To celebrate St Andrew's Day here is some controversy. It's an old story but what do you think?
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=961062003'The church elder’s reaction was one of utter disbelief. Shaking his head emphatically, he couldn’t take in what the distinguished professor from Yale University was telling him. "No," insisted Jim McRae, an elder of the small congregation of Clearwater in Florida. "This way of worshipping comes from our slave past. It grew out of the slave experience, when we came from Africa." But Willie Ruff, an Afro-American professor of music at Yale, was adamant - he had traced the origins of gospel music to Scotland. The distinctive psalm singing had not been brought to America’s Deep South by African slaves but by Scottish émigrés who worked as their masters and overseers, according to his painstaking research.'
The article goes into some more depth and seems rather plausable, but it goes against something that is held dear to many African-Americans- is gospel the music of the slave masters and not the slaves?
