What Wondrous Love: Folk Passion

Meridian Chorale

Palm Sunday
March 16, 2008
4:30 PM
Druid Hills Baptist Church
Atlanta, GA - Corner of Ponce and Highland

The Passion of Christ has been central to the life experience of common southern people. Their love and empathy is well recorded in the heartfelt strains of their songs. Singing from their experience, this unique Passion service is built around folk hymns from the famous 19^th century The Sacred Harp tunebook, compiled in Georgia in 1844.

Southern Folk Passion was presented for its first four years with the prophetic preaching of Fred Craddock. Recordings of this service with his preaching are available by clicking Folk Passion Recording.

With Rev. Craddock's retirement from this service in 1999, the Folk Passion Service changed character from a preaching service to a musical service based on readings from the Passion narrative. Renowned Georgia actress, Brenda Bynum, reads the Passion story. Woven through the narrative will be congregational singing of folk hymns from The Sacred Harp hymnal commenting on Christ's Passion, as well as original arrangements of folk hymns by Steven Darsey, sung by the Meridian Chorale. Thus, using folk materials, this service will be modeled on historic musical Passion settings similar to those of J.S. Bach.

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul,

What wondrous love is this, O my soul!

What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss

To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,

To bear the dreadful curse for my soul.

Brenda Bynum retired recently from the faculty of the Department of Theater Studies at Emory University. While there she also taught a class entitled "Drama.,Liturgy and Homiletics" in the Candler School of Theology with Don Saliers and Fred Craddock. She has been a professional actress and director since 1975 and was associated for 20 years with the Alliance Theater Company in Atlanta as an artist and teacher. She is a specialist in the performance of the work of Samuel Beckett and has acted in or directed most of his plays in this country and in Europe. In January and February of this year she was invited to do a six-week Beckett residency at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland , Ohio. She has developed a number of original performances based on the lives of real women and for the past several years, as one of the luxuries of retirement from her stage career as well, has been frequently performing her one-woman show, "Notional Women" as a charitable benefit. It has been her pleasure and privilege to be associated with Steven Darsey and Meridian Herald for the last several years.