Southern Harmony

In today's Mass, we sang a hymn called "How Wonderful the Three-in-One". Text by Brian Wren with the tune coming from the old hymnal "Southern Harmony".  Southern Harmony was an old Baptist hymnal from the 1800s and, to me at least, is best known as containing the haunting spiritual "Down in the River to Pray" which languished in obscurity until Allison Krauss popularized it in the film O Brother Where Art Thou?

However "Southern Harmony" has a much different connotation to me. It's also the title of the Black Crowes' second album.  When I was in college, The Black Crowes were my favorite band.  Their first album was good, with some notable hits like "Hard to Handle" and "She Talks to Angels" but their second album was a knock-out.  Avoiding the "sophmore curse" that many bands go suffer, Southern Harmony remains, to this day, their best album in my mind.

The Black Crowes had a southern gothic feel in those days.  Their songs were bleak and expressed the pain of lives with no goal and relationships with no foundation.  The cover of Southern Harmony expresses this with the band standing in a muddy trash-filled alley, barely even engaging the camera.  Prior to the release of Southern Harmony, there were occasional rumors about the band; that they were heavy drug users (true) and that the practiced voodoo (false).  The inside artwork of the album certainly did nothing to dispel those rumors, with a voodoo king holding court over an assembly of skeletons.  Or something. I never really understood it.  And I've never found out where the artwork actually came from.

Surely the choice of album title and artwork was an ironic and provocative way of pushing back against their critics.

The Black Crowes were at the top of their game when Southern Harmony came out, but their fame was coming to a close.  They decided to take on TicketMaster and the big concert promoters, like Pearl Jam had done, but they weren't Pearl Jam.  Sporadic tours combined with heavy drug use and subsequent squabbling in the group reduced The Black Crowes to a niche act now, unable even to sell-out the Choctaw Casino's ballroom in Durant OK where I saw them last year.  They are not the dark kings anymore, but the supplicants.  The Worship of God raises one to God's throne.  Evil does not brook competition.

All this went through my head during Mass.  Not a very positive meditation for Trinity Sunday.  There's nothing wrong with using a tune from that old hymnbook, though I draw the line at actually singing "Down in the River to Pray" in Mass which our choir did once.   But it's interesting how a seemingly innocent choice of song can spur unexpected images in the minds of the listeners.