The Forgotten History of Black Calvinism

I heard the Primitives before I knew anything about them. It was their singing. There was a keening voice begging God for deliverance, a voice answered in long sonorous swells by other voices, all of them unspooling a modal melody, and the hymn itself sung so slowly as to melt its text into an incantatory strain that sounded to me like people calling up spirits. It struck me dead. I had never heard anything like it. It was beautiful. Those sounds possessed me and puzzled me and would not let me go.