At Sacred Nine Project, we have old scores to settle.

At Sacred Nine Project, we strive to attend the other & question the self.

Sacred Nine Project sees the world through the lense of a southern, white, Anglo, cultural Christian who is deconstructing. I have come to realize that we in this demographic are always the hero in our own story.

Sacred Nine Project reconsiders and reimagines music, verse, theatre, and events from an earlier America in order to help shape a future one.

The results are “Amerimusicals,” hybrids of research and vocal musical performance that can:

• revive or refresh earlier compositions.

• indict problematic worldviews.

• unearth almost forgotten genres, and even retroactively conjure ones that never existed.

• wield textual themes as present-day parables.

• challenge systems of opression.

• extract the healing from the beauty of music and verse associated with religious trauma.

• foster introspection, healing, and action. 

C. Leonard Raybon, Founder and Pharisee

Aspiring Americanist, C. Leonard Raybon, is a professor, conductor, composer, lyricist, singer, curator, graphic designer, and musical documentarian. Raybon is Associate Professor of Music, Director of Choirs, and Artistic Director of Tulane Summer Lyric Theatre, Tulane University. He earned a DMA in choral conducting at Louisiana State University under the mentorship of Dr. Kenneth Fulton and Dr. Sara Lynn Baird. Raybon enjoys creating helpful methodologies for his students, including his "Vowels in Hand" system, which aims to take the mystique out of choral vowel unification, and which was published in Voice and Speech Review in 2017. He has shared his vowel method in ten states and three countries.

Raybon is the founder of Sacred Nine Project. Raybon, a kind of musical documentarian, has received several important invitations to present site-specific concerts. Among these opportunities are Libby Prison, for the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, VA; American Martyr for Swarthmore College, inspired by Murder in a Mill Town, by Swarthmore professor, Bruce Dorsey; Foster's Foils, a daring assessment of the fraught legacy of Stephen Foster for the Theodore M. Finney Music Library at the University of Pittsburgh; The Billings Pendulum, a quirky retrospective of Revolutionary American composer, William Billings, for Michigan State University; and The Mending Sampler, a kind of musical companion to The Sewing Girl's Tale by The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor, John Wood Sweet. Mending has enjoyed two performances At UNC-Chapel Hill, and one at the National Humanities Center.

Sacred Nine also has generated scholarship. Sing Me, Sing Me Not is a presentation about whites engaging with African American Spirituals; the talk grew into an article, “Oh, Don’t You Want to Go,” published in Journal of Singing. The Billings Pendulum, about Revolutionary American composer, William Billings, was created for the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Boston in 2025.

Raybon is an active composer; “The Busy Bee” is published by Santa Barbara, and “Jesus, Show Us How to Pray,” is with GIA Publications. Raybon also serves as Director of Music at Rayne United Methodist Church, and hosts the Sacred Nine Project Podcast.

The richest mine for the projects is early American hymnody.  Other genres of interest are American theater, folk ballads, protest songs, reform songs, minstrelsy and its implications, the music of the Enslaved.  Often music of other countries (namely England, for obvious reasons) is featured prominently, but that is only when the music in question has enjoyed a strong tradition in the United States. 

Of course, Sacred Nine also relies on books about early America. For example, we have aligned entire concerts with excellent books by Bruce Dorsey, Christopher Lynch, and John Wood Sweet. Finally, since our performances are often a kind of thesis set to music, various scholarly books and articles are consulted.

In 2017 I needed to create an arrangement of “Brethren, We Have Met to Worship” to compliment a sermon. Trying to avoid copyright issues, I sought out an original source for the tune, HOLY MANNA, finding a facsimile of Southern Harmony. There I saw the usual and welcomed suspects like “Amazing Grace” and “Wondrous Love.” However, I was alarmed to find many tunes that not-so-subtly advanced the shame-based theology of the time. I decided to arrange 14 Southern Harmony hymns and songs, including some that contained the troubling and seemingly obsolete texts.

However, if those disturbing musical and poetic pieces did not survive the natural selection, why revive them now? A modern listener’s first reaction might be to condescend to our forebears. However, Sacred Nine advances the belief that just because we know what is proper to sing and say in polite society does not mean that we do not harbor primitive sentiments; the more austere and primitive texts we sing are dead and buried, but the sentiments they represent are alive and well.

As of November 2026, I have created a whole new logo group for Sacred Nine Project. Let’s talk about it!

In addition to being the founder and creator of Sacred Nine, I also do all of the graphics. Creating logos takes a lot longer than you might think. In 2018, I created a logo pair that I loved. It was two-fold. As you can see below, it was a little Revolutionary man, and a little measure of music. The man is Wages-of-Sin Webbe, or Wages Webbe. His name is a nod to the insufferable way that puritans named their children. The musical notation is where the text “Sacred Nine” appears in the heavily Christian tunebook, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (1835.) Page 19 contains “CANON” (and our nonprofit is CANON 19). Of course, “Sacred Nine” refers to the Muses, and since I am all about ancient Greek things, choosing this as a name was a no-brainer!

My problem with these logos is that they are too fiddly, too much going on. I wanted something simple and clean. Trouble is, I feel like Wages was part of the family and I couldn’t let him go! Therefore, I took his rather cubist original features and fashioned a profile that alludes to the ubiquitous silhouette portraits of the 18th century. (see the little dark silhouettes to the left and right of the headings on this page.)

Then, quite by accident, I landed on this kind of quarter-note shape. Below to the left, there is a stylized “S” for “Sacred” from quarter notes, and to the right is a stylized “P” for “Project” from a quarter note.

Now lets’ talk about the figure in the middle. Our new mantra is “Attend the other, question the self.” There is a lot of meaning in this, our main brandmark.

There are three suggestions from this figure. It can be viewed as a “Nine”; The broad, curved line can indicate an ear (“attend the other”); that same line, paired with the lower notehead suggests a question mark (“question the self”). Finally, for a bit of fun, one can notice that, when paired with Wages’ silhouette, this mark is located where his ear would be.