Tag: sacred harp

New American Music Article on Genre-Spanning Shape-Note Compositions

“Genre Spanning in the Close and Dispersed Harmony Shape-Note Songs of Sidney Whitfield Denson and Orin Adolphus Parris,” American Music 35, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 94–132.

In a new article, “Genre Spanning in the Close and Dispersed Harmony Shape-Note Songs of Sidney Whitfield Denson and Orin Adolphus Parris,” in the latest issue of American Music I argue that often-reified boundaries between dispersed harmony and convention gospel were porous and frequently crossed by mid-twentieth-century Alabama composers. I focus on compositions by Sidney “Whit” Whitfield Denson (1890–1964) and Orin Adolphus “O. A.” Parris (1897–1966), two singer-composer-compilers from northern Alabama. In the essay,

I argue that Denson and Parris tailored their contributions to fit the genre conventions of the oblong tunebooks and gospel convention songbooks in which their music appeared while also infusing much of their work with hybrid harmonic and lyrical language and extending elements from one shape-note genre to another. Their composition and songbook editing practices reveal a musical culture in which a variety of shape-note genres coexisted, influenced one another, and attracted overlapping followings.

In pointing to these composers’ genre-crossing work, my article challenges assumptions about the stylistic boundaries of white gospel music and Sacred Harp singing. My article also contributes to “the discussion of genre classification, development, boundary work, and disruption,” suggesting that boundary-spanning can actually contribute to the reification of genres.

In addition to making these contributions, I also hope that the article’s concise treatment of topics such as dispersed harmony and categories of contrapuntal effects in gospel music, will prove useful to others. A section of the article delves into the notation systems, harmonic styles, text meters, and contrapuntal effects in different shape-note genres, along with a review of scholarship on these topics.

Jesse P. Karlsberg, “Orin Adolphus Parris: At Home Across the Shape-Note Music Spectrum,” Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 6, no. 1 (September 1, 2017).

I also contributed an essay summarizing and expanding upon my argument to the latest issue of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter. In “Orin Adolphus Parris: At Home Across the Shape-Note Music Spectrum,” I detail O. A. Parris’s “unique and masterful approach to crafting new tunes in … three shape-note styles”: Sacred Harp, Christian Harmony, and gospel. This essay afforded me an opportunity to comment more extensively on Parris’s virtuosic approach to composition, noting favorite harmony parts  (“the bass in ‘Eternal Praise’ and the treble to ‘A Happy Meeting,'” both in The Christian Harmony), and articulating how “Parris’s harmony parts …elegantly interact with each other both rhythmically and melodically, like pieces of a puzzle snapping together.” As I note in the Newsletter, Parris and Denson were just two members of a group “that included several Densons, Kitchenses, McGraws, and Woodards” in the mid-twentieth century who applied their creativity across the shape-note genre spectrum.

But among this group, Parris seemed perhaps the most at home in the widest range of genres, capable in songs like “The Better Land” and “The Grand Highway” of mixing and matching elements from different styles while creating music that feels just right in its intended source.

Many thanks to all those who read and commented on drafts of these two essays, and to the archivists who assisted me in accessing the often obscure gospel publications featuring songs by these composers. Thanks, especially, to the descendants of Whit Denson and O. A. Parris, who shared family photographs and granted me permission to reprint their talented relatives’ songs.

New Article on the Ethics of Singing Across the Color Line

In a new article, “Singing Across the Color Line: Reflections on The Colored Sacred Harp,” in CDSS News, I delve into the history of The Colored Sacred Harp, a 1934 shape-note tunebook featuring the music of black Alabamians, to shed light on the racial history of Sacred Harp singing. In the essay I argue that “cultural, social and racial histories effect the choices we make about what and how to sing” and bear reexamining. I describe the circumstances behind book’s publication in Jim Crow–era southeastern Alabama, the popularity of the Wiregrass Sacred Harp Singers (a performing ensemble that sang from the collection during the folk music movement), and the tunebook’s use today, limited to two largely white shape-note singings in Montgomery. I suggest that these contemporary “singing[s] demonstrates both an ethical approach to the crossing of musical color lines and the challenges these crossings pose.” I conclude that

The choices we make when we sing songs initially performed in a context different from our own can help bridge vast differences of time, space, and culture. Our repertoire choices can facilitate respectful tributes to dear friends while highlighting often marginalized histories. Yet these same choices, if they allow for mimicry of affect, can easily turn well-intentioned efforts into caricatures that reaffirm marginalization. As we embrace more inclusive musical repertoires, let’s pay careful attention to the choices we make, drawing on our shared embodied knowledge to sensitively remember and perpetuate songs and styles with which we are intimately familiar.

