Symposium on Rural Hymnody Collection, 1974-1982

The Symposium on Rural Hymnody was hosted by Berea College on April 27-29, 1979.  Follow the links in the Series 4 box list to listen to the recordings of Symposium presentations, performances, and a worship service.  Presentations were given by seventeen participants.  The symposium also featured performances by the A.L. Phipps Family of Knox County, Kentucky and the Wiregrass Sacred Harp Singers of Dale County, Alabama. The group also traveled to Floyd County, Kentucky, to attend the Sunday worship service of the Left Beaver Old Regular Baptist Church. The symposium was conceived by Loyal Jones and William Tallmadge as the beginning of a new examination of hymnody.  Presenters looked to challenge the pioneering work of George Pullen Jackson by suggesting that lining hymnody was still being performed by white singers after 1850.  In addition, they looked to prove that lining hymnody represented the mainstream of rural hymnody from 1650 to 1850. The possibility of a symposium publication was not considered as part of the initial planning stages. Nevertheless, the event was perceived as quite successful by many of the participants, and Tallmadge and Jones expressed their desire to publish the proceedings as an anthology.  However, the manuscript tha tresulted from extensive editing by Tallmadge, was not well received by both the University Press of Kentucky and the University of Illinois Press. The primary barrier to acceptance was what reviewers perceived to be the difficulty of publishing “proceedings” in a way that would appeal to non-attendants. Further attempts to publish the work were conducted by University of Kentucky English professor Thomas A.Adler in 1982, but again a publisher could not be found. Individual Symposium papers have been published inacademic journals.