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One by one, the five young women of Faith & Harmony file to the front of the room, all sweetness and light in matching hot pink dresses, their hair done up in braids or bleached white as fleece. Within minutes, they’re calling out to God.

“Praise Him!” singer Christy Moody shouts, and the four others respond in kind. Drums clatter, a bass line bounces, and a pianist pounds away on his keyboard. Moody ratchets up the intensity. She’s jumping now, the others following her moves in a sort of choreographed chaos. “Praise the Lord!” Moody calls out, and again, the others respond: “Praise Him!”

Toward the end of the song, the fluorescent space inside American Legion Post No. 39 on the southern edge of Greenville is an ocean of outstretched arms roiling like waves in a turbulent storm. Handheld fans and elaborate Sunday hats flutter like gulls following a trawler. Tears smear mascara on faces lined by age and hardship.

Faith & Harmony is here today to celebrate the 56th anniversary of The Spiritualaires, a legendary Pitt County gospel group. One of its founding members, the late Johnny Ray Daniels, was married to Dorothy Vines of neighboring Greene County. She led another acclaimed group, The Glorifying Vines Sisters, who came out of the Union Grove Free Will Baptist Church of Farmville in the late ’50s.

In eastern North Carolina, the Daniels and Vines families are gospel royalty. Among the 10 ensembles performing today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who’s not related to a fellow musician. Faith & Harmony — granddaughters of Dorothy and Johnny Ray — are just the latest in a rich bloodline of vocal groups whose mix of country, soul, and rhythm and blues taps into a spiritual tradition stretching back to the field hollers that their enslaved ancestors brought over from Africa.

Plopped in a folding chair, watching singer after singer pour their hearts and souls into music that’s inextricably connected to the eastern North Carolina soil, my mind drifts back 45 years: I’m in my freshman year at East Carolina University, driving out of Greenville on NC Highway 903 in Pitt County and headed into the agricultural sprawl of Greene County. By my side is my college sweetheart, Sharon, who was raised amid this expansive farmland, spent summers pulling tobacco for extra cash.

She rolls down the window. “See that little church?” she says, pointing to a tiny white clapboard building way out in the middle of a field. Faint shouts of sacred soul music drift into the car. “They’ll still be singing when we come back by later this evening.”

It’s my first time hearing African American gospel music in its element. Oh, I’d seen black-and-white TV footage of Mahalia Jackson belting out “How I Got Over” at ’60s civil rights events. But hearing this music amid fields of tobacco leaves swaying in the wind, I feel it: the scratchy guitars and pounding drums, the deeply moving organ swells, the heavenly harmonies. These are ancient, primal sounds, the bedrock of every other kind of music that I’ve ever loved.

Back inside the American Legion building, scents of fried chicken waft from a kitchen area, pulling me into the present again. Next to a brick fireplace displaying photos of local military heroes, women dish out Sunday dinner in between performances by other groups, including Dedicated Men of Zion, fronted by Johnny Ray Daniels’s son, Anthony — father and uncle to the members of Faith & Harmony. And when I step out into the darkness five hours later, the extended Daniels and Vines families are still singing.