PNEUMA 36 (2014) 2544

brill.com/pneu

Pentecostal History, Imagination,

and Listening between the Lines
Historiographic Creativity for Writing Histories of the Marginalized
Andrew Sinclair Hudson*
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
hudsona@sas.upenn.edu

Abstract
As Pentecostals have historically lived, ministered, and led from the margins, their
histories often challenge the historian. Reading the religious and social histories contemporaneous to the beginnings of many pentecostal churches and movements is
often not enough to discover the complex tapestry of pentecostal voices. Not only
oral but also, and particularly, aural historical elements play a key role in the recovery of the unheard protagonists in pentecostal histories. The example of Richard
Green Spurling and the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) provides an opportunity to
imaginatively reconstruct the influences of African Americans on a white Appalachian
Baptist-turned-pentecostal preacher. Investigating sung moments of African American
prisoners working on a local railroad could shape the religious pedigree of this classical
North American pentecostal denomination. This article will explore pentecostal historiography by investigating Spurling and the sung music of African American prisoners
as a case study of imaginatively rereading pentecostal histories.

Keywords
pentecostal historiography African American religion Appalachian religion
Church of God (Cleveland, TN) ethnomusicology

* I would like to thank David Roebuck, Marie Spurling Crook, and Wade Phillips for their help
in my research as well as the anonymous readers whose comments, corrections and critiques
brought this article to fruition.

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-03601003

26

hudson

I do not believe that the pattern of Southern life can be fundamentally

reshaped until what lies behind these roaring, ironic choruses is understood.
alan lomax

Sound becomes a medium for expressing theology in song, speech, primal

cries, ambient sounds, and music-making. Through the choreography of
sound, meaning is internalized. Sound becomes a hermeneutic and its
generation of knowledge supplements epistemology with acoustemology
as a sonic way of knowing.
david daniels iii1

Introduction
The Church of God (Cleveland, TN) has historically been acknowledged to
have begun as an Appalachian church.2 Because of its Southern Appalachian
location, it has been assumed that the first congregations would fit the social
1 Alan Lomax, Murderous Home and What Makes a Work Song Leader? in Prison Songs:
Historical Recordings from Parchman Farm 194748, Vol. 1, Murderous Home (Cambridge, MA:
Rounder Records Corporation, 1997 [1947]); David Daniels, Gotta Moan Sometime: A Sonic
Exploration of Earwitnesses to Early Pentecostal Sound in North America,Pneuma 30 (2008):
26.
2 Charles W. Conn, Like a Mighty Army: A History of the Church of God, Definitive Edition (Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press, 1995); Deborah McCauley, Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 277280; Wade Phillips, Richard Spurling and Our
Baptist Heritage, Reflections: Newsletter of the Hal Bernard Dixon Jr. Pentecostal Research Center 2, no. 4 (Spring 1993): 13; The Church of God in the Light and Shadow of America, unpublished research paper (Cleveland, TN, 2002); The Significance of the Fire-Baptized Holiness
Movement (18951900) in the Historical and Theological Development of the WesleyanPentecostal-Charismatic Metamorphosis, paper presented to the Second Annual Meeting of
the Historical Society of Church of God Movements (Cleveland, TN: May 24, 2003). Hereafter
Church of God will be used to refer specifically to the Church of God (Cleveland, TN). For
more on the different groups with the name Church of God see Vinson Synan, The HolinessPentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, MI:

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pentecostal history, imagination, and listening

27

pattern and type of isolated whites.3 Consequently, the written history of the
Church of God does not include African Americans until 1909.4 Yet, upon further critical investigation, Appalachian history reveals a tri-racial culture5 and
interesting chronological and geographic overlaps of these isolated whites
with the sociocultural presence and influence of African Americans. By intentionally listening to the sung music of African American prisoners, I am attempting to imaginatively reconstruct a plausible musical interaction between
African Americans and the so-called isolated whites and to suggest a historical African American influence on Richard Green (R.G.) Spurling and the
formation of the Church of God.
My task in this article is both historical and historiographic. Historically, I am
seeking to reconstruct the diverse cultural and religious landscape of Southern
Appalachia by highlighting the often overlooked influence of African Americans in the region. Historiographically, I am arguing for an expansion of the
historical material and scope of historical investigation in religious, particularly
pentecostal, histories. Methodologically, I will construct this argument through
the employment of oral, aural, and written histories. The reconstructive nature
of this article employs imaginative exploration that requires interdisciplinary
work. I will investigate the ethnomusicology of African American convict lease
labor, personal interviews with descendants of early Church of God leaders,
and Appalachian ethnohistories in light of written Church of God history.

Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997), 6883; and Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global
Charismatic Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 5157.
3 See Conn, Like a Mighty Army, 5. For a critical deconstruction of these isolationist perspectives see Henry D. Shapiro Appalachia on Our Mind (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina, 1978), 77, 80.
4 H. Paul Thompson, Jr., On Account of Conditions That Seem Unalterable: A Proposal about
Race Relations in the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) 19091929,Pneuma 25, no. 2 (2003): 247;
see also: David G. Roebuck, Unraveling the Cords that Divide, paper presented at the 40th
Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies (Memphis, TN: March 2011), 35; Conn,
Like a Mighty Army, 112117; Bill George, Until All Have Heard (Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press,
2010), 1920.
5 The tri-racial culture of Appalachia reveals European, Cherokee, and African peoples, traditions, and culture. Laurence French, An Oral History of Southern Appalachia (Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen Press, 2008); Jon F. Sensbach, Before the Bible Belt, in Religion in the American South, ed. Beth B. Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2004), 530.

