The Makers of the Sacred Harp (review)

In the twentieth century, The Sacred Harp emerged as the preeminent nineteenth-century shape-note sacred tunebook in the South. In fact, in my experience, many people today believe shape-note singing and Sacred Harp singing are synonymous; for them there is no other shape-note music. The library world reinforces this understanding slightly in the way it places the heading "Sacred Harp singing," but no other tunebook-specific heading, within the syndetic structure of the "Shape note singing" subject heading. David Warren Steel's book fills an important gap in the scholarship about The Sacred Harp by focusing to a large degree on the individual people and songs associated with the early years. Before I comment specifically on the importance of Steel's book, I would like to place The Sacred Harp within the broader field of shape-note music as a whole.

When The Sacred Harp was first published in 1844, many similar oblong-style tune-books already had been published (more than 100, according to the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association's Web site: http://fasola.org/shmha/, accessed 6 July 2011). The compilers of The Sacred Harp copied liberally from existing tunebooks that utilized a four-shape-notation system—a system that was most popular in the South—including the Southern Harmony, published in 1835. Such tunebooks, which typically contained a few hundred religious songs notated in three- or four-part harmony, were widely sung in a congregational style at community singing events outside of formal church services. In the decades that followed, several other oblong-style tunebooks, many of which incorporated a newer seven-shape system such as the Christian Harmony and the Harp of Columbia, enjoyed substantial success. In the twentieth century, over thirty Southern publishers, most notably James D. Vaughan and Stamps-Baxter, published hundreds of smaller shape-note gospel songbook titles that typically featured newer songs. Shape-note hymnbooks such as Heavenly Highway Hymns and Favorite Songs and Hymns, both published by Stamps-Baxter, became very popular and are still found in many Southern church pews. The history and variety of shape-note music traditions are complex and rich, and stretch far beyond The Sacred Harp.

That being said, the extraordinary popularity of The Sacred Harp music is undeniable, and for reasons that will perhaps never be fully understood, the singing traditions associated with most other shape-note tunebooks have diminished or ended (although singings and singing conventions can still be found that use The Southern Harmony, The Christian Harmony, The Missouri Harmony, The New Harp of Columbia, and various newer shape-note gospel song-books). The Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association Web site lists over 375 locations where Sacred Harp singers gather regularly, mainly in Georgia and Alabama but also throughout the world. The tunebook, which has gone through numerous revisions, has become the primary song book used at informal singing events not only in rural churches and community buildings in the Deep South, but also at college campuses, music-related conferences, and informal house gatherings on a national scale. Typically, the songs are sung by everyone in attendance at a Sacred Harp singing, and the singers, who are organized by vocal part, sit in a square facing a song leader. The Sacred Harp has been the subjects of several books and recordings, innumerable articles, and a feature-length documentary titled Awake, My Soul (the movie's trailer is, in and of itself, a striking piece). The tunebook clearly deserves the attention of researchers of American music traditions.

With his book The Makers of the Sacred Harp, David Warren Steel makes an important contribution to the scholarship on The Sacred Harp, in large part because he includes biographical sketches of over 250 composers and poets whose songs are contained in its early editions. He also includes data on over 550 Sacred Harp songs, including source information. Most of this information is...