Minnie Lee’s Religion

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
Minnie Lee was born in 1898, the year after A. B. Crumpler began his Holiness revival in Dunn, North Carolina. She was a child when Gaston Cashwell introduced speaking in tongues in a Dunn warehouse in 1906. [1] By the time she would have become active in a church, other preachers were better known.

Julian Boyd recorded four of her religious songs, but only one hinted at her beliefs. Her version of "You Can Run a Long Time" began:

"When I looked down into holiness,
I saw it true and plain;
I saw that I could not despise his word
And in his love remain." [2]

As mentioned in the post for 22 March 2020, Free Will Baptists did not accept depravity as the human condition. Sin was an act of free will, and falling away from God through sin was their greatest fear. Resisting the impulse to "transgress God’s Law" was "among the highest of virtues." [3]

The use of word "Holiness" as a label for a way of life was introduced by Methodists. A Free Will Baptist hymnal published in New Bern in 1846 contained seven references to it. Four were Methodist, one was by a New Hampshire Baptist, one by a Maryland Baptist, and one may have been locally composed. [4] A later hymnal, published in the Greenville, North Carolina, area just after the Civil War, contained five references to Holiness: one by Charles Wesley, two by Isaac Watts, and two songs from the earlier songbook. [5]

One of the songs that appeared in both hymnals suggested the believer should follow the "way the holy prophets went" to avoid "banishment." It was described as "the King’s high way of holiness." [6] The other republished hymn described the "road that leads to God" as the "way of holiness." [7]

Lee used "Holiness" as a way of life, not as the achieved status promoted by Phoebe Palmer, Crumpler, and Cashwell. Their meaning of "sanctified and holy" occurred in the first verse of Bryan Banks’ version of "I Shall Not Be Moved." [8]

Lee’s first-person Holiness verse was not part of the original song. The rest of the verses were

third-person admonishments to church members who did not live up to standards of conventional morality. The chorus was more solemn. It warned:

"You can run on a long time
With the cover of the world pulled over your face;
You can run a long time;
But your sins are going to find you out."

The only other known version was collected from African Americans in Kentucky in the 1920s by Mary Allen Grissom. The chorus and five of her ten verses were the same as five of Lee’s seven. It did not contain the Holiness verse; its additional stanzas criticized the unseemly behavior of preachers. [9]

The thematic structure was like a sermon Billy Sunday published in 1908 [10] and continued to preach thereafter. [11] "Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out" repeated the warning of God’s omnipotence after each anecdote about a uncommitted church goer.

Before World War I, Sunday only preached in the North and Midwest. After a revival in New York City sponsored by John D. Rockefeller in the spring of 1917, he began speaking in the South. He was in Atlanta in the winter of 1917 and in Louisville in 1923. [12]

Sunday responded to segregation in Atlanta by holding five separate meetings with African Americans. His music director, Home Rodeheaver, recruited choirs from local Black colleges. Sunday’s first meeting was attended by 15,000; the choir had a thousand voices. [13] In subsequent meetings, local African American leaders took over the song leading, and, to quote a local newspaper, "the real music began." [14]

In the first African-American meeting, Sunday said:

"There are two verses of scripture I’d like to blaze all over Atlanta, and everywhere around. They are these:

"‘Be sure your sins will find you out,’ and

"‘If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness’." [15]

Rodeheaver probably did not publish "Your Sins Are Gonna Find You Out." In Atlanta, he used popular spirituals like "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and revival standards like "Brighten the Corner." [16] More likely, some souvenir vendor sold a cheap songbook that has not surfaced on the internet.

The success of Sunday’s revival in Atlanta meant any African American could have picked up the song and taken it to North Carolina, where, eventually, Lee heard the localized version. It diffusion path would not have been that different from the one for the other song Lee knew that first was published by Rodeheaver, "I Shall Not Be Moved." [17]

Sunday’s mother had been a Baptist; his wife was a Presbyterian. [18] He reduced sin to a list of tabooed activities like dancing, playing cards, and, especially in the years before Prohibition, drinking. Like Charles Finney, he used humiliation as a way to shame people into repentance. [19]

While Free Will Baptists had the same concerns about alienating God as Sunday, they did not share his desire to unmask their neighbors. That was probably why someone modified the lyrics of "You Can Run" with the introductory Holiness verse, much like someone in the 1840s had altered the New Hampshire Baptist hymn.

Three of Lee’s four religious songs – "You Can Run," "I Shall Not Be Moved," and "Come by Here" – were known by African Americans and Boyd did not transcribe them in dialect. The other described a man who Jesus told to preach the gospel. When he asked the Lord what to say, his "Hebenly Fader" spoke to him:

"Mah hands wuz tight and mah feet wuz bound,
De elements opened and de Lawd come down.
De voice I heard, it sound so sweet;
De elements opened to de soles of me feet." [20]

This ballad has not been reported elsewhere, so its province is unknown. The composer may have been an African American, or a white using a Black persona to express the inexpressible, but in a way that made the abstract concrete. Depending on the response of the listener, the singer could claim it was a joke about "the other" or acknowledge the reality of direct contact with the Holy Spirit.

End Notes
1. Crumpler and Cashwell were discussed in the post for 22 March 2020.

2. Minnie Lee. "You Can Run on a Long Time." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. 3:97.

3. T. F. Harrison and J. M. Barfield. History of the Free Will Baptists of North Carolina. Ayden, North Carolina: Free Will Baptist Press, 1898. 95.

