Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture

Before the Bible Belt fastened itself across the South, competing factions of evangelicals fought over their faith's future, and a contrarian sect, self-named the Primitive Baptists, made its stand. Joshua Guthman here tells the story of how a band of antimissionary and antirevivalistic Baptists defended Calvinism, America's oldest Protestant creed, from what they feared were the unbridled forces of evangelical greed and power. In their harrowing confessions of faith and in the quavering uncertainty of their singing, Guthman finds the emotional catalyst of the Primitives' early nineteenth-century movement: a searing experience of doubt that motivated believers rather than paralyzed them.

But Primitives' old orthodoxies proved startlingly flexible. After the Civil War, African American Primitives elevated a renewed Calvinism coursing with freedom's energies. Tracing the faith into the twentieth century, Guthman demonstrates how a Primitive Baptist spirit, unmoored from its original theological underpinnings, seeped into the music of renowned southern artists such as Roscoe Holcomb and Ralph Stanley, whose "high lonesome sound" appealed to popular audiences searching for meaning in the drift of postwar American life. In an account that weaves together religious, emotional, and musical histories, Strangers Below demonstrates the unlikely but enduring influence of Primitive Baptists on American religious and cultural life.

Author: Joshua Guthman
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 09/28/2015
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 9.27h x 6.17w x 0.64d
ISBN: 9781469624860

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2016

About the Author

author bio for back cover of book (mentions the website, to be live Sept 1 2015:

Joshua Guthman is assistant professor of history at Berea College. To listen to examples of the music in the book, and for more information on Joshua Guthman's work, visit http: //www.strangersbelow.net.