James B. Wallace, "Stormy Banks and Sweet Rivers: A Sacred Harp Geography"

The name of this oblong songbook has come to designate the form of a cappella choral music it preserves. Sacred Harp music has its beginnings in New England music reforms. Puritans neglected sacred music, and by the late seventeenth century, many church-goers were weary of antiquated psalmody and a limited number of tunes. Singing schools emerged to teach lay-persons the basics of reading and performing music. These schools operated independently of any congregation or denomination and were run by itinerant teachers who were often self-taught in music (Pen 212). With a revived interest in church music, composers introduced new tunes that ignored European "scientific" musical theory and broke many of the rules of Western musical composition. One of the most famous of these singing masters was William Billings (1746-1800), a Boston tanner who composed some of the earliest American music.

In the early to mid-nineteenth century, musicians in northeast urban centers became enamored of European styles of composition and came to regard the kind of music taught in the singing schools as crude. Musicians such as Lowell Mason (1792-1872) began an ardent campaign against the singing schools and the kind of music they promoted. Mason and the "better music" advocates helped insure that European standards would be the basis of the musical curriculum in public schools.

The singing school migrated south and west. Although critics pursued the tradition (Lowell Mason's brother, Timothy, moved to Cincinnati (Bealle, 29)), it put down firm roots in regions of the South. As immigrants moved southward from Pennsylvania into Virginia and the Carolinas, singing masters and their singing schools followed. The Shenandoah Valley proved fertile ground. (Cobb 1989, 66). Singing schools and gatherings provided a social institution much appreciated by rural farmers. The schools' success increased the demand for tune books.

Sometime around 1798, William Little and William Smith of Philadelphia compiled The Easy Instructor, likely published in Albany, New York (for problems of dating and place of publication, see Metcalf, 89-97; Lowens and Britton, 115-37; Bealle 269, n. 1). This compilation of primarily American music incorporated shape-notes, or patent-notes, for the first time. To make sight-reading easier, a unique shape was assigned to each of the four syllables (fa, sol, la, and mi) commonly used to represent the seven-note scale (fa, sol, la, fa, so, la, mi). This system became popular for use both in the singing schools and in songbooks. Although numerous books were printed with shape notes, none have had the staying power of The Sacred Harp.

Although originally published in Philadelphia in 1844, The Sacred Harp was compiled and edited by Benjamin Franklin White and E. J. King (ca. 1821-1844) in Hamilton, Georgia. It thrived especially around the foothills of the Appalachians that stretch into northern Georgia and Alabama, and accrued strong followings in parts of northern Mississippi and some locales of Tennessee as well. George Pullen Jackson speculated in 1944 that "aside from the Holy Bible, the book found oftenest in the homes of rural southern people is without doubt the big oblong volume of song called The Sacred Harp" (Jackson 1944, 7). Although other song books continued to be printed using shape-notes, most eventually adopted the seven-shape system (representing the seven syllables do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti), and after the mid-nineteenth century, the tunes in these books came to be increasingly influenced by gospel styles.