Americans line up to hear psalm singing in Gaelic [Scotsman article]

BEN MCCONVILLE
in New Haven

AMERICA last week witnessed a new explosion in interest in Scottish culture after a group of Gaels touched a nerve in a way that Tartan Week could not.

More than 16 million listeners tuned in to National Public Radio to hear a group of Gaelic psalm singers from Back Free Church in Lewis perform alongside Baptist congregations from Kentucky and Alabama.

The Gaels are in the US to take part in a conference on line singing at Yale University alongside a white congregation of Old Regular Baptists from Kentucky and a black Primitive Baptist church from Killen, Alabama.

After the broadcast the switchboard at Yale was jammed as Americans scrambled to get tickets for a concert in which the three congregations were to 'line out' an ancient form of worship, which was once common throughout Europe and the US.

The international conference on line singing was arranged by Willie Ruff, a professor of music who has played with some of the giants of jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis.

Ruff says "precenting the line" - the traditional unaccompanied singing of psalms in Gaelic in the Presbyterian churches in the Hebrides - is one of the predecessors of 'lining out', still practised in black churches in the South.