The book has no notes in it.
That is the first thing to understand about the hymnals used in lined-out singing. They contain words and nothing else — no staves, no shaped notes, no pitch. In the Old Regular Baptist tradition documented on the 1997 Smithsonian Folkways recording Old Regular Baptists: Lined-Out Hymnody from Southeastern Kentucky, these words-only books are distributed only to the song leaders (Scotty Gray, National Recording Registry essay, Library of Congress). The congregation does not hold them. The congregation does not need them.
What the congregation needs is a person willing to raise a voice and start.
This is an essay about that person — the precentor, the song leader, the brother who stands and lines out the hymn — and about what happens in the long, unhurried space between his voice and the congregation’s answer. It is also an essay about a particular kind of slowness, and why that slowness is not a failure of polish but a deliberate distribution of interpretive power. The tradition is most famously documented in southeastern Kentucky, not Middle Tennessee, and I want to be honest about that geography from the start. But the practice traveled, and it left traces across the Upper South, including a 1959 field recording made in Memphis that most listeners have never heard.
What lining out actually is
The mechanics are simple enough to describe and difficult to imagine until you hear them. A leader sings or chants a line of the hymn. The congregation answers — often before the leader has finished the line — singing relatively slowly and simultaneously in more than one version of the same melody, ornamented and more elaborated than the leader’s plain statement (Gray, Library of Congress).
That description comes from the National Recording Registry essay on the Indian Bottom Association recording, made at Defeated Creek Church in Linefork, Kentucky, on August 20, 1992, and June 10, 1993. The recording was added to the National Registry in 2014. It is the most accessible document of the practice, and it repays close listening.
The tradition’s roots run deep. Lining-out has origins in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English parish church practice (Gray). Steven L. Sabol’s older survey of lined-out hymnody notes that the style was used in some British churches in the 1700s and before and was brought to North America by colonists. The New England singing school movement, Sabol writes, was in part an effort to “improve” upon this style of singing. That word — improve — is doing a lot of work. It tells you that someone, at some point, decided the old way was deficient. The people who kept singing it did not agree.
The office the printing press created
Here is the structural fact that matters most: because the hymnal carries no tune, the tune has to live in a person. The precentor is not a decorative role. He is the technology. The book cannot transmit the melody, so a human voice must, and the congregation’s willingness to follow that voice is what makes the singing possible.
This is an office created by a printing decision. Someone chose to print words without music, and that choice — whether made for economy, for theology, or for both — produced a role that no seminary confers and no bishop appoints. The Indian Bottom Association, Gray writes, has lay, untrained, unpaid worker-preachers. It rejects what it calls “autonomous bureaucracies on theological grounds” and maintains no Sunday Schools, seminaries, or mission societies, which it considers a transfer of congregational responsibility to professional agencies.
I want to be careful here. The sources establish the theology and the musical practice as separate facts. Connecting them is my argument, not a claim about what the denomination teaches. But the coherence is hard to miss. A church that will not hand its preaching to a professional class will not hand its singing to a printed page either. Both decisions keep authority local. Both keep it in the room.
The pitch, the gathering tone, the scoop
Listen closely to how a lined hymn begins, and you hear a small drama of shared tuning.
The leader may hum to himself the first pitch, Gray writes, to be certain the tune will sit in a comfortable range. That hum is not performance. It is a private check, a man testing the air before he commits. Then the congregation’s response frequently begins with what Gray calls a “gathering [slightly held] tone” for pitch and perhaps to focus thought, and the first sounds are frequently “scooped” up — a portamento of an interval of a fourth — to the pitch.
An outsider might hear untidiness in that scoop. It is not untidiness. It is how a group with no accompaniment and no printed melody finds a shared pitch together. The gathering tone is the sound of people agreeing, in real time, on where they are about to be. There is no organ to give them a reference. There is no piano. There is a man’s voice and then a room full of voices finding it.
Why the congregation is slower than the leader
The tempo question is the one that most repays attention, because it is where the tradition is most often misheard.
Gray’s description is precise. The leader’s statement is concise and usually more rhythmic. The congregation is slower and contemplative, lengthening every word, even every syllable, and most often having more than one pitch to a syllable. There is no regular beat in the congregational response. The phrasing is governed by the length of the line and by breath — sometimes breathing more than once within a single word.
Read that again: breathing more than once within a single word. This is not a rhythm being executed. It is a rhythm being negotiated, syllable by syllable, by a room full of people who are each making small decisions about when to breathe and when to hold.
Gray puts it plainly: the slow, improvisatory nature of the singing allows the leader, and especially the congregation, a degree of personal interpretation of melody, rhythm, and tempo. The slowness is the room in which that interpretation happens. Speed it up and you do not get a cleaner performance. You get a narrower one. The congregation’s slow answer is not a lag behind the leader. It is the space in which each singer becomes an interpreter rather than an executor.
The imprecision problem
Outsiders have been calling this music imprecise for two centuries. The singing school movement tried to fix it. Later notation tried to fix it. The ear trained on metered, accompanied hymnody hears a congregation that cannot keep time and cannot agree on pitch.
Gray addresses this directly. What may seem to some as rhythmic, ensemble, and pitch imprecision, he writes, is a vital, personal spiritual experience expressed in a historic and almost lost form of folk art.
I would put it more sharply. The categories of precision and imprecision assume that the goal is a fixed, correct rendering of a score. But there is no score. There is a text and a tune carried in memory and a room full of people who have sung together long enough to trust each other. What sounds like error is interpretation. What sounds like drift is a group of singers making a thousand small choices in a space that has been deliberately left open for them.
