Between finally watching Walk The Line a few days ago, and
lim's new SGA vid set to Cash's cover of "The Mercy Seat", it's been a Johnny Cash sort of week. So I was poking around his discography and looked at the track listing for My Mother's Hymn Book. This should tell you something about regional variations in church music: in 18 years of regular church attendence in the Upper Midwest, I never sang a single song from that album, and had only heard one of them, on some K-Tel commercial for Washed-Up Country Star Sings Songs of Faith or something. After 5 years of church attendance on the border of the South, I now know seven of the 15 songs. And there's no real correlation with theology here -- the church I go to now is quite a bit more progressive than the (already tolerably liberal) church I went to in Michigan.
Who knows, maybe in my absence my old church has embraced Southern gospel (either as a result of the culture wars, or, more likely, the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack), but I doubt it.
A question for the library-wise among you: I'm trying to beef up my Bookmooch wishlist with obscure out-of-print books that might be useful for research, and I'm wondering what's the best way to look for books that may or may not ever have existed, like maybe a collected works of Friedrich de la Motte Fouque. Is there some easy-to-search, comprehensive database for old books?