Brenton Jordan, the stick-man and sometimes lead songster of the McIntosh County Shouters, respects the form’s history and understands his responsibility to its integrity, yet, as master performers of vernacular art do, he is willing to advance the tradition through personal expression.
One summer evening in 1981, I knocked on the door of a modest house on a street improbably named the Plaza in Athens, Georgia, looking for a man who, I had been told, knew some old-time work songs.