The song leader before the first hymn

At eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning, a Tampa fellowship hall still smells of coffee and floor wax, and the choir is already seated. Nothing has been sung. A man stands at the front with a pitch pipe in one hand and a folded page in the other, and for the next ten minutes the room belongs to him. He is listed on the printed program as devotional leader, and those minutes are the part of the service nobody rehearses out loud. What he does in those minutes is documented, but only if you know where the record lives. This book opens with that man, because the first number of any gospel service is the song leader before the first hymn.

Lining the hymn, line by line

He is not the director of music. On the printed program he appears only as devotional leader, or as the brother who sets the service. His instruments fit in one jacket pocket: a pitch pipe, sometimes a metronome, and a page with the first hymn's number and meter written in pencil. The craft is old and it has been documented. The Smithsonian Folkways notes describe lining out as a practice in which the leader sings each line alone and the congregation returns it, line by line, until the hymn has been built once through before it is ever sung straight. The hymn is assembled in the room, not carried into it already whole. In a room where half the hands hold no printed music, the lining out is the rehearsal.

What does the leader listen for before he starts?

The leader announces the number, then the meter. Long meter, he says, or common meter, and the room settles. He sounds the pitch pipe, takes the first line himself, and the congregation answers him back. By the time the fourth line comes back, forty voices in a fellowship hall know a hymn they arrived not knowing. The parts are carried by rote, the way the leader learned them himself. He is listening the whole time, because the tempo the pianist will inherit has to be set low enough to hold. He listens for who answers and who drags, for the basses that carry the room and the sopranos that rush it, and he adjusts the pace one line at a time.

The long meter that slows the room down

The pitch pipe gives the note, but the leader gives the pace, and the pace is what the first hymn will live or die by. The old devotional hymns, the ones the Smithsonian notes call the Dr. Watts hymns, are mostly in long meter: four lines of eight syllables each. Lined out, a long-meter hymn cannot be rushed, because each line must be sung, then returned, then sung again with the room. A congregation that starts too fast frays by the third verse. This is what the metronome in the leader's pocket is for. Set it slow, he said after the service, slower than feels natural, and the room will come down to meet you. The Library of Congress collection, a public archive, holds field recordings of lined hymns from the Southeast, and the same discipline is audible on them: the leader's line, the room's answer, the slow common pace.

A Macon program, folded in three

The devotional period is printed. A program from an anniversary service in Macon, folded in three to fit a jacket pocket, lists the order of the morning: devotional period, prayer, then the choir. No timings, no lyrics, only the sequence, and the sequence is the point. Two rehearsals a week had prepared the forty voices that sang, and three vans sat in the lot before the doors opened. The program records none of it. Checked from the first row against the order actually followed, the program held. What the program cannot record is the ten minutes before the choir: the lining out, the prayer, the room coming to one pace. That part of the morning lives only in the people who were there.

A Gainesville shelf

Collectors find the same sequence on record. On a shelf in Gainesville, a cassette single of a lined hymn sits beside a CD reissue, and the label copy on both does what label copy used to do: it names the leader and the meter before it names the choir. The shelf is where the printed page is checked against the live room. What the Macon program lists, what the Gainesville label copy records, and what the Tampa leader does in his first ten minutes run along one continuous line. The Smithsonian Folkways notes describe the same order in writing, and the recordings bear it out. A lined hymn on record carries the room it came from: the pace, the returns, the leader's voice worn from leading.

The prayer that sets the service

Before the first hymn is sung straight through, the leader prays. The prayer is short by the clock and long in its work. It names the room, the hour, the ones not present, and it drops the pace the way the long meter does. The devotional leader's prayer is not a preface to the singing; it is the middle movement of the opening, between the lining out and the downbeat. A visitor hears only fragments: the building, the sick, the ones who could not come. The rest belongs to the leader, and it is not the singing-school to transcribe. By the end of the prayer the room is one instrument, tuned to the pace the leader chose in the first minute.

Where does the book stop?

The book records one pattern, verified in three places: a Tampa fellowship hall, a Macon program, a Gainesville shelf.

What a visitor can do with the first ten minutes

Arrive ten minutes before the hour. Sit where you can hear the leader without turning around, take the hymnal whether you can read music or not, and when the number is announced, follow the first line as it is lined out. Note the meter the leader names; it will govern every hymn that follows. It is a small act of attention, and it changes what you hear for the rest of the service. A collector can do the same work at home: the Smithsonian Folkways catalog and the Library of Congress collection hold the lined hymns of the Southeast on record, and the discipline there is the same as in the room.