Shape note singing

NorthEdit

• Northeast U.S.
• New York state
  • Albany, NYC, LES; also Bard Hall, Bard College, 12-2:30pm, every Sunday (contact Ben Bath)[1][2]
• Western Mass.
• Vermont; Bennington College (contact Joanne Fuller), South Hero singing school
• Montreal
• Calendars: Singings nationwide; Sacred Harp Singings in New England (Google calendar by John Martin and Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg), Vermont, Rhode Island, Yale

SouthEdit

• Florida and Southern Georgia
  • Jacksonville Sacred Harp Singing
  • Micanopy 1 2 (Denson) and Hoboken, Ga. (Cooper)
  • Sacred Harp singing in Georgia Atlanta Sacred Harp facebook
  • Florida and Alabama Cooper Book singings schedule (cf.)
  • Several singings in the wiregrass country an hour and a half west of Tallahassee
• North Carolina and environs
  • Christian Harmony: Western N.C. and nearby parts of Tenn. and S.C.
  • Canton, N.C.: fasola.org, Mountain Grown Music, Blue Ridge Music Trails; Anne Lough of Clyde, N.C.[3][4]
  • Black Mountain/Swannanoa/Warren Wilson College: Contact Joe Holbert; All-Day Singing 7/28/12 (free admission)
  • Eastern Tenn.: New Harp of Columbia singings
  • Shenandoah Valley: Harmonia Sacra singings; DC area to Charlottesville singings; Charlottesville; NSV
  • Raleigh/Durham

Other tunebooksEdit

• Missouri Harmony in use in Missouri, Arkansas, Indiana, and Illinois
• Walker's Southern Harmony in use in Kentucky (also adopted at the Swannanoa Gathering in western N.C.)
• White Book in use in Mississippi, Alabama, and Decatur, Ga.
• The Denson-Parris revision (the "Alabama book" now incorporated into the 2010 Christian Harmony) in Georgia, the Carolinas, Arkansas, and Texas
• The new Shenandoah Harmony is strong in Virginia and Pennsylvania and spreading...
• Harmonia Sacra singings

Composing Sacred Harp todayEdit

• The Trumpet; recording
• Sacred Harp tunes
• Fasola songwriters
• Minnesota Harmony Project

Musicology/tunesmithingEdit

• Barbour, The Church Music of William Billings

Music engravingEdit

• Musescore with shape notes plug-in
• LilyPond and Frescobaldi
  • David Olson/Fasoli discussion list
  • Robert Stoddard LilyPond resources
  • Leland Paul Kusmer LilyPond resources

RecordingsEdit

• Hollowsquare.org (contact me for a current working link: kept private by request of the site creator)
• Pilgrim Productions
• Steven Taylor
• J.Q. Wolf Collection
• Bostonsing.org
• shapenotecds.com
• Sing Them Over to Me
• WCUG Cuthbert, Ga., 1970's Hymn Time
• 1970 video from John Garst collection
• Digital Library of Appalachia Berea College recordings from Sacred Harp (including Wiregrass Singers), Christian Harmony, Harmonia Sacra, and New Harp of Columbia (misidentified as "Knoxville Sacred Harp Singers")
• Lomax recordings
• Soundcloud: Texas, Richmond, Philly, Connexion Singers, Shenandoah Harmony, Cork, Dublin, Scotland
  • Bridget Camden, Bill Hinton, Nicoletta Rogers, Magdalena Zapędowska-Eriksen, Michael Walker, Duane Nasis, Ella Cumber, Fynn Titford-Mock

Tune and tunebook collectionsEdit

• New AAS materials at archive.org (whole collection)
• Shapenote.net
• Wikipedia list (incl. IMSLP links)
• R.L. Vaughn list
• Bremen
• Selected round-note books:
  • Aaron Williams, New Universal Psalmodist (1770), 5th ed.
  • Knapp, The Evangelical Harp, Utica, 1845
  • G.O. Robinson and I.B. Woodbury, The Casket, Charleston, 1855
  • William James Selby, The Old Paths, Utica, 1869

Song textsEdit

Sacred poetry

• ...

Folksong texts

• The Ozark Folksong Collection

Other resourcesEdit

• Resources (S. Sabol)
• Rising Dove: 1 2
• Some spreadsheets by Pam Keating
• A bunch of statistics derived from the 2005 minutes
• David Jensen, "Modal studies" of SH1991 and other shapenote tunebooks
• Appalachian State University library guide
• Hymn tunes: HTI Hymnary Anthology of The American Hymn-Tune Repertory; "SWASMIS is being transformed into a fully functioning, public access website"

Historical collections of documents or periodicals

• SH Museum online resources
• Huntsville SH Newsletter

Cooper BookEdit

• Cooper/Denson comparatio numerorum
• Karen Willard's Index to Composers, Arrangers, and Sources of Music
• Nice Cooper Book song information tables
• Further Cooper Book indices (warning: word index not completely reliable, e.g. "ready?" on p. 328 not indexed under "ready")
• Cooper Book minutes

Christian HarmonyEdit

• Christian Harmony 2010 indexes (Robert Kelley)
• Index to Composers, Arrangers, and Sources to Tunes
• Minutes and Singing Schedule

