Christians and Jews, believers and skeptics all came to Jesus when gospel music filled the air at the National Folk Festival.

It takes a lot to persuade taciturn Yankees to get up out of their seats, throw their hands in the air and sing without hymnals. Yet The Birmingham Sunlights and the Campbell Brothers accomplished all three again and again this weekend.

The five members of the Alabama-based Birmingham Sunlights sing unaccompanied four-part harmony, a tradition that grew out of African-American churches too poor to buy a piano and too illiterate to need hymnals. The group bills itself as a quartet but the fifth member often doubles a part for depth and emphasis.

Friday night, the group gathered about 50 members of the audience on stage for a singalong that delighted the Sunlights as much as it did the audience.

The Campbell Brothers followed, bringing the growling, shouting, singing and swinging voice of the steel guitar to the land of Congregationalists. Their music drenched righteous, religious and heathen alike in a Holy Spirit of sound eagerly embraced, at least for the moment.

Vocalist Denise Jackson gave the traditional gospel songs a passionate reverence that was lifted up by the wail of her cousins’ sacred steel and sent the audience home filled with redemption.

– Judy Harrison