From Lining Out to Christian Pop: A Brief Overview of Devotional Music in American History

As we all know, America was founded by intensely religious settlers for whom the Bible was the centerpiece of both literacy and faith. For many Protestant settlers the book of Psalms was also the centerpiece of their music. Part of this was due to the fact that not every family had access to Psalm books, and even greater number were not literate enough to have been able to read them even if they had. The result was a singing style that is known as lining out. The way it worked was that a very slow tempo was played upon which the minister or someone else in the church would chant the Psalms line by line just before it was repeated in song style by the congregation.

What made it more than just a kind of continental version of a Gregorian chant was that there would be embellishments made along the way by various people. What this eventually produced was a form of music known technically as dissonant heterophony. You may be familiar with this from certain kinds of African music; essentially what takes place is two statements of the same melody being made at the same time. To contemporary ears, this would sound rather harsh, hence the term dissonant.

Lining out singing utilizing dissonant heterophony was, therefore, really the first kind of religious music in America. Over time the practice settled into polyphonic compositions based around the rhythm of the Psalms and this would be considered far less strident to modern ears. These polyphonic compositions essentially were constructed in a repetitive overlap that may sound rather familiar to contemporary churchgoers. While it would be a mistake to suggest that this primitive form of American devotional music was an early form of gospel, there is little doubt that it was an influence on that particularly American style of religious musical expression.