Sacred Harp / Shape-note Singing

Sacred Harp is the shape-note hymnody tradition of the rural American South, named for the 1844 tunebook 'The Sacred Harp' compiled by Benjamin Franklin White and E. J. King. Singers sit in a hollow square facing inward — one side each for treble, alto, tenor and bass — and sing four-part hymns unaccompanied at full voice. Each tune is sung once through on the shape-note solfege syllables (fa, sol, la, mi) before the words, a sight-reading device based on the four distinctive note-head shapes printed in the book. The melody sits in the tenor part rather than the soprano, and the harmonic language uses parallel fourths and fifths and open dyads that sound archaic to modern ears. Singing is loud, unblended and ecstatic; it is participatory rather than performative.

Shape-note notation was developed in New England in the late 18th century to teach sight-singing to congregations without formal musical training; the four-shape system using triangle, oval, square and diamond note-heads spread south after 1800 and took root in the rural South. 'The Sacred Harp' (1844), revised through the 20th century in editions known by their cover colors (Cooper Book, James Book, Denson Book), became the dominant book and survived as a continuous tradition in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi when the Northern revivals moved on. Sacred Harp gained a wider audience after the 2003 film 'Cold Mountain', which featured the music, and the tradition now has active singing communities across North America, Europe and Australia.

On a tune like 'Wondrous Love' (No. 159 in 'The Sacred Harp', Denson revision), notice how the melody sits in the tenor part and the soprano (called 'treble') sings a separate counter-melody above. The harmony deliberately uses open intervals — fourths and fifths — rather than the closed thirds of European hymnody, producing the genre's characteristic raw sound. In a live recording from an all-day singing, the hollow square arrangement causes each section to sound spatially distinct.

Recordings by the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers from the 1940s and 1950s Library of Congress sessions are the historical document. For contemporary singing, the field recordings on the Awake My Soul project (Matt and Erica Hinton, 2006) include both audio and a documentary film.

Sacred Harp singings are non-commercial and non-denominational community events — no admission, no performance, no rehearsal, just a published time and place where anyone who can read shape notes is welcome to lead a tune. The annual United Sacred Harp Convention has met every year since 1904 in rural Alabama and Georgia, and is one of the oldest continuously running musical gatherings in the United States.