Great Thread Jerry,

I have a bluegrass group, "Bluegrass Messengers" and we do black gospel versions and white gospel versons of bluegrass songs. I learned black gospel from teaching black gospel to students who would bring in tpaes and CD's for me to teach them. The bass player in our group is black and plays in a black church.

We do "Lonesome Valley" and "Woke Up this Morning" in the black Southern gospel style, plus in other songs like "Bluegrass Boogie" we use the call and response style then at the end we do a vamp (I call that the repeated end section) with the back-up singers singing "Bluegrass Boogie" and the lead improvising over it.

I have also sung in shape-note groups where there are fuging tunes but the black gospel style singing is the main style I'm trying to incorporate in our "bluegrass" group.

-Richie