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A Pentecostal History
The Church of God is historically remembered as an Appalachian pentecostal
church in her infancy.6 It was not until 1905, under the leadership of Ambrose
J. Tomlinson, that the church would lose her Appalachian-mountain centering
when the group of churches transferred their center to the valley town of Cleveland, Tennessee. This article will focus on the churchs earlier Appalachian
history, which ranges between 1886 and 1905 and is extant in a collage of written histories and oral traditions. The vagueness of this Appalachian history
has precipitated an uncritical assumption that the first congregations were
influenced and embodied only by isolated whites. Charles Conn indirectly
evinced these isolationist perspectives in his historical account of the Church
of Gods Appalachian infancy: Characteristics of the people included isolationism, conservatism, individualism, frugality and a hearty degree of fatalism.7
These isolationist typologies have been deconstructed in Appalachian studies.
Henry Shapiro described this vision of Appalachia as a fabricated conservation
of ethnic purity in which the purest Anglo-Saxon stock could be found in the
isolation of the mountains.8 The continuation of these typologies in the Church
of Gods history has silenced the influence of African Americans in this early
history.
This fabricated social imaginary of Appalachia still delimits the participation and investigation of protagonists in the Church of Gods early history
despite the tri-racial culture of Appalachia, in which peoples of Cherokee,
African American, and Euro-American descent have historically populated
the region.9 Consequently, written histories of the Church of God, her members, and church formation are still silent about African American influence
in the beginning of the 1880s.10 Not until 1909 are African American voices,

7
8
9

10

McCauley, Appalachian Mountain Religion, 277280; Wade Phillips, Richard Spurling

and Our Baptist Heritage, Reflections: Newsletter of the Hal Bernard Dixon Jr. Pentecostal
Research Center 2, no. 4 (Spring 1993): 13; The Church of God in the Light and Shadow
of America, and The Significance of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Movement (18951900)
in the Historical and Theological Development of the Wesleyan-Pentecostal-Charismatic
Metamorphosis.
Conn, Like a Mighty Army, 5.
Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 77, 80.
The scope of this paper does not permit discussion of the full ethnographic diversity of
the tri-racial culture of Southern Appalachia. See French, An Oral History of Southern
Appalachia, and Sensbach, Before the Bible Belt, 530.
Conn provides a glancing reference to the friendly Cherokee who were unhappily

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leadership, and influences recorded.11 The late recording, though not exceptional in its character, perpetuates the stereotype of isolated whites starting an
Appalachian church and is misleading about the cultural diversity in Southern
Appalachia.
The African American presence within the region of the Church of Gods
origins in the 1880s emerges from the reinvestigation of the tri-racial context of
Southern Appalachia. Ethnographic research on Southern Appalachia points
to the active presence of African Americans in and around the birthplace of the
Church of God.12 The continued presence of African Americans in the region of
Southern Appalachia provides the most basic challenge to the cultural mythology of their absence. Although the mountainous region has been historically
characterized by isolation and merely subsistence agriculture rather than plantation cash-crop production, Southern Appalachias African American population traces its roots to the industry of chattel slavery. Tragically, even within
many academic publications, the fabled absence of African American slavery
in Appalachia still persists, despite empirical studies of census records that
clearly reveal that slavery existed in all of the Appalachian South in every
Appalachian county south of the Mason-Dixon line.13 At stake in this historical mis-acknowledgement is not merely a more diverse demographic, but also
a continuity of voice and recognition of cultural influence. African Americans
were and are a bodily presence and voice in Southern Appalachian culture.14
The evidence of African Americans in Southern Appalachian culture, as exemplified by Cherokee-owned plantations15 and music styles and instruments that

11
12

13

14

15

removed but never raises the possibility of African Americans within the culture. Conn,
Like a Mighty Army, 56.
Roebuck, Unraveling the Cords that Divide, 35; Conn, Like a Mighty Army, 112117;
George, Until All Have Heard, 1920.
John C. Inscoe, Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South (Lexington, KY:
University of Kentucky Press, 2008), 105. William H. Turner, The Demography of Black
Appalachia: Past and Present, in Blacks in Appalachia, ed. William H. Turner and Edward
J. Cabbell (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1985), 239; Frederick L. Olmsted,
A Journey in the Backcountry (New York: C.A. Alvord, Mason Brothers, 1860), 217.
Richard B. Drake, Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia, in Appalachians and Race,
ed. John C. Inscoe (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2001), 17; Turner, The
Demography of Black Appalachia: Past and Present, 237261.
Wilma A. Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5; and Conrad Ostwalt and Phoebe Pollitt, The Salem School and
Orphanage: White Missionaries, Black School, in Appalachians and Race, ed. John C.
Inscoe (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2001), 235.
Daniel C. Crews, Faith and Tears (Winston-Salem, NC: Moravian Archives, 2000), 3; and
Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6465.

