[1] It has survived to the present day among some communities and contexts, including the Gaelic psalmody on Lewis in Scotland, the Old Regular Baptists of the southern Appalachians in the United States, and for informal worship in many African American congregations.
The great influx of Presbyterians from the Scottish Highlands into the Carolinas might have introduced some African slaves to this form of worship, though the extent to which this influenced African-American church singing has been disputed, because English, lowland Scottish, and Ulster-Scots colonists, all of whom would have lined hymns, were far more numerous than the Highlanders in the region and could more easily have influenced the African Americans.
Influential clerics in England and America disliked the ragged nature of the singing that resulted as the congregation struggled to remember both the tune and the words from the lining out, but it continued to be practiced in most rural churches and still survives today in a form that likely would have been familiar to the original English and Ulster-Scots colonists in isolated communities in the Appalachian Mountains.
As time went on, a section of the church was allocated for these trained voices to sit together as a choir, and churches voted to end the lining out system (although there was often a transitional phase that had the entire congregation singing from tunebooks like the still-popular The Sacred Harp and others, before this was taken over by using trained choirs; this gave birth to the still vibrant tradition of "Sacred harp singing"[4]).
The white-haired officer of the church, with the full power of his voice, read on till the louder notes of the collected body overpowered the attempt to resist the progress of improvement, and the deacon, deeply mortified at the triumph of musical reformation, seized his hat, and retired from the meeting house in tears.
Lining of hymns is still widely practiced by the three traditional branches of the Hutterites (Lehrerleut, Dariusleut, Schmiedeleut II).
In the film Coal Miner's Daughter, lining out is depicted at the funeral of Loretta Lynn's father, Ted Webb.