No microphone. That's the thing about those Albany meetings into a church with a few hundred people in it and she'd set a line down and the room would come up under it. Born in southwest Georgia in 1942, and she sang the way the room was built.
Then a car. The Freedom Singers going up and down the South in a car, four of them, singing in whatever hall would have them. And in 1973 she started Sweet Honey in the Rock voices, and a hand drum, and that's your whole instrument list. No bass, which pains me a little, except it doesn't, because the low part was in there anyway.
She said that after a song the differences between people weren't so great. She also went and became a historian, and a curator at the Smithsonian, which tells you she meant to keep the thing where somebody could find it later. She died in 2024.
That shape has a long church history behind it: lining out, where a precentor gives one line and the room sings it back, recommended by the Westminster divines in the 1640s for congregations who had few books and fewer readers. It outlasted the shortage of books by three centuries, because people liked what it did to a room.
Otis, the Albany meetings are a case where the singing wasn't the warm-up for the organising, it was the organising; the mass meeting was where the next day's plan got carried. And the Freedom Singers in that car were partly a fundraising and recruiting arm for SNCC, which is how the songs got north and stayed there.