I Belong To This Band
by: Sacred Harp Recordings
I Belong To This Band: Eighty-Five Years of Sacred Harp Recordings
Various Artists
Dust-To-Digital
By James Calemine
This 30-song collection serves as a companion to the film Awake, My Soul: The Story of Sacred Harp. Sacred Harp Singing hinges upon a musical community of participation. Sacred Harp began in the rural south during the 18th century.
This collection is the first to offer such a full range of recordings from 1922 to 2006.
Many of these odes and anthems preserve some of America's oldest songwriters' work.
Joe Bussard, Richard DeLong, Roger Misiewicz and David Warren Steel provided the original records which Matt Hinton and Dust-To-Digital president Lance Ledbetter produced.
Hearing this CD, the beautifully complex hymns morph into one ethereal mood. The Henagar-Union Sacred Harp Singers comprise 13 tracks on this spiritual CD. The Roswell Harp Singers of Roswell, Georgia, appear various times on this CD along with The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers and Denson's Sacred Harp Singers.
I Belong To This Band ranks as one of the sole collections preserving some of the South's oldest music.