singing angels and issued white robes and golden, starry crowns. Free of care, full of bliss, their labors over, they march singing to God’s throne, where they see his face—or even, according to one hymn, lie folded in his breast. They rest in eternal joy. This vivid detail is scriptural, consolidated from the Book of Revelation, mostly from Chapter 21, where the New Jerusalem is described descending from heaven after the Second Coming and the defeat of Satan.

     Of course, the Book of Revelation is allegorical, which is to say it names people and things and describes events, not to assert that they are literally true, but that they symbolize what is true. The book is visionary poetry, not history. There is wide variation among Christian interpreters how to read the allegory—as unfulfilled prophecy or as a message of hope to persecuted first-century churches—but nobody reads the Whore of Babylon as a sex worker in ancient Iraq. Everybody reads allegory, which was presumably coded to hide seditious criticism of Roman authorities. John of Patmos trusted the seven churches of Asia, his audience, to read his meanings through the allegorical cloud, and these meanings clearly include hope for a blissful afterlife with Christ, but it’s unlikely that he (or they) thought he was literally promising a golden city shaped like a 1,500-mile-sided cube with foundations of earthly minerals and gates carved out of giant pearls (imagine the oysters!).

     So I can’t help wondering if the singers of Showalter’s hymns really expected to wake from their deathbeds to bleached robes and starry crowns or understood all this as metaphor for joys more indefinite. How lightly did my grandmother and her congregation ride the rococo imagery? Did they expect the afterlife to be that, or merely like that? And did this really matter to tired workers snatching Sunday consolation after a grinding week.

     One frequent theme in the hymns, absent from the book of Revelation and other Biblical references to the afterlife, is the joyful reuniting with loved ones, especially family, either on the shore or at the gate. Crowds of the saved are scriptural, but dockside reunions are absent from scripture, where there is nothing like hymn 191: “Dear Mother, safe on that bright shore, I love to picture o’er and o’er my welcome at the gate.” The one gospel instance that references heavenly family relationships in the afterlife seems to devalue them. The Sadducees, who do not believe in the afterlife, attempt to reduce it to absurdity by asking Jesus who will be a woman’s husband in Heaven if she marries a succession of seven brothers. Jesus’s answer, that there is no marriage in Heaven, may merely note the irrelevance of reproduction without death. But, to the extent that marriage is more than sexual, it may also suggest that private attachments to family and friends--mere earthly coincidences--dissolve in universal brotherhood and sisterhood along with the cancelling of ego-traits such as gender and status as signified by uniform robes. Henry Suso, among others, is explicit about this point in his A Little Book of Eternal Wisdom (Chapter XII), where he says that “the greatest stranger” in the heavenly hosts will love a new arrival “more ardently and faithfully than any father or mother ever loved the child of their bosom in this scene of time.” The dim light of earthly love disappears in the universal glory of heavenly love.

     Outside of scripture and history, expected reunion with loved ones may reflect a broad psychological pattern studied by Dr. Christopher Kerr of Hospice Buffalo and explained in his Ted Talk. Documenting 14,000 cases over ten years, Kerr has found that that 80 percent of dying patients have vivid dreams or visions of dead loved ones, often promising reunion and giving comfort--a pattern so predictable that experienced care givers take such dreams as signs of impending death. Dying children who have no dead loved ones may dream of dead pets.

     The hymns seem to assume that we awake after death completely ourselves, as if from a nap, with uninterrupted memories and attachments but with a passion to march about in robes and crowns, singing and adoring a the Lord’s shining face. This eternal church service would soon feel like hell to most mortals—Christian or not—so, without some sudden transformation in earthly habits (or a gradual one in the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory), Heaven might be less than heavenly. The necessary transformation, I’d think, to loving all of one's celestial neighbors as oneself would dilute the charm of family reunions. Jesus suggests this when, while addressing a crowd and hearing that his family waits outside, he dismisses them: “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12: 46-50). Still, for hard-working shape-note families—especially in the family-centered Scotch-Irish frontier tradition—domestic love is a natural paradigm for Heavenly love. The heavenly home is the extended family home writ large, and, in those pre-antibiotic days, when premature death from infectious disease was all too commonplace, the hymns express deathbed promises to meet again. 

     The circumstances of shape-note singing also encourage thoughts of reunion. In Sacred Harp singing schools that Showalter taught, singers sit in a hollow square—basses, tenors, altos, and trebles grouped on four sides around a leader in the center—listening to each other as they sing four-part harmony without accompaniment. Even if the the singers are strangers when they sit down, this custom, along with the devotional themes of the music, generates a sense of community. In the Sacred Harp square, the idea that “we” will meet in heaven—especially along with the idea that “we” will sing together there—may reference the singing school, a real community worshiping in the shape of John’s holy city. It’s not surprising that the theme recurs.

     As a child, even when Baptist teachings seemed fact, I don’t recall taking the golden streets and pearly gates literally, but I did expect a post-death life as more-or-less myself—two legs and a full set of senses ambling ten-toed in a blissful cloud-land of some sort. I’ve since lost that blessed assurance, having realized that the descriptions are written by the living. So this has been a sad chapter to write, locked out of the gates of the second Eden.