Brett Sutton was born in 1948 and raised in Champaign-Urbana, Ill. He was graduated with honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1970 with a Bachelors degree in English. After a period of work and pursuit of his musical interests, he enrolled in the Curriculum of Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he earned a Masters degree in 1976. His thesis project, entitled The Gospel Hymn, Shaped Notes, and the Black Tradition, focused on African American spiritual folk singing around Raleigh and Durham, N.C. In 1982, Brett Sutton went on to earn a Ph.D. in anthropology and, in 1988, he earned a Masters in Library Science, all at UNC.
Peter Hartman was born in 1959 and graduated in 1975 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.S. in business administration. Peter Hartman, also a banjo player, joined Brett Sutton to explore their mutual interest in religious folk music. In 1976, they moved to southwestern Virginia where they resided for eight months, the duration of the project documented in this collection, entitled Religious Folksongs in the Virginia Mountains, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This region of Virginia, including Franklin, Lloyd, Henry and Patrick counties, was chosen because of the numerous resources in the archaic spiritual folksong style. From this research, a book and LP recording were produced, Primitive Baptist Hymns of the Blue Ridge, published in 1982 by the University of North Carolina Press.
The collecting project investigated the relationships between many rural churches involved in the Primitive Baptist tradition in the Blue Ridge Mountains region, including white and African American congregations that attended the same churches up until the 1890s. A second emphasis was on other rural churches of the area: the Old Regular Baptists and other Baptist groups, the Pentecostal-Holiness sects, and the Church of the Brethren. Sutton and Hartman were mostly interested in collecting religious folksongs that are often unwritten, sometimes unknown to scholars, and variable from church to church and from tradition to tradition. The study revealed the importance of the music's presence in the community, the spiritual values that the music conveys, and why and how the music has survived.
From the guide to the Brett Sutton and Peter Hartman Collection, 1976, (Southern Folklife Collection)