Harmonia SacraEdit

• Indices including incipit

Northern HarmonyEdit

• Northern Harmony index

Introductions to Sacred HarpEdit

Introductory videosEdit

• Echoes of the Past: Singing the Sacred Harp, produced in North Carolina with Lydia Lewallen]
• San Jose Mercury-News
• Mike Osborne, "The South's Sacred Songs"
• Anniston Star
• David Indge, 4th Norwich All-Day Sacred Harp Singing, 11 July 2015
• "Stuck in Vermont"
• "Only in Montreal: Sacred Harp Singalong"
• Awake My Soul trailer
• Sacred Harp singing (Pop Goes the Culture podcast)
• OPB, Oregon Art Beat: Portland Sacred Harp
• They Sing of A Heaven (1972)
• Sacred Harp in Paris
• UK singers at Bonnie Prince Billy show
• 2018 interview of singers at Liberty Church (Henagar, Ala.)

More extensive documentariesEdit

• Awake My Soul
• Sweet Is the Day: A Sacred Harp Family Portrait
• Shouting Song (1982)
• The Sacred Harp of Hoboken: part 1, part 2 (dead; WaterTower films seems to have disappeared from YouTube[5])
• Hoboken Style: Meaning and Change in Okefenokee Sacred Harp Singing
• Valdosta State University, South Georgia Folklife Collection: Sacred Harp
• Univ. of Mississippi interviews (the field notes [PDF], complemented by the audio logs, quickly communicate the matter of these lengthy interviews)

ArticlesEdit

• Many at the Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter
• Anna Claire Vollers, "This old Southern tradition bridges new cultural divides" (AL.com, 2018)
• Inara Verzemnieks, "Shapes of the Heart" (The Oregonian, 2007)
• Matt Hinton (2013, Creative Loafing Atlanta)
• Rachel Hall, "A New Generation of Shape-Note Singers in Philadelphia" (2018)
• Al Blanton (2013)
• Shape, rattle and roll: The amazing survival of shape-note singing (The Guardian, UK, 2010)
• Joe Dempsey, Washington City Paper (2007)
• ArkansasOnline (2015)
• Mark Peterson (Time)
• Andy Markowitz
• Kevin Griffin Moreno (2012)
• Minneapolis Star-Tribune, with a nice video
• Jennifer Kelly (2009)
• Nervous Pete
• Steven Sabol
• Simon Jones (2012, Church Times, UK)
• Matt Huston, Sacred Harp and Leaving the Comfort Zone (2011)
• Walter Graff, "Kudzu": a northern singer's first southern singing (part of fasola.org/essays)
• Robert S. Brunk, "Guided by Voices: Finding Grace Through Shape-Note Singing" (2016) (VQR)
• Shape Note: America's Oldest Music Now Sung Around the World
• Montgomery Advertiser (2014)
• An Anglophone visits the Sacred Harp singing in Bremen, Germany
• From a perspective skeptical of religion:
  • Können Nichtglaubende Religion überhaupt verstehen? - Von Rudolf Otto bis Sacred Harp on "einen ursprünglich christlichen Laien-Chorgesang, der heute als überkonfessionelle, musikalische Bewegung weltweit religiöse und nichtreligiöse Sänger zu kraftvollen Musik- und Gemeinschaftserlebnissen zusammenführt" (2013)
  • The Profane Harp: Humanism and Song (2011)
  • Kate Cohen, Church (Just not the normal kind) (2014)
• Profiles: Stanley Smith (Stanley Smith video interview, 2002)

Radio features Edit

• Sacred Harp Singers (WMUB, Huntsville, 1979)
• Melissa Block (NPR)
• Kelley Libby visits the first all-day singing from the Shenandoah Harmony (Authentic South podcast)
• Sacred Harp: the punk rock of choral music (KALW San Francisco)
• Sacred Harp music (WYPR Baltimore)
• New Haven singing (WSHU)
• WMUK (Southwest Michigan), 2016
• BBC's "The Strand" (listen from the 11:00 mark) There were several other BBC features on Sacred Harp, including a half-hour documentary by Cerys Matthews from Dec. 2012, but they are no longer available online.
• audioBoom: Everything Sounds/Shapenote, Michael Walker/BBC
• Australian RadioNational: 1 2
• Singing in Derby Line, Vt. (Newport Dispatch)
• ‘Shape’ singing strikes high note in Philadelphia
• 2015 WABE report on singing from the reprinted James 1911 book

Instructional materialsEdit

• Cheat sheet for a beginner to take to a singing
• Lisa Grayson's more extensive introduction
• Lee & Willard singing school workbook

HistoriesEdit

• American hymnody (Smith Creek Music)

Essays and explorationsEdit

• Will Robin, Shape Notes, Billings, and American Modernisms
• New Approaches to Shape Note Hymns - WNYC radio program on shapenote-inspired performances and compositions ("new music approaches to an old American tradition")

More collections of linksEdit

• Sacred Harp Detroit's link sampler
• T456: Mid-Late 19th Century Tunebooks

MiscellaneousEdit

• Sacredharp on Twitter (RSS)