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still define the regions bluegrass music,16 prompts another look at the possible
African American influences on the early Church of God.
It was in this tri-racial context of Southern Appalachia that the first three
developmental events of the nascent church took place.17 These events overlap
like phases and are not recorded with great specificity, but are extant in the
form of several narratives. The first event was the founding of the Christian
Union (the first congregation) on August 19, 1886 in Cherokee County, North
Carolina, followed by possibly three more local congregations with the same
name.18 Second, in 1896 an Appalachian Holiness revival began in the Shearer
Schoolhouse in Cherokee County, North Carolina with influences of Irwin
Fire-Baptized theology.19 Finally, the third event was the formation of the
Holiness Church in Camp Creek, North Carolina in 1902.20

16

17

18

19

20

See Cecelia Conway, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia (Knoxville, TN: University of
Tennessee Press, 1995); and Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1995).
Mickey Crews, The Church of God (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990),
10; Conn, Like a Mighty Army; A.J. Tomlinson, Last Great Conflict (Cleveland, TN: Press
of Walter E. Rodgers, 1913); E.L. Simmons, History of the Church of God (Cleveland, TN:
Church of God Publishing House, 1938); History of the Church of God, Second Edition,
unpublished typescript, 1949, accessed and used by permission of Dixon Pentecostal
Research Center Archives: Cleveland, TN; M.S. Lemons, History of the Church of God,
unpublished history, ca. 1937, accessed and used by permission of Dixon Pentecostal
Research Center Archives: Cleveland, TN.
For the 1886 first congregation see Conn, Like a Mighty Army, 12; Tomlinson, Last Great
Conflict, 185. The exact location of the Second Christian Union congregation is still ambiguous, but a dated photograph is in the private collection of Wade Philips. Most likely the
congregation was in Cherokee County, NC or Monroe County, TN, as Spurlings itinerant
church planting and preaching ministry was within this walking distance. Marie Spurling
Crook Interview (Cleveland, TN: October 27, 2010), interview conducted by author. See
also: G.P. Spurling, Biographical Sketch of the Reverend R.G. Spurling, unpublished typescript, accessed and used by permission of Dixon Pentecostal Research Center Archives:
Cleveland, TN.
W.F. Bryants 1922 account of the Shearer Schoolhouse Revival implied that the revivals
were probably a series of scattered services that lasted for about three years. The significance of the 1896 dating seems to revolve around the expulsion of these revivals from the
Schoolhouse and their continunation in informal settings thereafter. History of Pentecost, The Faithful Standard (September 1922): 6.
Revival attendants that continued to practice this frontier Holiness Christianity were
expelled from local congregations and later organized into the Holiness Church at Camp
Creek on May 15, 1902 under the leadership of Richard G. Spurling and William F. Bryant,
Jr. Conn, Like a Mighty Army, 2330, 53; Tomlinson, Last Great Conflict, 210.

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Common to all of these overlapping events is Richard Green (R.G.) Spurling in the role of protagonist. The life and work of R.G. Spurling, a white
Appalachian Baptist soon-to-be pentecostal preacher, serve as a key for the
enigmatic historiography of this period.21 The myriad grassroots congregations
and Holiness groups surrounding the foundation of the Christian Unions, the
Shearer Schoolhouse Revival, and the formation of the Holiness Church at
Camp Creek makes it difficult to distinguish between continuity and merely
parallel movements in formation or conflict.22 This is further complicated
by the differences of ecclesiological identity that emerge with the person of
Ambrose J. Tomlinson and his leadership; it was Tomlinson who provided the
written history of the 1886 Christian Union. Much has recently been written
with a view to tracing the thread of this history, and I will not repeat that work
here. Instead, I will simply affirm the identification of Spurling as the central
leader and the continuity of the early period of the Church of God (1886
1910).23
Spurling was the first pastor24 within this group of Baptists and Holiness
revivalists and a key leader in these three event-phases.25 Widening the lens of
investigation in search of African American influences and recognizing Spurlings importance, I would like to pay close attention to an otherwise peripheral
event in Spurlings life that was contemporaneous to the dawning period of the
Church of God. The Spurling familys oral tradition preserves that R.G. worked
on the construction of a local railroad project while simultaneously founding and leading the early Church of God. According to family tradition, R.G.
helped provide lumber for the large railroad project of the Hiwassee Loop con21

22

23

24

25

R.G. Spurling best represents the first phase of this formative period (18861910). Dale
Coulter, The Development of Ecclesiology in the Church of God (Cleveland, TN),Pneuma
29, no. 1 (2007): 61; and Founding Vision or Visions? Cyberjournal for Pentecostal-Charismatic Research 21, http://www.pctii.org/cyberj/cyberj21/Coulter.html, accessed April 16,
2013.
Daniel G. Woods, Daniel Awrey, the Fire-Baptized Movement, and the Origins of the
Church of God, Cyberjournal for Pentecostal-Charismatic Research 19, http://www.pctii
.org/cyberj/cyberj19/woods.html, accessed May 30, 2013.
See Coulters justification of Spurlings role and leadership countered by Hunters argument for Tomlinsons later leadership. Coulter, The Development of Ecclesiology in the
Church of God (Cleveland, TN) and Founding Vision or Visions. Harold Hunter, A.J.
Tomlinsons Emerging Ecclesiology, Pneuma 32, no. 3 (2010): 369389.
James Beaty, R.G. Spurling and the Early History of the Church of God (Cleveland, TN:
Derek Press, 2012), and Wade H. Phillips The Church of God in the Light and Shadow
of America.
Phillips, Richard Spurling and Our Baptist Heritage, 13.

