FOLKLORE, FOOD IN. While doing folklore fieldwork with the Singing and Praying Bands of tidewater Maryland and Delaware, the present author observed a minor event that made a major impression on him. The Singing and Praying Bands are groups within some African-American Methodist churches in the Chesapeake Bay area of the East Coast of the United States that hold services in which they sing and pray with escalating fervor to invoke the Holy Spirit and to convert the unsaved. That day in particular, they were having no success: the Spirit simply was not stirring. Finally, one senior member slipped into the center of the singing group and called out the following verse to be added to the hymn:

Old man Moses must be dead;
Children in the wilderness crying for bread.

This couplet combines two episodes from the book of Exodus. The first line refers to the episode when Moses ascended Mount Sinai and disappeared from the...