The White Separatist Baptists in the South devised their own preaching tone; they called it the “holy whine.”16 Decades of African American seminary students have been surprised and delighted to learn that what they know as a “whoop” had—and still has, in a few areas—parallels in some White pulpits. One person who used the word “sonorous” to describe Black preaching was the celebrated British geologist Sir Charles Lyell, who reported on a visit to the First African Baptist Church at Savannah some