Three of my shape-note tunes—“Clinton,” “Hamrick,” and “Newton”—are included in the new Northern Harmony (Plainfield, VT: Northern Harmony Publishing Company, 2012). First published in 1980, this fifth edition of the Northern Harmony includes 150 tunes—half written by members of the “first New England School” (1770–1810), and half by contemporary composers working in the dispersed harmony shape-note idiom. Singers across New England use the Northern Harmony as a supplement to The Sacred Harp at weekly and monthly singings. The songbook has also been used by Sacred Harp singers in the United Kingdom since the mid-1990s. A variety of adult and teen performing ensembles brought together by Vermont world music and shape-note music organization Village Harmony also make regular use of the songs in the Northern Harmony tunebook on concert tours and at singing camps.
I attended all-day singings from the Northern Harmony in Vermont and Massachusetts in 2001 and 2002 shortly after I was first exposed to Sacred Harp music. For several years I sang favorite tunes out of the fourth edition of the songbook at “otherbook” shape-note singings at Aldo Ceresa’s apartment in New York City and at various homes in Cambridge, New York. It’s an honor to be included in this new edition, and to have my songs appear alongside those of teachers of mine such as Neely Bruce, and co-conspirators such as Aldo Ceresa and Lauren Bock.
The new second issue of The Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter features Chloe Webb’s fascinating account of the life of Lorraine Miles McFarland, the girl depicted on the cover of Awake, My Soul as well as a preview of the forthcoming shape note songbook the Shenandoah Harmony. A special section of this issue is a selection of reports on each of the five all-day singings and conventions held on the fifth Sunday this past April (and the Saturday before).
Coming soon: “National Newsletter: Vol. 1, Nos. 4, 5, and 6,” digitized copies of issues of the National Sacred Harp Newsletter (September–November, 1985)
I’ll be teaching this summer at both the adult- and youth-emphasis sessions of Camp Fasola. My classes this year include sessions on leading (with Judy Caudle and Cassie Allen), composing, the role of the arranging committee in Sacred Harp, and the rudiments of music (I’ll be teaching rudiments at the youth session of camp with Lauren Bock). Camp Fasola—Adult Emphasis will be held June 10–14 in Double Springs, Alabama. Camp Fasola—Youth Emphasis will be held July 2–6 in Anniston, Alabama.
Harmony Primitive Baptist Church, Calhoun, Georgia. Photograph by Judy Mincey, June 4, 2012.
On Saturday, May 5, I attended a Sacred Harp singing at Harmony Primitive Baptist Church in Calhoun, Georgia. The singing was organized by Judy Mincey to coincide with the stop in Calhoun of “Georgia Harmonies: Celebrating Georgia Roots Music,” a traveling exhibition of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum on Mainstreet program. One of a number of events associated with the exhibition, the singing attracted a dozen white Sacred Harp singers, perhaps thirty listeners, and three members of a black shape-note singing community who also had a special singing included in the event calendar.
I write about this encounter between white and black shape-note singers, the exchange it promoted, and the role that the exhibition’s focus on the connections between music and place played in making the connection possible in a new post on the Southern Spaces blog titled “Place and Pluralism: The ‘Georgia Harmonies’ Traveling Exhibition.” The post also contains three recordings of mine from a black shape-note singing held in Marietta the day after the singing in Calhoun that four other white Sacred Harp singers and I attended.
The weekend will begin with the film screening, followed by a question and answer session with the filmmakers, on Friday morning. In the evening, I will lead a singing school, teaching the rudiments of Sacred Harp singing to students at the Academy and interested members of the public. The next day we will hold an all-day Sacred Harp singing from 9:30–3:00.
The weekend has been made possible by a grant from the Community Foundation for Brevard.
In my essay I situate the first Ireland Convention in the context of the establishment of Sacred Harp conventions outside the southeastern United States over the past four decades and describe how the Cork convention (like the New England Convention and other relatively new conventions) was founded thanks to influences from academic and traditional channels, was a revelatory emotional experiences for many who attended, and precipitated reciprocal travel among new groups of singers. As is the case with all of my research on Sacred Harp singing, writing and researching this essay was a moving experience.
Facebook posts reflecting on the first Ireland Sacred Harp Convention. Accessed March 1, 2012.
My fieldwork for this article took me not just to Ireland, but to new digital spaces where Sacred Harp singers from across Europe and the United States are meeting and conversing about their singing experiences. In the wake of the Ireland Convention Irish, English, Polish, and American Sacred Harp singers took to Facebook to effuse about the Cork convention. I cited several of these comments in my essay, but in the wake of the convention my Facebook wall and the Cork Sacred Harp Facebook page overflowed with moving reflections.