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struction.26 The duration or extent of Spurlings work on this project is not

exactly clear, but, as later sermons and discourse reveal, Spurlings involvement
with the railroad had a lasting impact on his preaching and personal religious
beliefs.
The Hiwassee Loop27 is an intricate section of railroad that was constructed
between 1886 and 1903 in order to bring the railroad through the untamed
topography of Tate Mountain and the Hiwassee River basin. A patchwork history of railroad bankruptcies caused by costly innovation required both the use
of locals like Spurling to provide lumber and the inhumane system of convict
lease labor28 to grade the unyielding slopes of Tate Mountain. Between 200 and
250 prisoners at this construction site were remembered by railroad employees
for their continuous singing that echoed throughout the years of the construction.29 A closer look at the prisoner lease records reveals an immoral system
in which African Americans were forced into inhumane captivity. These men
were imprisoned to raise money for state governments and to provide labor at
costs economically lower than slavery for new industries in the Southeast.30
This is confirmed by statistical records that reveal that approximately 180 of
the prisoners working alongside Spurling at the Hiwassee Loop were African
26

27

28

29

30

Marie Spurling Crook Interview, October 27, 2010. The charter for the contemporaneous
and nearby Cartersville, Maryville, and Knoxville Railroad Company reveals that the
Hiwassee Loop construction was paying $0.25 per railroad tie, at a rate of 2,500 ties per
mile. Estimating a possible payment of $4,224.00 to lumber contractors, this large sum
would have likely been attractive to R.G. Spurling and other locals familiar with the
regions timber. C.M.K. Railroad Charter, 1890, in the Robert E. Barclay Papers (Location
Item 15 Microfilm Reel #12), accessed and used by permission of Tennessee State Library
and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.
For a detailed history of the construction of the Hiwassee Loop see The Old Line Railroad, compiled and ed. Ingrid Buelher and Linda Caldwell (Benton, TN: Polk County
Publishing, 2009); Maury Klein, History of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad (New York:
Macmillan Company, 1972); Kincaid A. Herr, The Louisville and Nashville Railroad 18501942
(Louisville, KY: L.&N. Magazine, 1943); and Joseph G. Kerr, Louisville and Nashville Railroad
Company (Louisville, KY: Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company, 1926), accessed and
used by permission of: University Archives and Records Center, University of Louisville:
Louisville, KY.
Mary E. Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 18651900 (Charlottesville, VA:
University of Virginia Press, 2000), 13; and Milfred C. Fierce, Slavery Revisited (New York:
Africana Studies Research Center, 1994), 9, 77.
H.G. Monroe, Hook and Eye Division, in Railroad Magazine (June 1940), 9, accessed and
used by permission of: University Archives and Records Center, University of Louisville:
Louisville, KY.
Fierce, Slavery Revisited, 77.

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Americans.31 The names of these prisoners have not yet been recovered, but
their music continues through later audio recordings of a sacred sung tradition
they preserved and propagated.

Imagination, Making Room to Listen

Shifting focus from the traditional written history to the peripheral events of
Spurlings life brings us to the fallow historical setting of this railroad construction site, the setting in which the historian is privileged to have the opportunity
to hear the unheard. When we acknowledge the way in which historical discrimination has continued through the notion of white isolation that prevails
in the historiography of the Church of God, we are compelled to embark upon
an innovative search for the voices and influences of the African Americans of
Appalachia that have been silent in the history of this churchs formation. Yet,
in a historical setting in which human beings were held in captivity for simply
being both African and American,32 traditional historical methods of looking
for names and narratives will not suffice. In order to recover African American
influences on the early Church of God, the historian employ a dignifying imagination that takes into account protagonists that had hierto been denied historiographic privilege.33 This imagination is not a counter-mythology designed
to conjure up cultural diversity in response to the mythology of white isolation, but rather is intended to be an intentional historiographic engagement
of the historical setting that was inaccurately identified as culturally homogenous. This imagination hears the forgotten protagonists as the historian listens
between the lines of traditional historiography to the peripheral music at the
construction site where Spurling was working during his early leadership of the
Church of God.
Researching musical activity is not a new task for pentecostal historians, and
it is not surprising that music would substantiate the rich diversity of influences
on the formation of this pentecostal church.34 Music has been described as a

31
32
33

34

Ibid., 10; and Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor (New York: Verso, 1996), 4647,
64.
See Douglas Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name (New York: Anchor Books, 2008).
For a similar historiographic method see Trouillots assertion to debunk the myth of
The Past as a fixed reality, Michel-RolphTrouillot, Silencing the Past (Boston, MA: Beacon
Press, 1995), 147.
E.g., David Martin, Tongues of Fire (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 175176; and
Bernardo Campos, Experiencia del Espiritu (Quito, Ecuador: CLAI, 2002), 79.

