Our premium News+ ad-free experience – only $10 more every 4 weeks!

The Sacred Harp” is a pre-Civil War compilation of sacred songs that uses music notes shaped like triangles, ovals, squares ...

Singers at Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church in West Georgia treat their red hymnals like extensions of themselves, ...

Singers at Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church in West Georgia treat their red hymnals like extensions of themselves, ...

Black Church is a language. The hymns, parables, wisdom expressions, and biblical narratives have combined with Black speech to create a distinctive mother tongue for those who grow up in the Black ...

The kick drum thumped. The high hat ticked. And the audience punctuated the hymn with the syncopated double clapping often heard in Black churches. Some of the congregants sang with masks over ...

They missed the handshakes and hugs of in-person fellowship, the resonant sound of the choir, the feel and smell of hymnals ... acute when it comes to the Black church, according to Pew Research ...