When I was growing up on Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm, my mentor and best friend Jaybird often took me to The Old Rugged Cross Chapel, a tiny country church, always packed on Sundays. I remember the towering, trumpet-voiced preacher, Reverend Moses Malachi Magee, whose sermons balanced hell-fire-brimstone admonitions with soft-spoken, impassioned pleas to do unto others, as we would have them do unto us. I remember the ladies, so dignified in their Sunday-best white dresses and wide-brimmed hats, who writhed in rapturous moments, shouting hallelujahs, offering orisons to the Almighty and waving bright red bandannas. I remember the powerful, moving, rhythmic, hypnotic, gospel music — how it coalesced the congregation into a collective, swaying mass, chanting in a unified, volcanic voice that rolled like a symphonic tsunami across the surrounding cotton fields.

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