The Makers of the Sacred Harp David Warren Steel with Richard H. Hulan (review)

David Warren Steel and Richard H. Hulan's The Makers of the Sacred Harp comprises a four-part, fourteen-chapter reference source replete with notes, bibliography, index, figures, and plates that will be welcome by all parties interested in shape-note music in its many manifestations. While based in solid scholarship, one particular strength of this work is its straightforward language that makes it accessible even to those without a great deal of technical musical knowledge.

Part 1, "The Book," consists of eight chapters focused upon the musical and cultural milieu in which The Sacred Harp was compiled. Chapter 1 examines the conflict between brothers-in-law William Walker (Southern Harmony, 1835) and Benjamin White (The Sacred Harp, 1844) and categorizes the types of music found in Walker's original volume, reminding us that tunebooks are compilations of variants, borrowings, and original tunes. Chapter 2, "The Chattahoochee Valley," considers the southwestward migration into newly opened lands in Georgia by white settlers and their slaves. The valley, in addition to being the home of The Sacred Harp, was also a key incubator of African American musical styles. Consequently, Steel speculates that the distinctive incorporation of "revival spiritual songs" in White's 1844 Sacred Harp demonstrates that these later antebellum tunebooks drew "on the widespread popularity of such songs in the musical lives of black as well and white pioneers in West Georgia more than twenty years before the national emergence of the Negro spiritual" (13). A brief third chapter documents this continued migration of tune composers and arrangers toward the south and west.

Much of Steel and Hulan's work is concerned with both the people—those "human faces"—and the cultures that gave rise to this music. Chapter 4 details the lives of Harp compilers and composers as they were affected by both Confederate and Union service in the Civil War and also traces how the book itself traveled through the war by way of soldiers. The succeeding chapter on "Musical Families" is a welcome and detailed lineage of the aforementioned primary Sacred Harp families and significant secondary contributors, while another chapter, "Professions and Occupations," groups these figures into several professions (primarily agrarian). "Teachers and Tradition" examines modes of transmission, including at-home training, singing schools, and singing conventions, calling on the instructional practices of individual teachers for documentation in some cases, or tracing the lineage of some singers back to the early Densons in other instances.

In contrast, chapter 8, "The Styles of Sacred Harp Music," is the most musically technical essay and in many ways is the heart of the volume. Here, Steel traces the music from the Reformation onward, focusing on the foundations of the singing school movement and the practices of John Playford: three-part psalm singing, printing with identifiable shapes, and the use of G clef for men. This particular essay illustrates theoretical points of composition, refers to and analyzes Harp tunes, discusses variants in tune and number of voice parts, and explains the rise of the folk hymn in "the hinterlands of northern new England, the Ohio Valley, and the South" unaffected by "reform and European music" (45). In the final analysis, Steel reaffirms that "Sacred Harp music is not a single distinctive style" (50). Rather, folk hymns, fuging tunes, revival "shouts," gospel tunes, and even reform music are all types of "Sacred Harp Music"—not because of a common style, but because they constitute the corpus of this eclectic book.

Part 2, "The Words," consists of two essays by Richard H. Hulan on the hymn texts of the Harp and their authors—useful not only to musicians but to scholars "inquiring more generally into American folk hymnody and shape note traditions" (57). In chapter 9, "Frontiers of the American Hymn," Hulan surveys the camp-meeting movement...