There's a tang of wood smoke in the air, corn drying in the field and late-afternoon sunlight slanting across the woods over by the schoolhouse, little tongues of fire where the light touches red and yellow leaves. It's fall in New Salem.

We're on the dogtrot porch of the Miller-Kelso home, singing out of old-fashioned, oblong tunebooks. About a dozen of us. We call ourselves the New Salem Shape Note Singers, and we do this every couple of weeks.

"Blow ye the trumpet blow," we sing, loudly, in four-part harmony. "The gladly solemn song, let all nations know, to earth's remotest bound." The words are those of an old Charles Wesley hymn. The melody, named Lenox, is by an eighteenth-century New England tunesmith named Lewis Edson. "The year of jubilee is come," sing the basses. We've got two today, and the sound is full and rich. And loud. "The year of jubilee is come," join in the tenors, the men singing the melody an octave below the women, a couple of beats after the basses. "The year of jubilee is come," sing the trebles, tossing the phrase around like a jazz riff above the tenors, who are repeating it by now. Then the altos sing it, "The year of jubilee is come." And louder now, all four parts come together at the end, "Return ye ransomed sinners home," on a final chord that's remindful of the high lonesome of a good bluegrass band or the skirl of bagpipes.

A living tradition

It's called Harp singing, shape-note or "fasola" singing, from tunebooks with names like The Sacred Harp, The New Harp of Columbia or Christian Harmony that use shaped noteheads. Ours, The Sacred Harp, uses a triangle for "fa," an oval for "sol," a rectangle for "la" and a diamond for "mi." But it's not book music. Key points of performance practice come down in oral tradition by way of the folk hymns and camp meeting songs of pioneer days. So did some of the songs, texts by hymnists like Isaac Watts sung to Anglo-Celtic melodies that were first handed down in the oral tradition. "Amazing Grace" (New Britain) was first written down as a shape-note song. So were "There is a Fountain Filled With Blood" (Cleansing Fountain) and "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand" (The Promised Land). We know the last two songs were sung in pioneer days during camp meetings at Rock Creek Cumberland Presbyterian Church, only a few miles from New Salem.

Especially in the South, shape-note music is still a living tradition at urban singing conventions and in rural churches. And as it has spread north, singers make a serious effort to walk in the old ways. Traditional Harp singing strikes those who hear it as powerful, stark and moving. And loud. Harp singers glory in it. Folksong collector Alan Lomax, who heard a lot of it, once said the "hard, pure voices" of country shape-note singers sounded like "a cross between a steam calliope and a Ukrainian peasant choir." It has the full-throated ornamentation of the Anglo-Celtic tradition, and it has a rough-hewn integrity all its own.

In pioneer days, sacred songs like those preserved in The Sacred Harp came to the Midwest with Scots-Irish settlers from Tennessee, Kentucky and the Carolinas. They sang folk hymns like "How Firm a Foundation," and camp meeting songs like "Our Bondage Will End By and By" (Saints Bound for Heaven). The latter song, set to a tune that is recognizably a variant of "Rye Whiskey" and "Give the Fiddler a Dram," is associated with Methodist circuit-rider Peter Cartwright of Pleasant Plains. It's fun to imagine him raising the familiar tune when the drunks got out of hand at a camp meeting. In church the songs were "lined out," with a deacon chanting the words and the congregation singing after him. Mostly they were sung in unison, often in a minor key with the kind of throaty, wavering vocal ornamentation you sometimes hear in old records by Roy Acuff or Hank Williams Sr. "At a [church] meeting," said a Springfield old-timer recalling pioneer days, "the men always sat on one side of the house, or aisle, the women on the other; the minister lined out the hymns, and the congregation sang with right good will, and delighted thereafter to hear an hour and a half sermon." At singing schools, youngsters learned to sing in parts, even if many were more interested in flirting. From the shape-note tunebooks they learned more hymns, New England anthems and "fuging tunes," lively, simplified canons like Lenox with staggered entrances for treble, alto, tenor and bass. In the Sangamon River country, old settlers recalled "harmonizing as they rode along the country lanes" to singing school "in a home or schoolhouse or church where they spent the evening singing, for the most part, sacred songs."

