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Frank Newsome The ancient tradition of lined-out hymn singing
thrives in the Appalachians, finds Cara Gibney.
he haunting call and response of lined-out hymn singing is one of America’s longest-running English language musical traditions. With a heritage that leads back to 17th-century England it continues as a form of worship among the Old Regular Baptists of the southern Appalachians, with singing unac- companied, no instruments, led by a church leader, and followed line by line by the congregation.
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Frank Newsome grew up in Kentucky with a strong tradition of lined-out hymnody. Moderator at the Little David Church, Haysi, Virginia, Newsome’s phe- nomenal voice has been leading prayer meetings, inspiring services, and bringing solace and light to those attending funerals for many years.
Simultaneously stark and warm, fragile and eternally powerful, his singing brought comfort to those attending the funeral of his old friend, Bluegrass elder Ralph Stanley. (“He was like a natural brother to me. He thought a lot of me, and I did him too.”) And like Stanley before him, Newsome is the recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship, the US government’s highest honour for a traditional artist. Indeed, you can hear the essence of that high lonesome sound in both Newsome’s and Stanley’s singing, as well as artists like Roscoe Holcomb or Hazel Dickens, bearing as it does a direct line to genres vary- ing from gospel to bluegrass to old-time.
In June 2018 Free Dirt Records released Frank Newsome’s Gone Away With A Friend, an album of unadulterated songs recorded in their natural habitat. Renowned country artist Jim Lauderdale had discovered Newsome at Ralph Stanley's Hills Of Home festival, and ultimately he and Virginia folklorist Jon Lohman travelled to Haysi to record Newsome singing. “Jim Lauderdale heard me singing Gone Away With A Friend,” Newsome recalled down a crackly line, Belfast to Virginia. “He loved it so well he wanted to take me down and get a CD made of me. He come from Nashville Tennessee and recorded me down in my home church.”
Frank Newsome came from a poor, hardworking family of 22 children, the son of a miner who went on to follow his father’s path. “That's when times was so hard [my daddy] would work all day, 18 hours a day for 50 cents.” That was the 1930s through to the ‘40s. He had musical brothers, one of whom, Johnny, performed on a radio station in Ohio, and was joined on occasion by the young Frank Newsome. “I sung with him some. I lived in Ohio for a
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while and worked in a sawmill.” But as Newsome and I talked about his following move to work in Virginia, he started to cough: “Lord, I feel a little tight in my chest and I'm kind of hoarse you can tell,” he apologised. I had noticed earlier how the fragile breaths he had been taking between lines as we chatted had contrasted with the strength of his voice as he sang Amazing Grace for me down the phone previously in the conversation.
is compromised breathing is a result of the black lung disease contracted during his years spent mining in Virginia. “I loaded [the coal] by hand when I first started working in the coal mines. I got a dollar a car, it was two tons a car and if you loaded ten of them that's ten dollars… I got married in the year of nineteen and sixty-two and then as time went on we had three little kids and I worked a lot of times twenty- four hours to try and make ends meet.”
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Nearly two decades later the black lung diagnosis kicked in and Newsome had to leave the mines. As the years pass, the dis- ease Newsome inherited through mining gets worse, but his take on things is from a higher source: “I believe the good Lord has
given me a helping hand,” he told me as I marvelled at his singing ability in the midst of all this. “At times I can do better than others, sometimes I have to sit with my oxy- gen on all day.” But other days aren’t so bad, he assures me.
Besides, it was while mining that New- some found the faith that ultimately led to him becoming a minister of his beloved Regular Baptist Church. “I got in trouble on account of my sins between me and God,” he told me. “I had took his name in vain, I drunk, I stole cigarettes. Little things like that when I was a growing up boy, you know how boys are. And it got to bother me. I began to pray and ask the Lord: ‘for- give me Lord… I don't want to go to that bad place’… then he heard me cry, he saved my soul, then I joined the church.”
Within two or three years he was ordained, and the stall was set for a hum- ble, genuine, hard-grafting man to start using his lungs differently – the haunting call and response of lined-out hymn singing. One of America’s longest-running English language musical traditions safe in the hands of Reverend Frank Newsome.
freedirt.net F
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