Legacy of the Sacred Harp

Chapter 1. The Sacred Harp

3 Chapter I The Sacred Harp Chapter 1 The Sacred Harp in a dentist’s waiting room, I turned through pages of the August 1987 issue of Texas Highways and a photograph caught my eye. Aged hands held a book of music with oddly shaped notes. The article’s headline read, “Sacred Harp, a Tradition Lives.” The unusual music looked curiously familiar and the outof -date print of the book’s title page called to mind a music book Grandma had given me. This much-used book, The Sacred Harp, had belonged to her father, and earlier, to her grandfather, whose brother, edmund Dumas, had written a number of its songs. The passed-down book was so worn that most of the cover was missing, the pages were yellowed, and the frayed binding threads were rotten. But I could never have thrown it away. I thought perhaps I could find Grandma’s copy of The Sacred Harp in a collection of sheet music and songbooks at my home. I realized with surprise that Grandma had been dead over a decade now, yet I felt her presence as near as the person in the next chair. I could hear the familiar timbre of her singing voice; she’d said her father and grandfather played the fiddle, but she just sang. Oh, how Grandma loved to sing. On one summer afternoon during our family’s annual visit to Louisiana, I sat next to Grandma in the glider on the porch, helping her shell peas. Suddenly , she burst out loudly, “I’ll sing halle-lu-jah, and you’ll sing halle-lu-jah, and we’ll all sing halle-lu-jah, when we arrive at home!” Her foot tapped a lively beat, and, when a hand was occasionally free, she gestured her arm to the rhythm in an emphatic up-down motion. “Chloe Ann, you’re a good little singer. You ought to stay and go with me to one of our singing schools. All we do is sing, all day long—except to eat, which is almost as important. everybody brings a dish for dinner on the ground. It never fails that it’s a real feast. We’ll try to talk your folks into letting you stay on a while longer when they go back to Texas. The next one’s going to be at Rocky Branch Church up by Antioch. It’ll be a real rafter-shaker.” It was easy to see that Grandma loved those folksy, hymn-like tunes, but I was skeptical; I’d never heard anyone sing like she did. There seemed to be Legacy of the Sacred Harp 4 no melody. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but I was convinced Grandma couldn’t carry a tune and those singing schools weren’t doing her any good whatsoever. Still, I was thrilled to have her Sacred Harp songbook because anything Grandma loved was precious to me as well. A page in the book held a glimpse into the budding romance of my grandparents. I pictured the young Burch Nolan taking Grandma’s book at a singing and penciling his words to her above the song “Fillmore” #434 in The Sacred Harp. From the hurried look of his writing, she’d struggled playfully to get it back, but she must have been pleased for she never erased his bold message: “Miss Terry Dumas is my girl.” Terry Louisa (pronounced Lou-eye-za) was his girl the rest of their lives. I’d made only slight attempts to play the music on the piano, because the strange three-line staff was unlike any music I’d ever seen. It was written with two lines of treble clef and one of bass, with note heads in a variety of shapes, not the familiar round notes. I concluded that the music was written exclusively for fiddle players. The magazine article, however, explained that Sacred Harp had nothing to do with any musical instrument. It was to be sung a cappella, for the sacred harp is the human voice. The writer continued that Sacred Harp singing, called fasola or solfège music, originated in elizabethan england and was brought to America by A page in the Sacred Harp songbook that my grandmother bequeathed to me holds a glimpse into the budding romance of my grandparents. I picture the young Burch Nolan taking her book at a singing and penciling his words to her above one of the songs, “Miss...