The article appears in CDSS News’s “CDSS Sings!” column, which features a song and its backstory with each quarterly issue. My contribution includes “Remember Me,” a lovely song from The Colored Sacred Harp by southeastern Alabama singer and singing school teacher T. Y. Lawrence.

Writing by and about Sacred Harp Composer Raymond C. Hamrick

I contributed an essay on the many contributions of singer, composer, and scholar Raymond Cooper Hamrick to Sacred Harp singing to the latest issue of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter. In my essay, “Raymond C. Hamrick’s Contributions to Sacred Harp Singing and Scholarship,” I note that, as a composer,

Hamrick imparted to his music a distinctive voice that recalls the earliest American composers while embracing a fluid melodic style and expansive chordal palette all its own. He wrote hundreds of shape-note songs across a sixty-year period, contributing some of the most popular and well-loved songs to The Sacred Harp, and consenting to have some 179 of his songs published in two editions of The Georgian Harmony. Hamrick’s singing voice was renowned, an accurate bass singer with a warm and round tone. Hamrick harbored an unquenchable curiosity—he collected rare tunebooks, studied the history of the tradition’s songs and composers, and asked and answered questions about the music’s practices in the groundbreaking articles he wrote for Sacred Harp newsletters and scholarly journals. Hamrick was a gracious and generous mentor and a friend to many. He shared his knowledge of Sacred Harp’s history, his insight into composition, and his thoughtful opinions with singers young and old over decades.

My essay on Hamrick, who was a mentor to me, serving “as a gracious and humble model for combining enthusiasm for Sacred Harp singing and composing with research into its history and practices,” as I noted in my dissertation’s acknowledgments, appeared in the Newsletter‘s first special issue.

“Raymond C. Hamrick on The Sacred Harp,” special issue of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter.

“Raymond Cooper Hamrick on The Sacred Harp,” which I edited, “includes insightful essays by Hamrick himself, a video interview, and commentary on his many contributions to the Sacred Harp world.” The collection includes seven essays by Hamrick himself. Two of these, a masterful study of tempo and an insider’s account of the process of editing The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition, were never before published. A short video of Alan Lomax and Hamrick in conversation recorded in 1982 had also never been published before appearing in the Newsletter.

Hamrick’s unique dedication to studying and writing about Sacred Harp history and practices has largely escaped singers’ attention and was invisible to scholars unwittingly building on the foundations established by his research. I’m excited that this special issue brings Hamrick’s writings together in a single place, and grateful to have had the opportunity to draw attention to his fascinating findings and to his spirit as a person. I am also grateful to the large team of volunteers, Hamrick family members, and librarians and editors, named in my introduction, who made this issue possible.

“Regional Roots” and “Seasonal Songs” in the Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter

Cath Tyler leads at a Sacred Harp singing in Utrecth, The Netherlands, August 30, 2015. Photograph by Jesse P. Karlsberg.
Cath Tyler leads at a Sacred Harp singing in Utrecth, The Netherlands, August 30, 2015. Photograph by Jesse P. Karlsberg.

Two new articles of mine are included in the latest issue of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter (vol. 4, no. 2, December 31, 2015). In “Regional Roots: Growing Sacred Harp in the Netherlands, Alaska, and British Columbia,” I recount recent trips to growing Sacred Harp singings in Utrecht, Sitka, and Vancouver, contending that while during the first wave of Sacred Harp’s expansion beyond the South, singers from Alabama and Georgia played an enormous role in connecting new singing groups and sharing Sacred Harp’s practices, increasingly

regional cores—sturdy groups of singers with substantial Sacred Harp experience—are helping ensure the success of new classes in their areas … welcom[ing] new classes into the international Sacred Harp network, fostering Sacred Harp’s growth in a period when chartered busses no longer regularly transport southern singers to new conventions[.]