4. Enoch Cobb. The Free Will Baptist Hymn Book. Newbern, North Carolina: William G. Hall. 1846.

5. Rufus K. Hearn, Joseph S. Bell, and Jesse Randolph. Zion’s Hymns. Falkland, North Carolina: 1867.

6. John Cennick. "Jesus Is the Way." [21] Cobb, 3, and Hearn, 31. Cennick worked with John Wesley, then left to join George Whitefield in 1740 after the latter returned from the colonies. Cennick later joined the Moravians in London. [22] He wrote this while working for Whitefield. [23]

7. "In pleasure sweet here we do meet." Cobb, 127, and Hearn, 155. It first was published in a New Hampshire Baptist hymnal edited by Joshua Smith in 1803. [24] Smith’s 1791 edition is not on the internet, and since the contents of the different editions varied widely, [25] I don’t know if he published it earlier. Smith’s version did not include the verse about holiness.

8. B. D. Banks. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. Brown 3:639. This was discussed in the post for 4 August 2019.

9. "Yo’ Sins Are Gonna Find You Out." Mary Allen Grissom. The Negro Sings a New Song. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1930. Reprinted by Dover Books of New York in 1969. 52–53. In her Forward, Grissom wrote: "most of the songs included in this volume have been taken directly from the Negroes in their present-day worship, and have been selected from those sung in the neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, and certain rural sections in Adair County." Her grandfather was born in Adair County in 1830, [26] and her father was a physician there. [27] She was teaching piano at the Louisville Conservatory of Music in the 1920s. [28]

10. William Ashley Sunday. Life and Labors of Rev. Wm. A. (Billy) Sunday, the Great Modern Evangelist. Decatur, Illinois: Herman, Poole and Company, 1908. 265.

11. Howard Johnston said he preached the sermon in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1914. [29]
12. Angela. "Billy Sunday." Apples of Gold website. 20 May 2009.

13. David W. Wills and Albert J. Raboteau. "African Americans and Billy Sunday in Atlanta (November–December 1917)." Amherst College website. Parts of the local African-American press criticized Black ministers for participating in the Jim Crow meetings. While they have a valid point, the fact the city allowed such large congregations of African Americans without whites being present to monitor them was extraordinary. Sunday and Rodeheaver, who explicitly forbid whites from attending the African-American meetings, successfully exploited the Jim Crow laws to benefit both themselves and their audiences.

14. Ned McIntosh. "Negroes Show Way to Whites in Giving at Sunday Meeting." Atlanta Constitution. 2 December 1917. 1A, 7A. Republished by Wills. Has the quotation.

"Religion Is Obedience to God’s Command, Says Sunday." Atlanta Constitution. 9 December 1917. 16A. Republished by Wills. "Rev. D. P. Johnson, a negro minister, who took Rody’s place at lending the singing and exhorting the sinners, that the meeting closed in a spontaneous outbreak of old-time religion which made the very rafters of the tabernacle shake with fervor." Rody was Rodeheaver.

15. "Billy’s Negro Meeting Great Success." Atlanta Georgian. 20 November 1917. Home edition, 9. Republished by Wills. The newspaper was owned by William Randolph Hurst. [30] The verse was Numbers 32:23: "But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out." [31]

16. Ned McIntosh. "Rody Learns about Singing and Sunday about Emotion When Negroes Hit the Trail." Atlanta Constitution. 20 November 1917. 1, 5. Republished by Wills.

17. "I Shall Not Be Moved" was discussed in the post for 4 August 2019.
18. Atlanta Constitution, Religion Is Obedience.

19. Charles Grandison Finney was discussed in the post for 12 August 2017. Free Will Baptists did not humiliate others; they practiced humility through the ritual foot washing with communion. [32] Lee’s third verse of "I Shall Not Be Moved" was "I love my neighbors." [33]

20. Minnie Lee. "Jesus Says, ‘You Goes and I Goes Wid You’." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. Brown 3:643.

21. John Cennick. "Jesus, my all, to heaven is gone." Sacred Hymns for the Use of Religious Societies. Bristol, England: Felix Farley, 1743.

22. John Julian. "Cennick, John." In A Dictionary of Hymnology. Edited by John Julian. London: John Murray, 1907 edition. 1:215–216.

23. John Julian. "Jesus, my all, to heaven is gone." In Julian. 1:601.

24. "In the Lord’s word left on record." Joshua Smith and Samuel Sleeper. Divine Hymns. Portland, Maine: Thomas Clark, 1803. 33.

25. David W. Music and Paul Akers Richardson. "I Will Sing the Wondrous Story." Macon: Mercer University Press, June 2008. 138.

26. Rich K. "Dr William T Grissom." Find a Grave website. 19 March 2012.
27. Judy Lynn. "Benjamin Bell Grissom." Find a Grave website. 29 November 2013.

28. "Sings Negro Songs at Chapel Tuesday." The [Lawrence College] Lawrentian. 15 October 1926.

"Mary A. Grissom Presents Recital." Chicago Daily Illini. 14 April 1928. 1.

29. Howard Agnew Johnston. "When Al Saunders Hit the Trail." Sunday School Times. Reprinted by The Pennsylvania School Journal, August 1915, 59–61; and by The Presbyterian of the South, 8 September 1915.

30. Wikipedia. "The Atlanta Georgian."
31. King James version.
32. Harrison. 187.

33. Minnie Lee. "I Shall Not Be Blue." Collected by Julian P. Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in 1926. Brown 3:639.