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regulative and guiding activity of both worship and social order within Pentecostalism.35 But I would like to make a stronger appeal about pentecostal
music. Pentecostalism is a religion in which divine encounter and immediacy reside as theological centers.36 Listening between the lines of the history
reveals that music is relaying aural testaments of felt emotive articulation; and
this music could function as an unheard pentecostal testimony that facilitates
the historical recovery of marginalized people.37 Recognizing the potential of
these musical testimonies precipitates an investigation of the possible musical
interaction between R.G. Spurling and African American prisoners during his
work on the railroad construction. By intentionally listening to the prisoners
sung music, I am imaginatively reconstructing a plausible musical interaction
and a historical African American influence on R.G. Spurling and the formation
of the Church of God.
A dignifying imagination reclaims these forgotten African Americans from
the background and re-envisions them as religious protagonists that provided
a tangible religious symbiosis of belief through their sung music.38 The recordings of ethnomusicologists provide aural testimony of how the prisoners seemingly mundane work preserved and multiplied a deeply sacred tradition, a

35

36
37

38

I am basing my thought on the epistemological ideas of James K.A. Smith. For example,
I mean that embedded in the embodied practices and spirituality of Pentecostalism are
the elements of a latent but distinctive understanding of the world James K.A. Smith,
Thinking in Tongues (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), 31. Whereas Grant
Wacker recognizes a regulating instrument in music for pentecostal liturgy, I would like to
move forward by also recognizing the aural and sonic experience of music as a particular
historic articulation of pentecostal belief. Wacker, Heaven Below (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 109110.
Terry L. Cross, The Divine-Human Encounter: Toward a Theology of Experience,Pneuma
31, no. 1 (2009): 334.
In a sense, this is a historiographic demonstration of David Daniels call for historic
investigation of sonic elements in early North American Pentecostalism. Resonating
with the multidimensionality of early Pentecostalism, sonic discourse complements other
forms of discourse drawn from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics. The
sonic discourse supplies an explanation of cultural borrowings that eludes dependence
on functionalist theories of social deprivation, psychological disorder, secularization, or
globalization Daniels, Gotta Moan Sometime, 11.
I am employing James Cones interpretation of African American labor music as theology.
Cone insists that this music is much more than a reactionary articulation to what is being
done to oppressed black peoples; rather, it is a creative theological response to restrict
the white assault on their humanity. James H. Cone, Black Spirituals, in Risks of Faith
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1999), 1516.

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tradition that I believe has vast significance for Pentecostal religious beliefs.
Listening to the melodies and continual rhythms of these African American
prisoners work ballads compel us to recognize another layer of epistemological reflection and articulation.39 The wails and bent notes of the lead singer
reveal the released anguish that was not allowed within the verbal lyrics overheard by guards. Those who appear within written histories as mere details of
railroad economics become cultural and religious protagonists when they are
heard in the songs of their toil.

Listening Between the Lines

Due to the technological limitations of Spurlings period, the historian must
depend on the later audio recordings of ethnomusicology to retrieve the emotion in these African American worksongs. In a 1934 article, pioneer ethnomusicologist John Lomax recorded the words of a powerful worksong entitled
Godamighty!
Ridin in a hurry.
Ridin like hes angry.
Well, I wonder whuts de matter?
Bull Whup in one han,
Cowhide in de udder,
Gonna be trouble!
Well, de Capn went to talkin
Well, come here an hol him.
Bully, low down yo britches!
Capn let me off, suh!
Woncha low me a chance, suh?
De bully went to pleadin,
De bully went to hollerin,

39

40

Great Godamighty!
Great Godamighty!
Great Godamighty!
Great Godamighty!
Great Godamighty!
Great Godamighty!
Great Godamighty!
Great Godamighty!
Great Godamighty!
Great Godamighty!
Great Godamighty!
Great Godamighty!
Great Godamighty!40

Daniel Chiquete supports the expansion of comprehension as a pentecostal exploration:

Considero que hay otras formas de saberes, ms all o paralelos al saber y el conocimiento
cientficos, otras formas de conocer, de aprender, que sin ser cientficos, pueden ser
igualmente vlidos e importantes. Haciendo Camino al Andar (San Jos, Costa Rica:
Centro Cristiano Casa de Vida, 2007), 27.
John Lomax, Sinful Songs of the Southern Negro, The Musical Quarterly 20, no. 2 (April
1934): 180.

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When imaginatively listened to between the lines, what appears at first to

be a work ballad without religious intent reveals an intrinsically theological
voice of protest. The pain of an expected flogging for work unfinished and
trouble between inmates request divine mercy: Godamighty! Yet the responsive refrain also invoked the judgment power of Great Godamighty for the
felt pain of the punished prisoner. The known power of Great Godamighty
invoked fear and revitalized lost energy so that the prisoners might complete
their assigned labor. In the pain foreshadowed in the bosss ridin in a hurry
and the all too familiar pain of the De bully went to hollerin, the hearer is
returned to the echoing and figuratively expansive Great Godamighty! The
presence of the Divine is found not only in the response of Great Godamighty,
but in the felt reality of the songs narrative calls, in which a responsive God
confronts the lived reality of the prisoner.41
Bama, an African American prisoner interviewed in Alabama in the 1940s,
provided access to a voice that is often hidden between the words of these
prison worksongs. Responding to the question of what is required for someone
to be a good leader of the traditional call and response prison worksongs, Bama
said the following:
it take the man with the most experience to my understandin to make
the best leader in anything. You see, if youd bring a brand new man here,
if he had voice where he could sing just like Peter could preach, and
he didnt know what to sing about, well he wouldnt do no good, see.
But heres a fellow, he, maybe he aint got no voice for singin but hes
been cooperating with the peoples so long an been on the job so long
till he know just exactly how it should go. And if he can just mostly talk
itwhy, and you understand how to work,well, it would go good with
you. It dont make any difference about the voice you have to be done
experienced.42

41

42

The performance of the song is what triggers the historian of Pentecostalism to look for an
element of religious belief. According to Ogbu Kalu, Pentecostal critique is not just about
historical origin and some ingredients of theology, but about ritual practices because of
the relationship between religious experience and religious expression. African Pentecostalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 81.
Transcription of audio recording taken from compact disc booklet. Alan Lomax, What
Makes a Work Song Leader? in Prison Songs: Historical Recordings from Parchman Farm
194748, Vol. 1, Murderous Home (Cambridge, MA: Rounder Records Corporation, 1997
[1947]).