Bobby Watkins and son Taylor sport seasonal outfits at the 2014 Henagar-Union Convention. Photograph by Martha Beverley.
Bobby Watkins and son Taylor sport seasonal outfits at the 2014 Henagar-Union Convention. Photograph by Martha Beverley.

In “Seasonal Songs,” written with Mark T. Godfrey, we analyze the variety of ways in which Sacred Harp “singers think about songs in relation to the calendar” when deciding what to lead. As we illustrate,

[some] songs do indeed show a measurable and statistically significant burst in popularity at specific times of the year. Yet the reasons why some songs are led seasonally vary, as do the specific contours in the leading patterns of such songs over time. [This analysis] reveals just one small piece of how … [leaders’] individual discrete decisions build over time, shaping the seasonal ebb and flow of our collective experience.

In addition to these two articles, this new issue of the Newsletter—which I edit with Nathan Rees—includes articles on a 1924 Sacred Harp trophy from Mississippi, a Sacred Harp singing weekend in Sweden, conducting Sacred Harp research online in historical newspapers, a 1965 list of “dos and don’ts” by Nashville minister and Harpeth Valley Sacred Harp News editor Priestley Miller, and much more. You can access the full issue at the Sacred Harp Publishing Company website.

Vol. 4, No. 2 Contents

“Folklore’s Filter” in the New York Times

A recent New York Times article on a Sacred Harp course taught in the Yale music department features my dissertation, “Folklore’s Filter: Race, Place, and Sacred Harp Singing.” The article places the course, taught by Ian Quinn, in the context of recent student protests over racial inequality on campus. For Quinn, “Once the racial tensions broke out on campus, it seemed to me particularly urgent that we spend time talking about” race and Sacred Harp. As Times reporter Phillip Lutz notes, my dissertation “has become a reference for Quinn as he readjusts the course materials as a result of the racial protests.” The article continues:

The dissertation examines how in the civil rights era, a growing number of folklorists began to document black shape-note groups, and festivals started to feature them next to their white counterparts. Speaking to students before the community members arrived to sing, Mr. Quinn invoked Mr. Karlsberg’s analysis of multiracial programming at the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife in 1970. He showed a video of the Wiregrass Sacred Harp Singers, a black shape-note group, performing at the 1983 Smithsonian festival.

But he said that such efforts at recognizing the tradition’s diversity had a limited effect on entrenched attitudes in schools, churches and other places where most of the singing is done. “By nature, Sacred Harp singing is a kind of conservative, tradition-bound practice,” he said. “That’s going to be the issue those of us who would like to see a more diverse community of singers will have to face.”

Mr. Quinn said Mr. Karlsberg’s dissertation represents one of the most sustained counterweights to Jackson’s work to date. Mr. Karlsberg, for his part, said sessions like Mr. Quinn’s might, when coupled with targeted outreach, constitute a forum for diversifying the Sacred Harp experience.

“The welcome mat is there, and the structure, the setup, the practices make it really great for that,” he said.

You can read Lutz’s article, “A Different Note on Race at Yale,” on the New York Times website. Thanks to Ian Quinn for reading my dissertation with his students, and to Phillip Lutz for thoughtfully engaging with the issues my work raises.

“Folklore’s Filter” and a Post-doctoral Fellowship

In August 2015 I graduated from Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts with a PhD after my dissertation, “Folklore’s Filter: Race, Place, and Sacred Harp Singing,” was accepted by the graduate school. On September 1 I began an exciting new position as Post-doctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities Publishing at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.

My dissertation examines the impact of folklorization on Sacred Harp’s associations with race and place. I trace this through the tunebook’s twentieth-century editions and interactions between singers, folklorists, and folk festival audiences. Emory’s electronic theses and dissertations repository features the dissertation’s abstract and table of contents.

