Reworking the Traditional

This story about reviving Filipino tribal tattooing practices caught my eye recently:  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27539510. That's partly because we used to work in Kalinga, where some of the older men and women still have these tattoos. (See the photo below of the tats on our departed friend, Gayumma. She is holding Maddie here way back in 2003.)

The tedious and painful tattooing process has been (understandably) fading out. But some young Filipino people featured in the BBC article are trying to revive the artform. Their new artwork has been adapted to make the images less regional and more pan-Filipino, and the process has been modified to make it a bit more bearable for the recipient.

In my years as an ethnodoxologist in the Philippines, I saw churches in tribal areas making similar modifications to their traditional music. Young people did not want to lose the songs and dances that their ancestors knew. But those forms were not necessarily easy to learn or sing in a congregation. Here is a sample of a traditional Kalinga song. Try teaching this to your congregation for next Sunday:

Revitalizing traditional music was an issue in many song-writing workshops that we facilitated for tribal groups. In every workshop the participants were able to compose new songs to use in church, but they often sounded a lot like standard praise-and-worship songs. Nothing wrong with that, but they didn't sound especially unique. Songs of those songs could have come from anywhere. However, on certain occasions there would be certain person in the group who had a special skill for weaving traditional sound into new songs. These songs could be sung and learned by a group, but their sounds were still rooted in the local traditions. Several years back I wrote a short article in the book All the World is Singing about a young Manobo man who had this gift. He called his newly-composed songs "semi-tribal" because they combined some melodic fragments from traditional chants and melded them into a standard verse-chorus structure.

Here is a short sample of the song that he came up with, which is mentioned in the article:

A few years later, I worked with another Manobo group that came up with this song. Again, it has elements of a traditional chant-like melody, backed up by a standard guitar-chord structure:

Today I pastor in an area of North Carolina where roots music is still performed. There are a couple of places within driving distance that have Saturday night performances that are rich with the stringed instruments like the banjo, fiddle, bass, and guitar. I would really like to work with some musicians who could work those traditional sounds into some new songs to use for Sunday morning. Wouldn't it be great to sing the responses to The Great Thanksgiving, backed up by a traditional string band?