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37

Bamas response equips the historian with lived interpretation of the emotive articulation recorded in the sacred moments of the prisoners songs. His
response foils the conversational context of a question that prioritized rhythm
as a utilitarian pacing of labor. According to Bama, voice quality and rhythm
are subservient to the sacred voicing of the experience.
To be a good song leader one must have to be done experienced, they have
lived through cooperating with the peoples so long and been plunged into
the depths of unending labor without pay or humane recognition, and then
they know just exactly how it should go.43 To enter into the extemporaneous composition of these call and response sung moments was to re-enter the
experiences and feelings that were not allowed the privilege of spoken or written protest. In this sense, singing in the line of imprisoned laborers working in
synchronization on unending tasks, such as grading for the Hiwassee Loop, was
to claim audaciously a connection with the Divine that sustained one beyond
what was physically realistic. To join in this sacred activity was to sing intonations of empowerment in the face of guards who embodied constant subjugation.44 Reimagined, the prisoners were composers of a sacred testament
of embodied divine power that favored their physically exhausted bodies over
the seemingly impossible labor tasks that they were assigned.45 The African
American prisoners songs challenge the historiographers usual parameters of
recording history, claiming place for the aural alongside the written.

43

44

45

Kosuke Koyamas concept of the praxis of free theologizing provides a helpful dialogue
partner for the interpretation of Bamas testimony. Waterbuffalo Theology (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1974), 8384.
Sometimes the lines of the song were intended for someone other than the laborer
himself He knew from experience that he could sing at the boss things which he could
not say to him safely. John Work, American Negro Songs (New York: Howell, Soskin & Co.,
1940), 40.
Edwin Apontes ethnographic work on North American Latino Protestants and their use
of coritos, short praise choruses that represent popular grassroots theology, is a helpful
parallel for interpreting the activity of the oppressed prisoners: the majority of this
population [in] the situation is one of powerlessness, oppression, and hopelessness.
However, the perception, and indeed the actuality of life-situations are changed when
these symbols (coritos) are appropriated and used to make sense of ones situation. God
takes the side of the powerless, affirms both Gods continuing concern and involvement,
and affirms the integrity of the culture, for these words of good news come through
musical vehicles that are part of the believers own culture and everyday experience.
Edwin D. Aponte, Coritos as Active Symbol in Latino Protestant Popular Religion, Journal
of Hispanic/Latino Theology 2, no. 3 (1995): 65.

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Generally, the adjective aural describes affective information that is felt

through the sense of hearing. Specifically, I am employing aural history as a
complementary oral history to exploit the sonic content of the prisoners songs
that expresses felt belief. In reconstructing the histories of marginalized peoples, researching verbal oral history is not enough to recover their stories.46 In
this history the recovery of the voices of African American prisoners working on
the same construction site as R.G. Spurling in Southern Appalachia requires an
imagination in which the aural dimension matters.47 Although it is extremely
idealistic to imagine Spurling pursuing and being allowed verbal conversations
with these prisoners, it is plausible to imagine him as receptive to their sung
music. In understanding the reality of as many as 180 working and singing
African Americans, this music becomes more than just background noise and
should be recognized as a principal feature of the historic environment.
In view of Spurlings penchant for expressing himself in music48 and the
fact that much of his early work was written in reaction to the persecution
experienced by the Holiness revivals,49 the historian is compelled to reinvestigate Spurlings writings in the context of the music of these African American
prisoners. His theologizing in the face of religious oppression mirrors the religious expression of the prisoners that Spurling would have encountered on the

46

47

48

49

Bruce Jackson relays this clearly in his reflections on recording prison worksongs: When
weoutsiders alllook at printed versions of songs that have both physical and psychological functions, we have to know something about those specifics, otherwise we are
looking at words and staves, nothing more. Wake Up Dead Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1972), xvii.
This is an attempt to recover what J. Kameron Carter has labeled counterhistory: Counterhistory, therefore, is an act of memoryto speak theologically, of anamnesisof
remembering in a certain way: counterhistory remembers how the unifying light of the
present order of things presupposes and is sustained by group opposition.Race (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 6566.
R.G. Spurlings use of songs and poems is prolific and is confirmed as a primary method
of self-expression in the first page of the book he began writing in the late 1890s: I have
prayed, studied and preached on the doctrines which I do here set forth in the following
pages by songs and short lectures Throughout the fifty-one-page book Spurling supplies fourteen songs and poems. Richard G. Spurling, The Lost Link (Turtletown, TN: 1920),
1. As an interesting corollary Klotter expounds upon the overlap between the folk traditions, including religious song and poetry, of white Appalachians and lowland-South
African Americans. James C. Klotter, The Black South and White Appalachia, in Blacks
in Appalachia, ed. William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell (Lexington, KY: University of
Kentucky Press, 1985), 5152.
Coulter, The Development of Ecclesiology in the Church of God, 64.