In my post-doctoral fellowship I will edit a digital critical edition of Joseph Stephen James’s 1911 Original Sacred Harp, a companion to the Centennial Edition I edited published by Pitts Theology Library and the Sacred Harp Publishing Company this February. The digital edition will use Readux, a tool for annotating and publishing digital critical editions developed by a team from Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship and the library’s software development team with which I’ve served as annotation and export consultant. My digital critical edition will be the first volume in a series I’m editing using the platform tentatively titled Race and Religion in Turn of the Twentieth-century American Music. In addition to this project, I will teach a class each spring and will continue to pursue my writing and research. I’m happy to have completed my doctoral program and am thrilled to begin this new stage of my career.

Article on the Debut Singing from Original Sacred Harp in the Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter

Speaking about the history and design of Original Sacred Harp at the joint session of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music and the Emory singing. Photograph by Mark Karlsberg.
Speaking about the history and design of Original Sacred Harp at the joint session of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music and the Emory singing. Photograph by Mark Karlsberg.

The latest issue of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter includes an article I wrote recounting the debut singing from Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition. The singing, held on Valentine’s Day at Emory University’s Cannon Chapel during a joint session of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music and the Emory Sacred Harp Singing, brought together more than one hundred singers and scholars. The event included a talk on the history of the tunebook, an hour or so of singing from the new edition, dinner on the grounds, and singing from The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition. As I wrote in my report on the singing, “Old Strings on a New Harp,”

the day also gave a number of musicologists their first exposure to Sacred Harp singing, and provided an opportunity to reflect on how singers from generations past articulated the relevance of our tradition to their own times and places as we do so today in a rapidly changing Sacred Harp landscape.

Read “Old Strings on a New Harp” in the Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter.

Spring Presentations

This spring I’m presenting on a range of topics on the cultural politics and book history of Sacred Harp singing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The topics range from the Philadelphia print culture that produced the meticulously composed Sacred Harp editions of the 1840s–1860s to 1960s black South Alabama singers’ disagreements over the politics of protest.

In February I presented a paper co-written with Christopher Sawula at the Auburn University Montgomery Southern Studies conference on the life and music of Philadelphia bookkeeper Elphrey Heritage. Our paper argues that many of the songs Heritage contributed to tunebooks like The Christian Minstrel, The Hesperian Harp, The Social Harp, and The Sacred Harp, show musical markers of close and dispersed harmony styles. Combined with evidence of social interaction between Heritage, his employer the printer Tillinghast King Collins, and tunebook compilers William Hauser and John G. McCurry, Heritage’s music offers a glimpse into a Philadelphia social scene in the 1840s and 1850s that affected the form of southern shape-note tunebooks to a greater extent than commonly acknowledged.

Leading from Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition at the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music and Emory Singing with Allen Tullos, co-director of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and Danielle Pitrone, who assisted with the production of the new Centennial Edition.
Leading from Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition at the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music and Emory Singing with Allen Tullos, co-director of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and Danielle Pitrone, who assisted with the production of the new Centennial Edition.

The next weekend I presented a lecture–participatory singing at Emory during a joint session of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music and the Emory Sacred Harp singing focusing on the musical conservatism and material modernity of Joseph Stephen James’s Original Sacred Harp. My talk, which also served as the official launch of the new Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition, was a hands on tour of the book’s design and contents, articulating how its various features illuminated its revisers’ aims and social context. After a short break over 100 singers and conference attendees joined in singing a range of songs from the new edition illustrating its editors’ musical choices. Amy Kiley, a reporter from Atlanta’s NPR station, WABE, covered the event and the publication of my new edition.

I presented at another conference in Atlanta the following weekend, the Southern American Studies Association, on the politics of race and protest that emerged in a 1968 field recording in which SUNY Buffalo music professor William H. Tallmadge interviews south Alabama reverend Shem Jackson, a son of Colored Sacred Harp compiler Judge Jackson. During an interview largely about services and singings at Jackson’s church the conversation unexpectedly turns to Jackson’s resistance to his daughter Mary’s participation in student protest at Tuskegee Institute—protests which Tallmadge seems to regard positively. I presented this paper as part of a panel on race and Sacred Harp singing, where I was joined by Nathan Rees, who spoke about the Wiregrass singers’ album cover art, and Jonathon Smith, who discussed celtic imagery in representations of East Tennessee New Harp of Columbia singers. Douglas Harrison, an insightful scholar of southern gospel, chaired our session.

