Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism, and: The Makers of the Sacred Harp (review)

The Sacred Harp (1844) is the oldest published collection of shape-note hymns in regular use today, and its music and practitioners have received considerable attention over the last century. Beginning with George Pullen Jackson’s White Spirituals of the Southern Uplands (1933) and continuing through important surveys by Buell Cobb, John Bealle, and Stephen Marini—not to mention dozens of accounts written for popular consumption over the years—the Sacred Harp’s idiosyncratic sound and compelling cultural links with the American South have made it one of the most distinctive vernacular musical traditions of the United States. Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of the Sacred Harp’s most recent edition (the so-called Denson Edition of 1991), and shape-note researchers and devotees can celebrate the occasion with two scholarly monographs on the subject: David Warren Steel and Richard Hulan’s The Makers of the Sacred Harp, and a new paperback edition of Kiri Miller’s Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism.

The Makers of the Sacred Harp will undoubtedly prove an important reference tool for Sacred Harp enthusiasts for years to come. Unlike most historical surveys of the genre, it is not organized as a continuous narrative; rather, it is divided into four large sections (‘The Book’, ‘The Words’, ‘The Composers’, and ‘The Songs’), each of which employs a distinctive approach to its topic. The first section, ‘The Book’, features eight short chapters that provide a concise publication history of the Sacred Harp and those involved with its creation and dissemination (editors, singers, and so on), while also briefly contextualizing the social and cultural world in which the book and its contributors came of age. While this section displays some structural shortcomings—several chapters are only two or three pages long, which unnecessarily interrupts the narrative continuity—Steel has crafted a refreshingly unsentimental look at the world of shape-note singing. Ironically, Steel’s efficient, almost clinical listing of names, charting of family trees, and recording of biographical details effectively renders real a group of people frequently reduced to little more than a set of regional stereotypes—a condition stretching all the way back to George Pullen Jackson’s affectionate description of the ‘lost tonal tribe’ of rural southern singers, which Steel acknowledges succinctly (p. 11):

The composers who contributed to the Sacred Harp represent a cross-section of white males and a few females representing a diverse range of wealth, education, and influence, during the age of Jacksonian democracy, when universal white male suffrage supplanted an earlier franchise limited to holders of substantial land or property. Most of them learned music in singing schools or informally in the family or social circle. They wrote for an audience of singers much like themselves, while working in a variety of trades and professions. They did not mean to found a ‘lost tribe’.

Richard Hulan’s section on ‘The Words’ adopts a breezier tone than Steel’s, but these chapters are highly informative for readers more familiar with the Sacred Harp’s musical legacy than its lyrical pedigree. Chapter 9 (‘Frontiers of the American Hymn’) is less about the contributors to the Sacred Harp than their American progenitors—this, in contradistinction to the British evangelicals whose poetry pervades the tunebook and whose biographies have been well documented elsewhere. Hulan describes the challenges inherent in tracing the creative lineages of preachers on the western and southern frontiers, and of African American authors generally, acknowledging that the history he presents is still incomplete (sometimes through a lack of evidence, other times because of missed opportunities in bibliographic research). Chapter...