This collection of essays, best described as an extended set of liner notes to its accompanying compact disc, frames its topic with deceptive modesty. Benjamin Lloyd (1804-60) was a Primitive Baptist preacher, who in 1841 published some 535 hymn texts under the title Primitive Hymns. Lloyd's Hymnal (as it is often called now) has been a small but consistent seller ever since, finding wide use among Primitive Baptists throughout the South. The CD [as well as the book] appropriately uses Lloyd's as a point of reference from which to navigate the varied landscape of folk worship in the South. Those who find beauty in the music and worship of the southern folk will be overwhelmed by the sounds and the spiritual intensity; those who grapple with the tangled biracial culture of the South will find a key to understanding the devotion of southerners, black and white, to this small book. - The Alabama Review