Paste
Pasted corrections on a page for the 1992 “Cooper book.” Collection of Stanley Smith. Photograph by Jesse P. Karlsberg.

Earlier this month I presented a paper on how Texas singers associate the layout of pre–digitally retypeset Sacred Harp editions with the sound of small rural singings and find both an impediment to efforts promoting the style to urban(e) southern audiences. My paper, delivered at the annual meeting of the Society of American Music in Sacramento, drew on Buell Cobb‘s metaphor of “the South’s ring of repugnance” to describe how such singers invest the digital with the potential to erase the vernacular rusticity that some newer singers romanticize, echoing a folkloric paradigm.

Later this month I will travel to Boston for the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, where I will speak about the nineteenth century editions of The Sacred Harp. Far from a vernacular folk production, The Sacred Harp was a meticulously produced publication of T. K. and P. G. Collins, a high status firm at the center of the emerging national book trade.

Viewing the title page of Original Sacred Harp in Readux BETA.
Viewing the title page of Original Sacred Harp in Readux BETA.

I’ll travel from Boston to Portland, Oregon, to present one final paper, discussing the Readux platform under development at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship at the Library Publishing Forum. Readux is a new tool for reading, annotating, and publishing digital critical editions of digitized texts. The open source platform is designed to foreground scanned page images, paired with fully searchable text and robust multimedia annotations mapped to page regions. A digital critical edition of Original Sacred Harp will serve as a proof of concept demonstration of the tool’s capacity and will be the first in a series of editions featuring nineteenth- and twentieth-century sacred tunebooks and manuscripts, but the platform will also be available for use, for free of charge, by others interested in editing and publishing digital critical editions.

Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition Debut, February 14

My first book, Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition, is printed and on its way to the publisher’s warehouse in Georgia. We will be officially launching the book at Emory’s annual Sacred Harp singing on Saturday, February 14, 2015.

Front cover of Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition.
Front cover of Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition.

We will celebrate the book’s publication with a joint session of the Emory singing and the annual meeting of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music. I’ll give a short talk placing the book in the social world of its editors and describing its “musical conservatism and material modernity.” We’ll then devote the first session of the Emory singing to participatory singing from the Centennial Edition. Sacred Harp singers will take turns leading songs from the new book and I’ll chime in here and there with comments on the songs, the tunebook, and their makers. The debut presentation and singing will take place from 9:45–10:45 am in Emory University’s Cannon Chapel. The event is free and open to the public. Please join us!

We’ll sing for the rest of the day from The Sacred Harp, 1991 Edition, pausing for dinner on the grounds at noon. Other special events include:

  • Noon and 3 pm: A tour of an exhibit on hymnody and psalmody at the Pitts Theology Library including Watts, Wesley, and selections from the library’s collection of shape-note songbooks.
  • A talk by Joanna Smolko on the history of Sacred Harp singing in Athens, Georgia, also part of the SCSM conference session.

The new edition is the product of four years of work by a dedicated team at Emory University’s Pitts Theology Library and Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. At 584 pages, its editing was an enormous task I could not have undertaken without the support of many people, but Danielle Pitrone, M. Patrick Graham, and Allen Tullos deserve special mention. As noted on the book’s ordering page on the Sacred Harp Publishing Company website,

This commemorative edition celebrates the century that has passed since the 1911 publication of Original Sacred Harp, the direct progenitor of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company’s Sacred Harp, 1991 Edition. Each song in the book includes a historical note written by James. These annotations comprised the most ambitious and accessible record of the history of the songs and hymns in The Sacred Harp and their writers until David Warren Steel’s 2010 reference work, The Makers of the Sacred Harp. Although of variable accuracy, the annotations [in Original Sacred Harp] are a valuable source of information, and a frequent source of humor! Original Sacred Harp included all the songs in the 1870 Sacred Harp, the last edition Sacred Harp co-compiler B. F. White edited. In addition, it restored two thirds of the songs removed from the songbook in the nineteenth century, and introduced new songs that are among the most loved in the book today including “Present Joys,” “Praise God,” and “Traveling On.”

The Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition reprints the entire contents of the 1911 tunebook in meticulously reproduced facsimile, preserving the book’s quirky then-modern typographical style. The book features a new introduction by Jesse P. Karlsberg placing Original Sacred Harp in historical and social context, describing how it came to be published, and detailing its reception and legacy.

A handsome hardbound volume reproducing the 1911 tunebook’s original cover, Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition makes newly accessible James’s fascinating historical notes and a trove of engaging music.

John Leland and the Mammoth Cheese: Original Sacred Harp Historical Notes, Volume 2, Cheese Notes Edition

John Leland, engraving by T. Doney, 1845.
John Leland, engraving by T. Doney, 1845.

The design of the Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition was widely hailed as a great improvement over previous editions, yet many singers bemoaned the loss of James’s historical notes. By far the crowd favorite among these notes is James’s comment on John Leland, author of the hymn-text “O when shall I see Jesus, and reign with Him above,” which accompanies Elisha James King’s “Bound for Canaan” (p. 82). James wrote:

Rev. John Leland was born in 1754 and died in 1844. He was a Baptist preacher. In 1801 he took a preaching tour from his home in Massachusetts to Washington with his Cheshire cheese, which made his name national on account of that trip. … The farmers of Cheshire, for whom he was pastor, conceived the idea of sending the biggest cheese in America to President Jefferson. Mr. Leland offered to go to Washington with an ox team with it and preach along the way, which he did. The cheese weighed 1,450 pounds. He died with great hope of rest in the glory world.

This note led some singers to adopt the name “cheese notes” for James’s annotations. Singers in the Boston area even established an annual “cheese notes singing,” featuring dramatic readings of this and other choice historical notes from Original Sacred Harp.

Two other notes in which James touches on Leland’s character are less widely known. James’s comment on “Ecstasy” (p. 106) evinces an awareness of Leland’s friendship with Jefferson, which began during the minister’s time in Virginia from 1776–1791: (( Elihu Barrett, “Correspondence of Sylvanus Urban: The Great Cheshire Political Cheese,” in Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 3 (London: Bradbury, Evans, and Co., 1869), 636. ))

Rev. John Leland … was a Baptist minister, and was a great friend of President Thomas Jefferson. … He was popular among his people, but had many peculiarities. Further notice of him appears under the tune “Bound for Canaan.”

Baptist colleagues of Leland commented widely on the preacher’s peculiarities. (( “Eccentric John Leland; Baptist Pastors Tell Stories of a Once Noted Preacher,” New York Times, October 26, 1886, 8, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F0CE4DB163AE033A25755C2A9669D94679FD7CF. )) James’s juxtaposition of Leland’s eccentric nature with the story of the mammoth cheese in his note on “Religion Is a Fortune” (p. 319) suggests he was aware of and attempting to reproduce the story’s humor through including it in his annotations:

John Leland was … a Baptist minister, and composed his own hymns. He was also the author of several tunes. Some persons claim he was very eccentric. He traveled all the way to Washington from Cheshire, Mass., to carry President Jefferson a cheese weighing 1,450 pounds: He went through the country on an ox team, and preached all along wherever he could get an audience. He was a good man; and it is said on his deathbed he quoted the words of this hymn: “O When shall I see Jesus?”

Cheshire cheese monument, Cheshire, Massachusetts, September 25, 2012, CC SA
Cheshire cheese monument, Cheshire, Massachusetts, September 25, 2012, CC BY-SA

Undeniably comical, the propensity of the notes to encourage jokes at the tunebook’s expense, along with the uneven display of pages after seventy-five years of additions and substitutions, was embarrassing to the tunebook’s revisers, in whose cultural context Sacred Harp singing was often regarded as “old fogy.” In its time and place, however—Cheshire, Connecticut, in November 1801—Leland’s journey to Washington was serious business. The journey was a political statement in favor of the separation of church and state and against slavery, as well as a celebration of the newly elected Jefferson. More on that in a future post!