"A superb study of Primitive Baptist belief and practice in a specific region of the South. Expands our knowledge of an often neglected group."--Bill Leonard, Dean, School of Divinity, Wake Forest University Between 1819 and 1848, Primitive Baptists emerged as a distinct, dominant religious group in the area of the deepest South known as the Wiregrass country. John Crowley, a historian and former Primitive minister, chronicles their origins and expansion into South Georgia and Florida, documenting one of the strongest aspects of the inner life of the local piney-woods culture. Crowley begins by examining Old Baptist worship and discipline and then addressing Primitive Baptist reaction to the Civil War, Reconstruction, Populism, Progressivism, the Depression, and finally the ferment of the 1960s and present decline of the denomination. Intensely conservative, with a strong belief in predestination, Old Baptists opposed modernizing trends sweeping their denomination in the early 19th century. Crowley describes their separation from Southern Baptists and the many internal schisms on issues such as the saving role of the gospel, the Two Seed Doctrine, and absolute as opposed to limited predestination. Going beyond doctrine, he discusses contention among Old Baptists over music, divorce, membership in secret societies, sacraments administered by heretics, and rituals such as the washing of feet. Writing with insight and sensitivity, he navigates the history of this denomination through the 20th century and the emergence of at least twenty mutually exclusive factions of Primitive Baptists in this specific region of the Deep South.

A Country Strange and Far considers how and why the Methodist Church failed in the Pacific Northwest and how place can affect religious transplantation and growth.

In The Sound of the Dove, Beverly Bush Patterson explores one of the oldest traditions of American religious folksong, a national heritage of great beauty and dignity that remains vital in the lives and worship of predestinarian Primitive Baptists in the southern mountains. This unaccompanied and frequently unharmonized congregational singing challenges our assumptions about creativity, aesthetics, meaning, and identity. Patterson's revealing study incorporates interviews, field observations, historical research, song transcriptions, and musical analysis. She uses seventeenth-century English documents to trace historical antecedents of Primitive Baptist singing and to frame her discussion of religious belief and gender roles as they intersect with singing. One chapter is devoted to the role of women in this church.

This study describes the creation of the Primitive Baptist movement and discusses the main outlines of their thought. It also weaves the story of the Primitive Baptists with other developments in American Christianity in the Early Republic.

The definitive history of the dominant religious group within the state during the last two centuries

Examines the economy and it's impact of slavery on the coast land slave states pre-Civil War.

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.