Until fairly recently, Lumbees regularly sang long-metered hymns, an old form of congregational singing that doesn't use instruments or songbooks. The history of these hymns is very complicated and involves much cross-cultural communication. In fact, it illustrates a good deal about Lumbee political and religious history.
George Pullen Jackson, one of the leading authorities on religious folk music in America, credits the evolution of long-meter singing to the early Puritan church in America. In the 17th and 18th centuries, congregations sang psalms from the Bible that they plugged into a variety of hymn tunes. Because the psalm verses were translated with four lines and eight syllables per line, congregations could plug any psalm into a tune that had four phrases and eight beats per phrase (Sutton 1982: 12). As followers of John Calvin, these church-goers believed that music should be unaccompanied and unharmonized, focusing the congregation's mind on heavenly, rather than earthly, things. "Such songs would be a means to spiritual joy and would distinguish the truly sacred from mere entertainment" (Patterson 1995:16).
In the Calvinist church (the Puritan church in New England, and later Presbyterians and Primitive Baptists, among others), an individual's salvation is only obtained through God's enabling (and irresistible) grace. Many followers of Calvin have interpreted his theology to claim that some individuals are predestined to receive salvation, that God only enables a few to accept His grace. In the Puritan church, church membership was only granted to those who evidenced this sense of grace, who had had an experience of salvation and could testify to it. Consequently, one's church and, to some extent, societal membership depended upon one's standing with God, as demonstrated by one's experience of God's grace. Of course, congregations did not only consist of the "elect"- it was a requirement of Puritan society that one attend church to determine if one could be enabled by God's grace.
Long-meter singing therefore fit the needs of the early Puritan church quite well; the psalm texts nearly ensured that the power of melody would not make "evil" words "pierce the heart that much more strongly." The unharmonized form also ensured that the music would engage the mind "appropriately," which, for Calvin, was the goal of congregational singing (Patterson 1995: 16). Furthermore, these hymns and the spiritual lessons they reinforced could be transferred from church to town meeting to school to home, without the encumbrances of instruments or songbooks. The congregation also didn't need to memorize a large repertoire of tunes to make singing both instructional and emotionally fulfilling.
The role of the song-leader was particularly important in this style. Because few church members had songbooks and many were illiterate, the leader would stand in front of the congregation and "line-out" the hymn, chanting the first phrase and then giving the congregation a starting pitch. This method lead to a very slow pace and numerous variations on the melody by individual singers, and harmony by the non-Calvinist denominations that lined-out hymns. Gradually long-meter singing disappeared in most New England churches, as preaching and prayer became more important in Puritan services, and access to songbooks and instruments increased. It persisted in many southern churches through the nineteenth century, but has been particularly stubborn in the Lumbee church. It has only been the last twenty to thirty years that have seen the decline of unaccompanied hymn-singing in Lumbee churches.
Beverly Diamond-Cavanagh, who has worked among Eastern Woodland communities in New England and Eastern Canada, sheds some light on this persistence in writing on the difference between the oral and the literate: "In the former, words do not merely connote meaning; they are an enactment of it. Their utterance has power and dramatic intensity" (Robertson, ed. 1995: 389). Such "enactment" of meaning in the oral tradition characterizes several features of the Lumbee religious experience. First, the enactment of meaning through oral tradition has paved the way for the necessary emotional and immediate spiritual experience of both Puritan churches and contemporary Lumbee churches. These qualities of oral tradition extend beyond the traditionally-conceived boundaries of culture and race, and demonstrate how cultures perceived to be vastly different can actually have quite a lot in common. Secondly, the persistence of Lumbee oral tradition into the late twentieth century, in spite of the omnipresent written word, is a tribute to the significance of the "power and dramatic intensity" of singing and hearing the gospel according to the long-developed structures and forms of worship. Our conscious perpetuation of oral tradition through song and worship has kept our spiritual experience alive and immediate.