The Shaker Spiritual (review)

I spent part of my undergraduate years, much of my graduate career, and all of my dissertation seclusion researching and writing about the Shakers. An abiding point of professional pride for me was that what I and many others considered the foremost scholarly work on the Shakers was written by a folklorist, Daniel Patterson. No matter that it was narrowly focused on one aspect of Shaker culture—their music—it was Shaker literature's most thorough cultural, social, and historical treatment of the entire society when it was originally published in 1979 and for some time after. One could argue that it still is, although some excellent general histories have arisen, most notably Stephen Stein's The Shaker Experience in America, as well as some important focused studies that drew upon Patterson's highly contextualized model for inspiration. Therefore, it was always a mystery to me that JAF,folklore's flagship journal, never reviewed the original publication. Therefore, it is a delight for me to review the corrected reissue of this work, now in a much more affordable copy from Dover.

The Shaker Spiritualis overtly a catalog of all the known extant pieces of Shaker song with a focus on the early period of Shakerism (up to about 1850), but including a focus on nearly 400 songs selected for their significance within the society, each with its own transcription, annotation, and list of analogues, when available. But it is more than that. Patterson includes detailed and well-researched articles on early British and American religious folk songs, Shaker institutions, the relationship of Shaker spirituals to traditional songs, and transcription styles. Within each section of the book that focuses on the Shaker spirituals, he provides historical and comparative data that places the 367 songs (and 17 additional variants) in context. He categorizes them as (1) songs of the gospel parents, (2) solemn songs, (3) early laboring songs, (4) ballads, (5) hymns, (6) extra songs, (7) occasional songs, (8) anthems, (9) laboring songs of the middle period, (10) gift songs from Mother's Work, (11) laboring songs from Mother's Work, (12) later laboring songs, and (13) later hymns and extra songs. As an important part of the book, he provides checklists of Shaker song manuscripts and additional manuscripts cited, which he very sensibly arranges in terms of the nineteen villages that formed the Shaker confederation. The checklists themselves cover 798 song manuscripts with between 8,000 and 10,000 variants. He likewise includes wonderful illustrations with citations, well-researched notes, indices of persons, subjects, first lines and titles, and non-Shaker songs cited. More than a catalog, this is a heavily annotated, scholarly, encyclopedic work on Shaker history as understood through its musical heritage.

When Patterson published the first edition of this work in 1979 with Princeton University Press, Shaker studies was in the hands of amateur scholars, antique buffs, commercial promoters, some scholarly researchers, and various hybrids of two or more of the above. Edward Deming Andrews was the conventionally accepted master of the literature, having published several books covering a range from music to paintings to furniture to overall histories. His work was tainted by a robust romanticism, a pseudo-scholarship, and a self-serving promotion of the Eastern Shakers of the early 1800s—self-promoting because he owned houses full of Shaker documents and antiques from those communities, whose value soared the more he wrote about them. Mary Richmond had come out with a Shaker bibliography in 1977 that was a hallmark of objective research and might be considered a watershed moment when scholars began to control the data. Certainly excellent books, or parts of books, or articles, had been published prior to Richmond, but she established an annotated reference whereby works could be assessed for whatever value they might have—scholarly, primary, secondary, amateurish. Once Patterson's work came...