Sex, Birth, and Singing Alto in the Sacred Harp

My partner Raider is an extraordinary lover. When we were first together, he would take me to bed with no thought but my pleasure. He spent weeks and months exploring my body and listening to what it told him. In quiet persuasive whispers he got me to give up all the secret wishes I'd been harboring, and then he made them come true. He was like a guide leading me into my dark secret places, and sex with him was like psychoanalysis, spiritual revelation, deep epiphany. Every time. I could tell you about the orgasms I had with him, and how they started deep in my body, centered in my womb, and spread out from there, pulling all my muscles into one great clenched fist, and then letting go. I've always thought I was so good at giving birth because he helped me find the muscles in my deep core, got me acquainted with the iron earth. But after awhile, I didn't always want to have sex with Raider. Nobody wants to have a life-changing experience every time they go to bed; who can stand to be that in touch with her deepest parts, bodily and spiritually, day after day? Sometimes you need a break. So we had to learn to have sex that was merely very good, that was satisfying but didn't leave me drenched and mind-blown, that didn't have me staggering through the next few days, dazed and happy but unable to balance my checkbook or safely drive a car.

This is exactly why, although singing alto in the Sacred Harp is one of the things I love best, I don't do it at every opportunity. There's a local singing twice a month, but I only go occasionally. There's a larger one two hours away; I make it once or twice a year. I love the Sacred Harp, but I don't trust it. It's too powerful. Singing the Sacred Harp reminds me of the time I was bodysurfing in big waves in Hawaii and got tumbled about when I missed my timing; I made it to the beach safe and sound, but when I stood up in the shallows, the water had taken my swimsuit off.

Mary Rose O'Reilley says in The Barn at the End of the World that the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto are rage, darkness, motherhood, earth, malice, and sex. The trebles, by contrast, "sing a descant line composed of ecstasy, light, purity, jet contrails, and self-surrender." O'Reilley isn't wrong, except about the malice, perhaps--she seems to have encountered a meaner and more self-interested brand of alto than I have. The altos tend to take the grounding line, the steady drone that keeps a song on the earth. We tend to sing the notes that give the harmonies their rough edge, and we do it sometimes by staying still while the other three parts move around us. Sometimes the altos are holding a steady, solid note and the music shifts around us and I hear a buzzsaw digging into lumber, I see the invisible whirling blade that, one time, took off the end of my father's thumb, I taste the sudden spurt of blood.

Singing alto in the sacred harp isn't for the dainty or squeamish. It's loud and raw. It helps to have had some really good sex, or to have given birth a time or two without anesthesia, to know where the womb is with its hidden muscles, the strongest in the body, some say, but locked away and not for you to command. Singing Sacred Harp has something in common with sex and birthing: all three are done better if you can set aside self-consciousness, modesty, and concerns for propriety, if you're willing to lay it all out there.

It helps, too, to have grieved a time or two. You can see that right in the music, that it was created and sung by people for whom death was always present. The Sacred Harp birthday song goes like this:

Youth, like the spring, will soon be gone, by fleeting time or conquering death.
Your morning sun may set at noon, and leave you ever in the dark.
Your sparkling eyes and blooming cheeks must wither like the blasted rose.
The coffin, earth, and winding sheet will soon your active limbs enclose,
Will soon your active limbs enclose. (Morning Sun, 436)

We sing it as a joke, but the people who originated this music weren't making fun of death. They were living side-by-side with it.

That's one of the dangerous things about the Sacred Harp, to my mind: the way you take on someone else's religion for a few hours or a couple of days at a time, belting it full-out like you're a believer, too. I always feel, when I sing, like I'm pushing at an invisible membrane between me and some woman not that different from me, who sang this music a hundred and fifty years ago, who struggled with her husband to make a go of a farm with poor soil, who had buried a baby, say, as well as two kids at once the year cholera came through. A woman who carried all of the hard work of her days, all of her losses and disappointments, to church with her, whose church was her only consolation.

Sacred Harp was a teaching tradition, originally, and we still call a short sing a lesson, an all-day sing a school, and a group of singers a class. It's not just the music we're being schooled in, though; it's the lives and faith of the original singers, the times they lived in, the God they worshipped.

Mary Rose O'Reilley writes, "The trebles have by now burst the bounds of earth. They will all call in sick on Monday." She writes, "The singing over, we drop like birds who have been buffeted to the edge of the oxygen zone. We have barely escaped with our lives." And that's the thing, that's the answer to why I don't show up twice a month at my local singing and drive two hours every month to the singing in Kalamazoo, why I go to only some of the conventions, and often for only one day. It's not just to save my voice, though that gets raw enough after awhile. It's to save my life, the life I'm living now and love, the one I could lose if that membrane ever ruptures and I'm not just getting a view of another life, another faith, but dropped into the middle of it. I don't want to find myself face-to-face with the God of that gray woman; I like the God I have, so much friendlier, more loving, less capricious. The God I have lets me keep the things I love best.

I walk away from a Sacred Harp singing sweaty, hoarse, wrung-out, and with a sense of having narrowly escaped being turned into something else, someone else. It's a good thing there's not an altar call in the afternoon, in place of the Memorial Lesson, or after four hours of singing to God with my whole heart, I'd be on my knees in the center of the square, accepting Jesus as my personal savior.

Convicted as a sinner, to Jesus I come,
Informed by the gospel for such there is room.
O'erwhelmed with sorrows for sin I will cry,
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. (The Rock That is Higher Than I, 496)

It's like a kind of Russian roulette, every time I sing. I never know when the hammer will come down and boom! I'l be on the other side of a change I can't easily come back from. I carry my songbook into the square and settle myself in the second row of altos. Today, I have decided, I'll take my chances.

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