“Little White Church” is sung by someone many miles from home who still hears, in memory, the bells of a little white church in the valley. On Sunday mornings the whole countryside would gather there and kneel at the altar to pray, and in the second verse they sing the old hymn “Rock of Ages.” The chorus admits to being sad and lonely for “that little white church in the dell,” and the song closes on the thought that some of that congregation are now waiting just over the dark and stormy sea, their troubles ended, watching for the singer and the listener to come home.
Mac Wiseman recorded it with his Country Boys on 23 May 1951 at the KWKH radio studio in Shreveport, Louisiana, with Ted Mullins on mandolin, Joe Medford on banjo, Ralph Mayo on fiddle and Don Davis on bass; Wiseman sang the verses and the tenor on the chorus, Mullins the chorus lead. Dot issued it in December 1951 on a 78 backed with Wiseman’s own “I’m a Stranger,” and the label credit went to Eugene Wellman. Later records do not agree on the writer: Jim & Jesse’s credits Chas. Pleasant, the 1979 Osborne Brothers and Mac Wiseman version M. Christian, and Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver’s calls the song traditional.
Jimmy Martin recorded it at the Columbia studio in Nashville on 30 August 1962, with Paul Williams singing tenor and the high lead on the verses and Lois Johnson the high baritone, Bill Emerson on banjo; it came out on the Decca gospel album This World Is Not My Home in June 1963. That year Alex Campbell and Ola Belle Reed’s band included it on 16 Radio Favorites for Starday. The Country Gentlemen recorded a four-part version in Clinton, Maryland, on 22 October 1970 — Charlie Waller lead, Jimmy Gaudreau tenor, Bill Emerson baritone and Bill Yates bass — for One Wide River to Cross (Rebel, 1971). Jim & Jesse cut it at the House of Cash in Hendersonville, Tennessee, in 1974 for Jesus Is the Key to the Kingdom.
Wiseman came back to it more than once. He recorded it in Cincinnati in 1975 for the Vetco album New Traditions, Vol. 1, and on 8 May 1979 at Hilltop Studios in Nashville he sang it as a duet with Bobby Osborne for CMH’s The Essential Bluegrass Album, with Sonny Osborne on banjo, Bobby on mandolin, Ray Edenton on guitar and Jimmy Brock on bass. Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver recorded it for I Heard the Angels Singing (Sugar Hill, 1989), and in 2022 Billy Strings put it on Me/And/Dad, the Rounder album he made with his stepfather Terry Barber, who sings the lead to Strings’s tenor.
