Shape-note singing links

Shape-note singing or Harp singing is amateur, community-based choral music rooted in a living tradition that dates from the 1700s and 1800s. Our music is called shape-note singing because different notes of the scale carry noteheads of different shapes as an aid to sight-reading -- a triangle for fa, an oval for sol, a rectangle for la and so on. It's written especially for untrained voices, and you don't have to be a virtuoso musician to sing it. Once largely confined to Alabama, Georgia and southern Appalachia, organized group singing from a shape-note tunebook called The Sacred Harp has spread north since the mid-1980s.

-- Peter Ellertsen <peterellertsen@yahoo.com>

Local singings

Illinois State Convention
 4th Sunday in September and Saturday before 
watch this space for 2006 location

• For information about my talks on shape-note singing schools and popular music of 19th-century Illinois, funded by the Road Scholars program of the Illinois Humanities Council, click here.
• To visit my webpage on singing the Sacred Harp (mostly from the Denson book) in downstate Illinois, click here.
• Sacred Harp singers in Springfield and west central Illinois sing once or twice a month on Sunday afternoons. During the tourist season, several of us sing as volunteer interpreters at Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site. To learn about upcoming singings, please contact Becky Schildman, PO Box 147, Ashland IL 62612 <bschildman@casscomm.com> or <schildman.becky@uis.edu>.
• The Charleston-Mattoon Sacred Harp Singers gather Thursday nights. Since 1985 they have hosted the Illinois State Convention (the oldest in the Midwest) the 4th Sunday in September and Saturday before. For information, please contact Janet Fraembs, telephone 217-345-6873.
• For historical background on how shape-note singing came to west central Illinois, first in the 1820s and again in the 1990s to New Salem, please click here. To read my weblog Hogfiddle, which contains posts about folk hymns as well as lore on traditional styles of playing the Appalachian dulcimer, please click here.

Shape-note music links

• Sacred Harp Page. Compiled by David Warren Steel, music professor at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, this site is the best place to start learning about the tradition. It includes valuable "practical essays" by New England singer Ginnie Ely, schedules, minutes and links to most Web sites in the country (including this one) that have anything to do with shape-note singing.
• Fasola Home Page. Features of this site, at <fasola.org>, include an e-mail discussion list on Sacred Harp and allied shape-note traditions, a "singings" list that focuses more narrowly on reports of singing conventions, a bibliography by independent scholar-author John Bealle and e-mail links to experts in different aspects of shape-note singing.
• Shape Note Recording Index. An exhaustive list of recordings of shape-note songs, including valuable field recordings of Southern conventions and all-day singings, compiled by Berkley Moore of Springfield.
• Sacred Harp Singing in Chicago. This website, maintained by singers at the University of Chicago and the adjacent Hyde Park neighborhood, lists Chicagoland and upstate singings and gives a sense of the diverse people attracted to Harp singing. It also has links to local e-mail singing notices.
• Sacred Harp Singing in Texas. Your eyes will be on more than Texas at this informative site. Both Denson and Cooper book traditions are featured, and an essay by traditional singer Gaylon L. Powell, based on e-mail interviews, explains why people nationwide love singing the Harp.
• Tom Mitchell's Photo Page. A Minnesota singer, Mitchell has photo essays on the Minnesota Convention, the National Convention in Birmingham, Ala., and singings on Sand Mountain that give the true flavor of Harp singing, North and South. He also makes field recordings of singings on CD.
• Southern Harmony Online. Part of the Christian Classics Ethereal Library maintained by Harry Plantinga at <www.ccel.org>, this site has copyright-free GIF files of songs in the 1853 edition of William Walker's influential shape-note tunebook.
• Cyber Hymnal. One of the most comprehensive and convenient resources on the Web for tracking down information about hymns and hymnists. Indexed by title, tune, meter and composer are 2,300 Christian hymns and gospel songs. For people (like me) who don't read round notes, MIDI files can be played for most of them.
• Other shape-note traditions: Click on the following links to find out about Christian Harmony singing in North Carolina, Old Harp singing in East Tennessee and the Harmonia Sacra tunebook used by Mennonite musicians since 1832.

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Photo shows Terry Hogg of Decatur leading at the 3rd annual Ursula Hall Singing on Oct. 22, 2000. Courtesy of Mike Veech of Charleston. The setting of "Amazing Grace" (New Britain) shown above is from the 1853 edition of William Walker's Southern Harmony, in the online Christian Classics Ethereal Library. The Ursula Hall Singing was held annually in Springfield from 1998 through 2001.

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