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Hiwassee Loop project. Between the church burning and the continual harassment by and expulsion from local congregations, Spurling finds and refines
language for his theology of the church in the lived motif of persecution.
Through blood and through strife
They hazarded their life,
They were hunted and killed
Over mountain and hill.50
Spurling wrote that to be the church in the face of these trials was to uphold
the law of love, the lost link of Gods government. Yet this law was intricately
connected to persecution and blood-stained garments.51 In Spurlings experience, the snare of creedal adherence and church division through denominational exclusivism was not an intellectual proposition but a lived reality that
had led christians [sic] to persecute each other.52 He saw the suffering of the
crucifixion as a removal of malice, envy, strife, [and] hatred. The cross forged
in suffering was more than the huge beam of timber on which [Christ]
spilt His most precious blood. The cross was the cancel[ing] stamp of Gods
grace, forged in persecution and to be taken up by believers as they actualize
Gods law of love in the world.53
Yet, for Spurling this law of love was also intimately connected to labor. For
Spurling the labor of this cross was not for payment but out of commitment to
the felt love of God:
Go work in my vineyard today,
The Master is calling for you;
Why ask your poor brethren for pay?
The Master will give you your due.54
Listening between the lines of Spurlings poems and songs, the religious call
to labor in Gods church reveals a parallel to the labor music of the African
American worksong tradition. In Spurlings verses the reader is thrust into the
crescendos of Gods love in the moment of persecution. Gods love is felt in
50
51
52
53
54

Spurling, Lost Link, 17.

Ibid.
Eld. R.G. Spurling, Dangers and Hindrances to the Cause of Christ, The Way 1, no. 6 (June
1904): 1.
R.G.S., The Glory of the Cross, The Way 2, no. 9 (September 1905): 4.
Spurling, Lost Link, 37.

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the divine power of the Holy Spirit, and Gods call to love is emotively more
palpable than doctrinal creeds and denominational positions:
A chain of doctrine now appears,
Thats cursed the sects for many years;
Be truth or false just which it May,
It drives Gods Spirit power away.
When their churches first begun,
By the Holy Spirit they were run;
But when their creeds each church had took,
The Holy Spirit them forsook.55
It is this felt divine power that had healed Spurling from the doom of death
as an sickly infant and would lead him to found the Church of God.56
In addition to music, Spurlings use of technical railroad imagery in a 1913
sermon and his 1897 and 1920 writings provides more weight to the plausibility
of the prisoners influence on him and the Church of God.57 Spurlings subsequent use of the railroad imagery of narrow and broad gauge rails reflects
the progression of the Hiwassee Loop construction58 and especially demonstrates these influences: Having felt it my duty to read my Bible in search of
the truth, I soon found myself, so to speak, trying to run a broad gauge engine
on a narrow gauge railway.59 Spurling preached that the great engine of the
Church of God can not travel these side tracks [of denominationalism and
creeds] because they are narrow gauge.60 This evolution of narrow gauge to
broad gauge railroad tracks in the railroad construction figured prominently in
55
56
57

58

59
60

Ibid., 4344.
Ibid., 47.
A transcript of the sermon is found in the printed minutes of the Church of God General Assembly: Echoes from the Eighth General Assembly of the Churches of God held in
Cleveland, TN January 712 1913 (Cleveland TN: Church of God Printing House, 1913), 3841,
accessed and used by permission of Dixon Pentecostal Research Center Archives: Cleveland, TN. Spurling, The Lost Link, and An Appeal, manuscript dated May 4, 1897, Wade
Phillips private collection. Much of what is in the manuscript was reproduced in the 1920
publication of The Lost Link.
As the construction progressed, so also did rail standards, and before the section was
finished the original narrow gauge tracks of the Hiwassee Loop had to be changed to the
standard or broad gauge. Klein, History of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, 308309.
Spurling, The Lost Link, 47.
Eighth General Assembly Minutes, 39.

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figure 1

41

Spurling Train Chart

Spurlings memory and provided a graphic expression of his understanding of

spiritual reformation. Spurling illustrated his sermon at the 1913 Church of God
General Assembly using a hand-drawn chart.61 Still extant, the chart contains
an image of a train on a wide track (standard gauge) that splits in two directions.
The upward split is labeled Arian and the downward Roman. Another split
off the Roman track is unlabeled but is indicated to be the sixteenth-century
Reformation. In front of these split tracks are numerous smaller (narrow gauge)
tracks and on the right side of the chart is another wide (standard gauge) track
to which the (Gospel Train) engine must return.
Though seemingly peripheral to the traditional written histories, Spurlings
involvement in railroad construction and his prolific use of song and verse
become extremely significant for the historian who is investigating African
American influences on the early history of the Church of God. The music
of these African Americans during the logging and lumber work of Spurling
causes us to reassess how we describe the beginnings of this Appalachian
pentecostal church. Written history records an isolated white Pentecostalism,

61

See Spurling Railroad Chart.

