America's Favorite Hymns - Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Ambrosian Singers, Paul Freeman

americas favorite hymns LINER NOTES

In southwestern Georgia, ten miles past Americus, is a little village that might have remained as anonymous in the future as it has been in the past. Passing motorists, not using the impersonal interstate highway, may have continued to joke about a settlement so small that one is past it before digesting the data on that first official sign-the name of the town, a three-digit population count, and the year when it was founded. Americans have tended to be very city--oriented in the past, assuming greatness is nurtured only in the coastal megapolis or, in the larger island cities. This particular settlement was not on my road map when I drove down from Atlanta that beige-gray February day in 1977. A few signs had recently been erected pointing the way, once Americus had been found, to Plains. It was area in the throes of a dramatically new life, one in which American-style tourism would soon move peanuts to second place. It was obvious Plains could never be the same, nor would Georgia, or the South. Remember those self-caricaturing souvenirs which predicted that the South would rise again? So it has, but no one in the past would have guessed the manner of this resurrection, and certainly not the site for that event. Without considering the ultimate historical verdict on the presidency of Jimmy Carter, assurance is felt everywhere that even the potential of greatness can still be produced from such environs-a settling that is, in all truth, very "country.'"