This is not to say anything goes. The tradition is disciplined. It is handed down by oral tradition, Gray notes, with strong elements of improvisation, but the improvisation happens inside a form that everyone in the room knows. The freedom is real, and it is bounded. That is what craft looks like when it is not written down.
The texts: Dr. Watts and the old books
The oldest texts in the recorded repertoire are eighteenth-century hymns by English writers — Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, Samuel Stennett, William Williams (Gray). This is where Dr. Watts enters the congregation: not as a name on a spine but as a line a man sings out and a room answers back.
The two favorite collections of texts among the Indian Bottom Association, according to Gray, are Sweet Songster and the Thomas Hymnal. The tunes are similar to, and sometimes prior to, those found in nineteenth-century shape-note hymnals such as William Walker’s Southern Harmony and The Sacred Harp, along with tunes from the early Skene manuscript, Kentucky folk songs, and gospel songs with a chorus.
Notice what this means. The words are older than the tunes, or at least older than the printed tune collections. The text and the melody have separate histories that meet in the throat of a song leader on a Sunday morning. A Watts stanza written in eighteenth-century England, a tune that may predate the shape-note books, a pronunciation that Gray describes as characteristically Appalachian and intensified by the slow singing — all of it converges in one voice, in one room, on one morning that will never be repeated exactly.
The tradition is wider than its most famous recording
Here the essay has to widen, because the Kentucky recording, for all its importance, is not the whole geography of lined-out singing.
On October 4, 1959, Alan Lomax recorded an unidentified lining hymn in Memphis, at a service of the Great Harvest Missionary Baptist Church held at its temporary home, New Browns Chapel (University of Mississippi, Alan Lomax Collection, item 399). The session note records spirituals and preaching at that service, with the congregation choir under the direction of Mrs. Lulabelle Johnson. The recording runs two minutes and forty-two seconds. It is not available online; access must be requested from the Department of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Mississippi.
I cannot tell you what it sounds like. I have not heard it, and the metadata does not describe the singing beyond classifying it as a religious song and hymn. What the record does establish is that lining-out was being practiced in an urban Missionary Baptist setting in Memphis in 1959 — not only in the Appalachian churches that the Folkways record documents. The sources I have do not establish the racial composition of that congregation beyond what the session note states, and I will not guess. The tradition’s map is larger than its best-known document.
This matters for how we tell the story. Lined-out hymnody is often narrated as a white Appalachian survival, a curious relic of British parish practice preserved in the mountains. The Memphis record complicates that narrative without resolving it. The existence of the recording is a fact, and it asks a question the standard story does not answer: how many lined hymns were sung in how many rooms that no one recorded?
What the archive cannot give you
A recording is a poor substitute for a practice.
When the only access to a lined hymn is a field recording, the listener receives the sound but not the participation. You hear the gathering tone; you do not feel your own voice finding it. You hear the breath inside the word; you do not have to decide when to take it. The archive preserves the artifact and loses the thing the artifact was for.
This is not a complaint about archivists. The Lomax recordings, the Folkways record, the National Registry designation — these are acts of care, and they have made a nearly lost form audible to people who would otherwise never encounter it. But the essay should be honest about the gap. The tradition lives in congregations that gather, and the recording is a photograph of a fire.
The book with no notes in it
Return, finally, to the hymnal.
A book with words and no music, held by one person, completed by a whole congregation. The precentor raises his voice and the room answers, often before he has finished the line. The answer is slower than the call, and it is not one answer but many, each singer ornamenting the same melody in his or her own way, breathing more than once inside a single word.
What is that book, really? It is a decision about where authority lives. It is a printing choice that became a theology of the local room. It is the reason a man has to hum to himself before he begins, and the reason a congregation has to find its pitch together in the held air of a gathering tone.
The tradition is described in the sources as rare and almost lost. I do not know whether it is dying or whether it is simply quiet, sung in rooms that do not post their services online. What I know is that the slowest music I can document in the Upper South is not slow because it is behind. It is slow because it is waiting — for the congregation to answer, for the breath to come, for the room to agree on where it is about to be.
The question the hymnal leaves us with is not whether the old way can survive. It is whether we can learn to hear a room full of people making a thousand small choices together and call that, without condescension, what it is: craft.
Frequently asked questions
What does “lining out” mean?
A leader sings or chants each line of a hymn text; the congregation then sings the line back, often beginning before the leader has finished, in a slow and ornamented unison. The practice developed because congregations lacked hymnals or psalters, and it persists in some traditions as a valued form of worship rather than a fallback.
Who is the precentor?
The precentor is the song leader — the person who raises the line and sets the pitch. In the Old Regular Baptist tradition documented on the Smithsonian Folkways recording, song leaders are lay, untrained, and unpaid, and the words-only hymnals are distributed only to them.
Why are the hymnals printed without music?
The sources describe the books as containing words but no music, distributed only to song leaders. The theological and practical reasons are not fully spelled out in the retrieved material, but the effect is clear: the melody must be carried by a person and completed by the congregation, which keeps interpretive authority in the room.
Is lined-out singing only an Appalachian white tradition?
No. The best-documented recording is from southeastern Kentucky, but Alan Lomax recorded a lining hymn at a Missionary Baptist church in Memphis in 1959. The tradition’s geography and demography are wider than its most famous document, and the sources do not support a claim of exclusivity in either direction.
Where can I hear lined-out hymnody?
The Smithsonian Folkways recording Old Regular Baptists: Lined-Out Hymnody from Southeastern Kentucky (SF 40106), recorded in 1992 and 1993 and added to the National Recording Registry in 2014, is the most accessible document. The 1959 Memphis recording is held by the University of Mississippi and is not available online; access can be requested from its Department of Archives and Special Collections.