Singing at Rutledge Tavern

We know one of the tunebooks, The Missouri Harmony, was on hand in New Salem. Legend has it Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge sang out of it at the Rutledge Tavern. Another story, perhaps with better foundation, has it that young Lincoln parodied a song in the old Missouri tunebook. He'd "tip back his chair and roar it out at the top of his voice, over and over again, just for fun," the Rutledge children recalled in later years. The story may well have a kernel of truth to it -- Polly Rutledege's brother and Ann's uncle, James Miller of Carmi, was one of the first singing school masters in southern Illinois. James Rutledge and his family were pillars of the Cumberland Presbyterian church, and they had shape-note tunebooks with them when they lived in the Sangamon country in the 1820s and 30s.

There's an odd footnote to the Rutledge family story, too. On a visit home in 1914, poet Edgar Lee Masters heard a local musician named John Armstrong play the same tune on the fiddle at his home in Oakford. Its title was Legacy in the Missouri Harmony, but Armstrong just called it "Missouri Harmony." He didn't say anything about Lincoln's singing the tune, but Armstrong was a noted fiddler in Menard County and the son of New Salem's Jack Armstrong who lost a famous wrestling match to Lincoln. At any rate, Masters thought John Armstrong "was recreating the past of the deserted village [New Salem] for me." Masters, who grew up in Petersburg, wrote of how deeply he was moved when he heard Restoration ("I Will Arise and Go to Jesus") and other old songs at Concord Cumberland Presbyterian Church in the sand-ridge country north of town. "If there was a culture, a spiritual flowering and growth in the Sangamon River country," Masters said, "it was among these Cumberland Presbyterians. ... They read the Psalms and the poetry of the Bible, and they sang the hymns of Watts and the Wesleys. ... these people and my grandfather grieved with a depth and a sincerity, scarcely to be described that Jesus in his surpassing love gave his blood for the salvation of men. It was this grief of theirs that stirred me at the time, and even today I cannot think of them or of Concord Church without a surge at the heart. Their simplicity of mind and goodness of heart and implicit faith in the Bible seem to me a part of man's tragedy."

But a new style of church music came into vogue. Churches acquired organs and choirs. And, as an old settler in Sangamon County put it, before long "the congregation quit singing." The new music was prim, proper and very, very successful. In time it took the focus of mainline Protestant church music away from the congregation and up into the choir loft -- at least in town. The old songs moved out to country churches that still held all-day singings with dinner on the ground, to revival tents, camp meeting grounds and -- in time -- 500-watt country music radio stations.

'Seek[ing] the old ways'

The genteel tradition did not win out everywhere, however. Especially in the Southern hill country, people never did entirely quit singing of gospel trumpets, the old ship of Zion and days of jubilee. Old-time string bands, bluegrass and the Nashville sound owe much to the old Harp singers. Especially in Georgia, Alabama and eastern Texas, the minor strains of the old music are preserved in tunebooks like The Sacred Harp, never out of print since 1844. In the 20th century, books like White Spirituals of the Southern Uplands by George Pullen Jackson, field recordings by Alan Lomax and choral arrangements like those of Robert Shaw and Alice Parker helped the old music gain a wider audience. And a new generation of urban folk revivalists nationwide discovered Harp singing in the 1970s and 80s. Now it flourishes from New England to Florida, Texas, San Diego and Seattle.

