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Joe Earle - Staff Thursday, November 30, 2000 Forget Britney and that Backstreet bunch for a while. The holidays are coming. It's the time for old songs, not new ones. After all, those tried-and-true old tunes often do the best job of warming the winter chill. They're the tunes that can bring holiday comfort. And joy. Just ask Steven Darsey. He's fond of old tunes. Really old ones. "A great folk song is like a pebble in a stream that's been there so long all the conceits have been worn away," Darsey said. "What you're singing is the pure spiritual truth." Darsey, a Yale-trained conductor and composer with a doctorate in musical arts, researched old country hymns as a graduate student. He got interested in them when he found a 19th century songbook in a relative's attic. He found he felt a connection to those old church tunes. Now, at age 47, Darsey works as music director at Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church, next door to Emory University. He also heads a nonprofit group called Meridian Herald that puts together concerts and worship services. In the fall, for instance, the group holds old-fashioned camp meeting services at Salem Campground near Covington. This weekend, Meridian Herald will hold its seventh annual Southern Folk Advent, a service that combines old-style preaching with bluegrass music and songs from the Sacred Harp, a collection of tunes published in Georgia in 1844. The service will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 10:30 a.m. Saturday at the Old Church in Oxford, home of Emory University's Oxford campus. The service is open to the public without charge, although an offering will be collected. Darsey doesn't want these services to be museum pieces. He's interested in preserving the tunes, not the Sacred Harp style of singing. He scores the hymns in modern ways. A bluegrass band opens the service and musicians accompany the singers on some of the hymns. "What I'm trying to do is get to the spiritual heart of it," Darsey said recently over coffee at a Little Five Points shop near his home. "I'm trying to imagine people singing it before there was anything about their singing. They just created their music out of the land and out of their lives." Darsey believes the old songs, shaped by generations of singers, can convey a spiritual truth not found elsewhere. Many hymns were rooted in life in the farm and look for a release from hardship and suffering. "These tunes were really the white equivalent of the spirituals," Darsey said. Atlantans may mostly have made their marks by looking forward, by bulldozing what's come before in hopes of finding something better in the days yet to come. But some still look for a link to those who came before. "I believe we need to listen to our ancestors," Darsey said. "This music just sprang out of our ancestors." Darsey wants to maintain a musical connection. "Music gets in our souls and affects us profoundly," he said. "What I try to do and what the Herald tries to do is make sure what we see and hear does good for our souls. I think this connects us to our past in a good way." Years ago, when Darsey started pulling together songs for the Advent service, someone told him that even if the people in his audience had never heard these hymns before, they would feel like they recognized them anyway. These tunes sounded so familiar that people would simply believe that they had been singing them all their lives. They could find comfort there. After all, there's a reason old songs survive. Our DeKalb columnist e-mail: jearle@ajc.com
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