Now, a year after the convention, Facebook groups continue to loom large in my research. Posts on the Sacred Harp Singers of Cork and Sacred Harp in Poland pages leave traces of the strengthening connections between singers from these places and newer groups in Germany and elsewhere in Ireland. These Facebook groups are sites of negotiation where singers try to fit their own understandings of religious faith, community activity, and music with the body of traditions associated with Sacred Harp singing for which they themselves feel compelled to advocate. Just as the National Sacred Harp Newsletter in the 1980s and 1990s, and the Fasola listservs in the 1990s and 2000s, facilitated the expansion of Sacred Harp singing across the United States, ((See John Bealle, Public Worship, Private Faith: Sacred Harp and American Folksong (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997) and Kiri Miller, Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) for extended treatments of the roles the Newsletter and the Fasola listserv played in the recent expansion of Sacred Harp singing across the United States.)) Facebook has become the tool of choice for facilitating the spread of Sacred Harp across Europe in the 2010s.
The fieldnotes I took in preparation for writing my Southern Spaces essay include my reflections on the singing school and singing sessions themselves and the time I spent with other singers in pubs around Cork. They quote conversations I had with singers in these spaces as well as on Facebook and Google chat in the wake of the convention. My tone is impassive at the start of the singing. I focus on describing the event with a clear eye toward any perceived divergences from traditional practice, or any emblems of a Cork singing style. As the singing continues, however, the tenor of my fieldnotes shifts as I become engrossed in the revalatory experience Alice Maggio described in her post-convention blog post. ((See also Alice Maggio, “Wesleyan Sacred Harpers around the world,” WesLive (blog), March 31, 2011, http://community.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2011/03/31/wesleyan-sacred-harpers-around-the-world/ and Alice Maggio, “First Irish Sacred Harp Convention,” The Trumpet 1 (2): vi, June 2011.)) I write of my critical faculties being lost, and of feeling genuinely overwhelmed with love for my new singing friends.
Caught documenting the Ireland Convention. Photograph by Aldo Ceresa, March 8, 2011.
In my fieldnotes I am revealed as an ethnographer but also as a participant. I express the same feelings of love and connection to new singing friends that singers expressed on Facebook and at the pubs at which we lingered until late in the night on Sunday, hoping to delay the conclusion of the weekend for another hour. In Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism Kiri Miller writes of how all Sacred Harp singers behave like ethnographers to a certain extent. ((Miller, Traveling Home.)) Certainly since the first secretary of a Sacred Harp convention recorded minutes singers have attempted to preserve a record of their gatherings. In the first half of the twentieth century Sacred Harp singers such as J.S. James and Earl Thurman attempted to document the early history of The Sacred Harp. ((See J. S. James, A Brief History of the Sacred Harp and Its Author, B. F. White, Sr., and Contributors (Douglasville, GA: New South Book and Job Print, 1904) and, on the first century of the Chattahoochee Musical Convention, Earl Thurman, “The Chattahoochee Musical Convention, 1852–1952,” in The Chattahoochee Musical Convention, 1852–2002: A Sacred Harp Historical Sourcebook, edited by Kiri Miller, 29–120 (Bremen, GA: The Sacred Harp Museum, 2002).)) From the 1960s through the present numerous singers have brought portable recording devices to singings in an attempt to capture what they experienced. Singers have related to these documents both as overwhelmed lovers of Sacred Harp singing and as scholars, attempting to account for their experiences and understand their importance. As a researcher thoroughly committed to my participation in the Sacred Harp singing tradition I attempt to understand and situate, this dual desire can sometimes feel distorting and dangerous. Yet at other moments, as during the research and writing of “To Meet To Part No More,” the tension between these two modes can enrich my experience, enjoyment, and understanding.
Update: I’ve co-written (with John Plunkett) an expanded account of Bruce Springsteen’s sampling of “Last Words of Copernicus” for the first issue of The Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter: “Bruce Springsteen’s Sacred Harp Sample.”
Bruce Springsteen’s new song “Death to My Hometown” samples Alan Lomax’s 1959 recording of “Last Words of Copernicus”—an 1869 tune from The Sacred Harp composed by Georgia-based Sacred Harp singer Sarah Lancaster. A setting of a stanza from a 1755 hymn by Philip Doddridge, Lancaster’s tune creatively re-imagines the words as having been spoken by the sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.
I presented a paper at last weekend’s Atlanta Graduate Student Conference in U.S. History titled “Social Intercropping: Sacred Harp Singing in the Cotton-Cultivating U.S. South.” An abridged version of a recent seminar paper, my presentation demonstrated connections between the scheduling of Sacred Harp singings and the cotton farming calendar between 1845 and 1929 and examined how Sacred Harp singings adapted to the post-cotton Southern political economy after World War II.