Typically newcomers are attracted by the harmonies or historical significance of the singing, learning over time to value the tradition and its spiritual heritage. The Sacred Harp is sung now in major metropolitan areas like St. Louis and Chicago, as well as college towns and smaller communities including Charleston and Mattoon, Ill., and now the Springfield area. Hundreds of singers nationwide gather every year in Chicago for the Midwest Sacred Harp Convention. And an Illinois State Convention has been held in Charleston, Mattoon or nearby eastern Illinois communities every year since 1985. It is, in fact, the oldest Sacred Harp singing convention in the Midwest.

It would not be going too far to say the current revival of shape-note singing is due largely to the foresight of a Georgia country newspaper editor named B.F. White whose watchword was to "seek the old paths and walk therein." In the 1840s, White came out with the first edition of The Sacred Harp and a system of singing conventions that voted to use only his tunebook. The system proved durable -- 1999 saw the 100th session of the Alabama State Convention, for example, and the 131st annual June Singing in Alpharetta, Ga. It was to B.F. White's living tradition that Midwesterners turned as Harp singing began to spread nationwide in the 1980s, and it is the traditional style of Georgia and Alabama that has taken hold in the Midwest. The Harp is sung in major metropolitan areas like St. Louis and Chicago, as well as college towns and smaller communities including Charleston and Mattoon, Ill., and now the Springfield area. Hundreds of singers nationwide gather every year in Chicago for the Midwest Sacred Harp Convention. And an Illinois State Convention has been held in Charleston, Mattoon and now New Salem.

Shape-note singing came to west central Illinois in 1995, when interpreters for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency's state historic site at New Salem were asked to work up a few shape-note songs that would be appropriate to the 1830s. "I looked at a Missouri Harmony and thought, 'No way,'" recalls volunteer interpreter Jan Burnette of Beardstown. "But I took it home so I could play the parts on the piano and hear how the harmony came together. I figured out it was something pretty neat." Before long a small group of interpreters was puzzling through the tunebook. "We used a keyboard to try to get an idea of what the harmony sounded like, and we figured out the tenors had the lead most of the time," said Burnette. "Then the Charleston group came to the park."

When the singers from eastern Illinois visited New Salem, it was a turning point. They sang under a high-roofed portico at the Visitors Center, a favorite place for musicians to set up. "We made a hollow square as best we could out under the portico," says Peggy Brayfield of Charleston. "Then we called out and led songs in an imprompteau way, as the spirit moved us so to speak, and any passers-by who cared to stopped to listen for as long as they cared to. I remember a nun in habit staying for most of the time we sang, fascinated by the music. And I remember someone talking to us about their desire to get a group going at New Salem." It was the first time the interpreters heard anyone sing the Harp. "We all fell in love with it," Burnette said.

With a lot of help from experienced singers who rode the circuit up to western Illinois from Charleston and Mattoon, the New Salem volunteers recruited local singers who knew the tradition, got rid of the keyboard, learned the shapes, gained the confidence to sight-read and began to go to Sacred Harp conventions in Charleston, Mattoon and Chicago. The singers now perform at New Salem festivals and sing on occasion in area churches and other venues during the off season.

Twentieth-century American composers Charles Ives, Aaron Copeland and Virgil Thompson, among others, made good use of shape-note music. Ives expressed it well when he said he found in the "simple but acute Gospel hymns ... a vigor, a depth of feeling, a natural-soil rhythm, a sincerity." he said the spirit of the old songs gave depth to his own music, and he recommended it to other musicians. "If [their] music can but catch that spirit by being a part with itself," Ives said, "it will come somewhere near [their] ideal -- and it will be American, too."

-- by Peter Ellertsen

Based in part on my article on shape-note singing at New Salem published in Illinois Times Nov. 14, 1996. Photo of singers at Rutledge Tavern courtesy of Peggy Brayfield and Mike Veech, Charleston, Ill. The tune Legacy is copied from The Southern Harmony Online in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at www.ccel.org.

The contents of this page reflect the work and opinions of the faculty member who constructed it and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Springfield College in Illinois. Nor should they be taken to reflect policy or opinions of Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site.