Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp (review)

Its subtitle would seem to claim that Awake, My Soul is primarily about a tunebook; but The Sacred Harp is much more than a book, and its story requires a balancing act on the part of any storyteller. Some may emphasize a musical style, focusing on Sacred Harp music’s capacity as a written tradition. Others conceive of Sacred Harp as a musical culture, well into its second century and geographically concentrated in the American South; here the emphasis on oral tradition would speak to a style of singing more than a style of composition. And then there is the tunebook itself—a canon enveloping a lengthy publication history beginning with four successively larger editions by B. F. White between 1844 and 1869, proceeding to the 1911 James revision, and continuing on as the “Denson Book” following Paine Denson’s 1936 revision. In the 1991 Denson revision, used today and in this film, 179 of 560 songs were included the 1844 Sacred Harp. It is really that original book that constitutes the Sacred Harp of Awake, My Soul—a tunebook that preserved a singing tradition, a compositional style, and also a religious practice. Matt and Erica Hinton’s film documents a contemporary musical practice against a historical backdrop: it describes the prehistory of the original tunebook and the contemporary culture of Sacred Harp singing in Georgia and Alabama. The film yields mixed results as a history, but as a documentary about singers and singings—especially in its two-disc special edition—it sets a high standard.

Awake, My Soul was a labor of love: the Hintons spent almost a decade expanding a ten-minute student film into an ambitious documentary. They and cowriter John Plunkett interviewed eighteen singers, most from Georgia and Alabama and all but one from the South; I note with appreciation that they included nearly everyone from the Music Committee of the 1991 revision. Interview segments are combined with footage from eight Sacred Harp singings between 1998 and 2005, and the editing, by Matt Hinton and Jennifer Brooks, is usually excellent. The story is also told through photographs and other archival materials, some collected from singers and some from the George Pullen Jackson archive. Visual and audio reproduction in the film are of a consistently high quality. The narration, read by honey-voiced country-and-western singer Jim Lauderdale, provides background information and helps bring the various media together into a coherent story. Those hoping for uninterrupted songs will welcome the bonus footage available in the special edition—including over two hours of Sacred Harp tunes, sung at conventions by top-rate singers. Here and in the film proper the Hintons have chosen a nicely diverse group of hymns—though one might have asked for an anthem or two—and they made the right choice also in including footage of a closing prayer to bring the singing to an end. Awake, My Soul appropriately devotes time to important parts of an all-day singing such as dinner-on-the-grounds and the memorial lesson, and interviewees discuss courtship and travel alongside more directly musical topics. The Hintons have produced a lively and entertaining record of Sacred Harp as a musical and cultural practice in the contemporary South.

Educators will enjoy using Awake, My Soul for these reasons, but its use in the classroom should be supplemented with a historical corrective. (Candidates would include John Bealle’s Public Worship, Private Faith: Sacred Harp and American Folksong [1997] and Kiri Miller’s Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism [2008].) As good as it is as a musical documentary, the film ultimately disappoints in its capacity as a history. The problem is not particular to this film but instead reflects a common misconception within the reception and historiography of Sacred Harp music. This misconception has two parts: first, that Sacred Harp music constitutes a monolithic style that originated with William...