This is a great thread!!!!! Keep em' coming. In the Southeast USA, on these border Appalchia areas like Chattannoga, where there was a huge class of equally poor, uneducated blacks and whites, much of the music was shared. Even today, on a Sunday morning, you'll hear the same songs in black and white churches. I can go to my in-laws' little Church of God and hear them do some old gospel numbers, with steel guitars and drums. Then, I can go a mile away, and hear the same song, done a little differently, in a black congregation.
    In about 1966, my in-laws moved from a little mining community, about thyirty miles North from here, called Gruetli. They didn't have indoor plumbing, and the entertainment was music. Non-church music was considered dangerous, since it was associated with drinking and carousing. Greutli was/is a little coal mining community.
    About thirty miles south from here is Sand Mountain, Alabama, where sacred heart singing has thrived for decades, which might be the only area in the US where it survived.
    You can listen to these raw, unadulterated traditional singing, and you can hear these amazing rythyms and inflections.
    White Southern Gospel singing is largely a commercial venture.

keep it coming Jerry and Thanks!!!!