Shape-Note Singing
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The broad American tradition of congregational sight-singing from tunebooks printed with shaped noteheads — triangles, ovals, squares, and diamonds standing for the fasola syllables — a pedagogy that let rural singers read four-part harmony without formal training. It spans the whole tunebook family: Kentucky Harmony, Missouri Harmony, William Walker's Southern Harmony and seven-shape Christian Harmony, John G. McCurry's The Social Harp, and East Tennessee's Harp of Columbia "Old Harp" tradition, of which The Sacred Harp is the dominant surviving four-shape book. The sound is plain, sturdy, and communal — melody in the tenor, harmony dispersed, sung for the singers rather than an audience.
History
William Little and William Smith's The Easy Instructor (1801) introduced the four-shape system to the singing-school movement; Ananias Davisson's Kentucky Harmony (1816) carried it south, and Walker's Southern Harmony (1835) sold on the order of 600,000 copies, still sung each May at Benton, Kentucky's Big Singing (held annually since 1884). Jesse B. Aikin's seven-shape system (The Christian Minstrel, 1846) won the publishing war and flowed through Ruebush-Kieffer and Stamps-Baxter into the Southern gospel industry, while four-shape practice survived in The Sacred Harp and pockets like the Old Harp singers of Sevierville, Tennessee, recorded by Folkways in 1951. George Pullen Jackson's White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (1933) founded the scholarship, and Rounder's The Social Harp sessions led by Hugh McGraw documented McCurry's 1855 book in its three-voice settings.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- Morning Trumpet(1951) — Old Harp Singers of Eastern TennesseeSpotifyYouTube
- Amazing Grace(1951) — Old Harp Singers of Eastern TennesseeSpotifyYouTube
- Liberty(1951) — Old Harp Singers of Eastern TennesseeSpotifyYouTube
- Zion's Walls — Southern Traditional SingersSpotifyYouTube
- Weeping Mary — Southern Traditional SingersSpotifyYouTube
- Windham(1979) — Word of Mouth ChorusSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- George Pullen Jackson, "White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands", University of North Carolina Press, 1933
- David Warren Steel with Richard H. Hulan, "The Makers of the Sacred Harp", University of Illinois Press, 2010
- "Old Harp Singing" liner notes (Folkways FA 2356, 1951)
- "The Social Harp: Early American Shape-Note Songs" (Rounder 0094) liner notes