Many of my relatives on my mother’s side attended Colony Church, about three miles from Farmington. This was a hard-shell Baptist congregation, the members of which took their religion with the utmost seriousness and were constantly on the lookout for sin to rear its reptile head. If it did they assailed it with glad cries. There was no organ in this church; indeed, for many years none of the Baptist churches in and about Farmington would permit any sort of music at their services, holding that music was an invention of the Devil designed to entice Christians from respectful contemplation of the mercies and graces of the Lord, and that no devout Christian could hear music and still keep his mind on God and his heart true to the faith. Their attitude toward the organ was exactly that of the good Sister of whom Will Carleton sang in his Farm ballads:
I’ve been a Sister good and true
For five and thirty year;
I’ve done what seemed my part to do,
And prayed my duty clear.
But death will stop my voice, I know,
For he is on my track;
And some day I to church will go,
And nevermore come back.
And when the folks get up to sing,