The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion (review)

Reviews505 handled Congressional delegations as well as any statesmen could have under the circumstances . After 1889 the Keetoowah Society tried nonviolently to prevent detribalization by refusing to accept allotment. The Keetoowahs's resistance caused some to go to jail, and McLoughlin calls them "the last resisters in the lost cause of Cherokee sovereignty ." The United States's Congress denationalized the Cherokees by allotting their lands in the 1890s. When Oklahoma joined the Union in 1907, the Cherokees became a people without a country. Factionalism jeopardized the traditional harmony and sovereignty of Cherokees, but their undoing stemmed from the racism of United States Indian policy. However acculturated mixed bloods might have been, they still remained Indians. Social Darwinism reinforced the myth of the United States as a "white man's" country in which Indians simply could not compete. McLoughlin extensively researched United States government records and Cherokee documents, and he filled his narrative with detail and nuance. He clearly sympathizes with the Cherokees, noting that the democratic principles of the United States denied Cherokees the sovereignty they had tried to preserve through consensus. McLoughlin's moral outrage over this travesty, when coupled with his meticulous scholarship, makes it a compelling study that should appeal to general readers as well as scholars. The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion. 1854 edition, 5th printing. By William Walker. University Press of Kentucky, 1993. 344 pp. Cloth, $25.00. Reviewed by Harry Eskew, a music librarian and professor in the division ofchurch music ministries at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Early nineteenth-century southerners usually learned choral music by attending singing schools taught by itinerant teachers, a number of whom compiled oblong tunebooks in easy-to-read shape notation. Of the several dozen shape-note tunebooks published before the Civil War, probably none was more popular than Southern Harmony by William Walker of Spartanburg, South Carolina. After having the first edition of Southern Harmony printed in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1835, Walker had each of the other four distinctive editions (1840, 1847 [2 editions], and 1854) printed in Philadelphia. Walker reported that 500,000 copies of Southern Harmony had been sold by 1866. Although Southern Harmony enabled several generations of southerners to read music, its significance is manifold. Walker's tunebook introduced to the South the early New England singing-school repertory of psalm and hymn tunes, fuging tunes and anthems. To this repertory Southern Harmony and other shape-note tunebooks added folk hymns with tunes related to oral tradition. Walker's first edition of 1835 published for the first time together the text and tune to such well known folk hymns as "Amazing Grace" (to its familiar tune "New Britain") and "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand" ("Promised Land"). The 1840 edition first published together the text and tune to "What Wondrous Love Is This" (Wondrous Love). These and other folk hymns appear frequently in major Protestant and Catholic hymnals of the latter twentieth century. Walker's tunebook reflects the historical and religious heritage of the early South. For example, several pieces have "Indian" in their titles such as "Indian Convert," a ballad 506 Southern Cultures sas -r-saali IIb *¦*!¦>, ari . ^SnSSSSSSsaS!SSSSSÑ«SSJlaS* Ì«SSìvMMMaS*SHMSSSS3S aSffliZSÌi KINO OF PEACE. 7·. dictated to a missionary. Simple folk hymns with their characteristic repeated phrases, as in "Hebrew Children," represent the frontier revival tradition: Where are the Hebrew children? Where are the Hebrew children? Where are the Hebrew children? Safe in the promised land. The texts of Southern · makïsville. l. m Harmony often mention the promised land and the afterlife, reflecting an otherworldly outlook commonly found in hymnals and tunebooks of the period. After 1854 Walker published no more editions of Southern Harmony. In 1867 Walker produced another major tunebook, Christian Harmony , which reflected changes in musical style as well as a shift from the earlier four-shape notation to the more "progressive" sevenshape system. Although Southern Harmony dropped largely out of use after the publication of Christian Harmony, a North Carolina family carried it to western Kentucky. In 1884 Southern Harmony singing gained popularity in Benton, where the tradition still continues. Each of the four reprints of the 1854 edition (1939, 1966...