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while aural historical elements raise questions of sacred conversation and

symbiotic reception in the sidelines of worksongs and forgotten prisoners.
Taken further, the African American prisoners that worked alongside Spurling become extremely significant if their songs are reconceptualized. These
prisoners, re-envisaged with a dignifying imagination that makes room for listening between the lines of traditional history, become religious informants
that would have helped forge Spurlings ecclesiology and founding leadership.62 The presence of these African American prisoners becomes vitally important in order to understand the historical setting of the Church of Gods
formation, especially in the context of Spurlings influence on the Church of
God as its founding pastor and as mentor to first general overseer Ambrose
J. Tomlinson,63 and the impact upon the denomination of the three eventphases contemporaneous to Spurlings work on the railroad. When a pastor
has founded a new church and, subsequently, a pentecostal denomination in
which such poignant music of persecution and love has played such a vital role,
it would be negligent to ignore the songs and sacred sung expressions of the
African American prisoners that Spurling encountered while working on the
Hiwassee Loop.
Yet, this historical revision cannot be achieved at the cost of inadvertently
creating other historical vacuums. Spurling and the Holiness adherents that
would become the Church of God were immersed in a crucible of ecclesial
innovation. Spurlings group was in contact with other emerging bodies, such as
F.W. Hencks East Tennessee Holiness Association, whose evangelists preached
at the 1896 Shearer Schoolhouse Revival services and would later propagate
B.H. Irwins multiple baptisms of fire.64 Even Spurlings original discomfort and
his search for renewal arose from the fiery disagreements about the Landmarkism teachings of James Pendelton and James Graves.65 While listening between

62

63
64
65

Apontes ethnomusicology of Latino coritos depicts music as a congregational way of

doing and teaching theology, and I believe that this concept could also be applied to
the influences of the African American prisoners worksongs. Aponte, Coritos as Active
Symbol in Latino Protestant Popular Religion, 63.
Tomlinson introduced Spurling on the occasion of Spurlings 1913 sermon by saying, In
one sense I look upon him as my father. Eighth General Assembly Minutes, 8.
Woods, Daniel Awrey, the Fire-Baptized Movement, and the Origins of the Church of
God.
David G. Roebuck, Restorationism and a Vision for World Harvest, Cyberjournal for
Pentecostal-Charismatic Research 5 (February 1999), http://www.pctii.org/cyberj/cyberj5/
roebuck1.html, accessed June 4, 2013. Coulter, The Development of Ecclesiology in the
Church of God, 62.

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the lines, the historian cannot neglect the lines of established history. It has not
been my intention here merely to establish historical ethnic diversity at the cost
of neglecting the ecclesial diversity.
I am, rather, arguing for a re-evaluation of historiography. As historians of
Pentecostalism, our project, in its many contexts such as the early Church of
God, requires a broadening of the historical material because pentecostal histories were constituted through a broadening of potential protagonists. Aural
testimonies, heard between the lines of African American worksongs alongside the songs of an itinerant white Baptist preacher, not only diversify the
ethnographic setting of the early Church of God, but also facilitate the historical remembering of forgotten and marginalized religious protagonists.
The presence of these African American prisoners challenges the notion of
isolated whites, revealing new protagonists and, thereby, plausible religious
pedagogies. African American prisoners singing while building the Hiwassee
Loop railroad reveal initial religious influences in Spurlings person that may
have opened him to a more deeply felt Christianity. This Christianity, manifested and practiced in the Holiness worship of the Shearer School House
Revival and the 1907 Church of God acceptance of the Azusa Street pentecostal
doctrines, would have echoed Spurlings encounter with the African American
prisoners.66 Spurling worked on an immense project that had a lasting impact
on his religious identity, and he was confronted with these worksongs for hours
at a time. These singing African Americans who have been left out the written
histories may well have helped transform Spurlings mundane labor of logging
and railroad construction into a sacred symbol in which the ineffable [was]
breaking into the sphere of the mundane.67
Listening to the sung call and response choruses of these African American
prisoners underscores the importance of an imaginative historiography that
acknowledges their presence and possible influence on others like R.G. Spurling and the Church of God. It is highly unlikely that Spurling spoke or wrote theology with the African Americans prisoners, but if one understands sung music
as a congregational way of doing theology,68 one could ask whether Spurlings
experience of their worksongs in any way shaped his religious beliefs. The presence of these African Americans prisoners is very important during this crucial
66

67
68

Tomlinson later appropriated the doctrinal teachings of the 1906 Azusa Street Mission to
the charismatic experiences of the Church of God after his 1908 experience of glossolalia
as the initial sign of Spirit Baptism. Roger G. Robins, A.J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 184188.
Aponte, Coritos as Active Symbol in Latino Protestant Popular Religion, 6162.
Ibid., 63.

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period in which Spurling founded churches and then experienced exuberant

Holiness worship at the 1896 Shearer Schoolhouse Revival. These African American voices in Appalachian pentecostal history deserves to be heard.

Conclusion: Why Listen?

This work has not yielded empirical verifications but rather imaginative reconsiderations. I have sought to raise the question of African American influence
on the Church of God specifically and the incorporation of aural historiography
generally. Yet, a serious question about pentecostal studies remains: If Pentecostalism was sung, preached, and established by untraditional protagonists,
how can we write that history using traditional historiographical methods?
Pentecostalisms history and historiography must open a place for aural as
well as written history. The creative stretching of historiography that incorporates less traditional methods is more than interdisciplinary expirmentation; it
is an intentional effort to record all the actors in the drama of Pentecostalisms
history. Hearing these forgotten African American prisoners between the lines
of the Church of Gods early history inspires a serious question: Will pentecostal
historiography listen between the lines of the history to recover all Pentecostalisms unheard protagonists?

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