quote:

---

...Gillespie often regaled his friends with stories of how the Scots had influenced the blacks in his home state of Alabama. He spoke to his long-time collaborator, Willie Ruff, a bassist and French horn player, about how his parents told of the black slaves who spoke Gaelic, the tongue of their masters...

...A chance visit to a black Baptist church in Alabama led Ruff to discover that some congregations were still "lining out" in the Deep South. This is a call and response form of worship where a precentor sings the first line of a psalm and the congregation follows.

Ruff had thought that this ancient form of worship, which predated the Negro spiritual, had died out. But then he discovered that the practise was still going strong among white, Gaelic speaking congregations in the Western Isles. His investigations also took him to a white congregation in Kentucky...

---

I think that the Ulster Scots Irish (Scots Protestants transplanted back to Ireland in the early C17 by James I) were the first major wave to go to the southern states, and were the more likely aristos/slave owners (although many Irish Catholics were as well -- read your Gone with the Wind). The Highlanders and Islanders would have been driven out much later, after Culloden (1746), and the Lowlanders not mainly until the C19.

None the less, these are ethnically the same people (well, the Lowlanders aren't, but they're very late emigrants), most of them originally Irish (the Scots arrived in Scotland from Ireland and overwhelmed the Picts, ca the C8). And certainly the ones who were first encouraged to emigrate to the New World colonies in the C17 were the enthusiastic Protestant converts, given the Crown's continuing anxiety about Catholic plots everywhere.

I suppose what I am wishing to note is that there would have been a dominant dissenting, vaguely Presbyterian culture into which later, often slightly different immigrant cultures would have fed until well into the C19, all the time melding as well with the by-then indigenous black culture of the mountains and the South. Given that we are talking about close to three centuries of immigration and history, I suspect that the cultural history that remains to be written is huge and most complex.

Charlie Mingus's name: I've thought about that before. The Scots' pronunciation of "Menzies" is something like "Meng-ges."