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The music of the Old Regular Baptists resembles Christian hymnody in many aspects. Yet it is also a music very much its own. The melodies descend from the common stock of British and Irish folksong, and they are learned and passed along by ear rather than from written musical notation. Second, the melodies are elaborated, decorated, and embellished, with several tones sung for certain syllables. Each person is free to “curve” the tune more or less as he or she chooses. Third, the songs are “given out” line by line, by the song leader, as you will hear; this practice is called “lining out” and dates back to the 16th-century English parish church. Only the song leaders have song books, and these have words only (no tunes); the congregation remembers the tunes and catches the words as they are lined out. In Colonial America this was the usual way that Protestants sang hymns, but gradually it gave way to musical reforms, note-reading, and instrumental accompaniment. In the United States today “the old way of singing,” as it was once called, survives only in a small number of religious groups, most prominently among Old Regular Baptists in the central region of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. These musical examples all were recorded by Jeff Todd Titon at the Defeated Creek Old Regular Baptist Church, Linefork, KY, June 10, 1993.

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