An Introduction to Sacred Harp Singing by David Warren Steel from Goodbye, Babylon

Sacred Harp singing is typically a community musical and social event, held at all-day singings and conventions in the rural South. It is characterized by mass participation, full-voiced singing, lack of instrumental accompaniment, and rotation of song leaders. Growing out of the singingschool movement of the 18th century, and preserving the music of the first American composers, it came to be associated in the deep South with church and community homecomings and decoration days. It differs from shape-note gospel singing in that the repertory is largely pre-Civil War, and is relatively fixed in one of the 20th-century revisions of the original 1844 oblong tunebook by B. F. White and E. J. King. Although the "Sacred Harp" was called "the book oftenest found in the homes of rural Southerners other than the Holy Bible," the tradition was ignored by the cultural elites of the nation and region until Vanderbilt professor George Pullen Jackson described it in "White Spirituals of the Southern Uplands" (1933) and established its connection with folk song.

But the "Sacred Harp" is not confined to these large community singings. For those who sing the "Sacred Harp," there are many other opportunities to sing, often from memory, during farm and housework, or as a family recreation in the home. In such informal situations, singers may accompany themselves on piano or other instruments, and may sing in a softer, more nuanced voice. Many sacred harp singers also participated in newer traditions of gospel music, using small paperback songbooks published by James D. Vaughn, Stamps-Baxter and others, which combined community singings with traveling professional quartets who doubled as salesmen. In the 1920s, when the success of "race" and "hillbilly" recordings demonstrated a demand for traditional artists, it was hardly surprising that sacred harp singers would aspire to make recordings, or that local talent scouts would record them. Several factors may explain why these early recordings tend to reproduce more closely these smaller, informal settings rather than the mass community singing. Early recording methods, especially those employed by portable studios, required that all musicians had to be in roughly the same location, near a single microphone. Southern audiences were already familiar with a cappella gospel quartets, and with family groups such as the Carters and Stonemans, who sang in harmony and accompanied themselves on varied instruments. As a result, there was no significant attempt to record a full "class" of singers until 1942, when Alan Lomax and George Pullen Jackson recorded an Alabama convention for the Library of Congress (see DTD-01, 3-6). Earlier recordings of sacred harp music are almost always small groups of three to perhaps twelve singers, and are often accompanied by instruments. Brief songs are often extended by adding additional verses, to fit the optimum length of a ten-inch recording.

In one respect, however, they adhered to a traditional performance practice: before singing the words, the singers nearly always sang the music using the four singing syllables (fa, sol, la, and mi). These four syllables, and the four shapes that represent them, distinguish the "fasola" system of the "Sacred Harp" from the more usual "doremi" system employing seven syllables and shapes. In the fasola system, the syllables fa, sol, and la are used twice in an octave, while the syllable mi occurs only once.At singing schools, singers sang the syllables as an aid to learning the tune without worrying about the words; this "run-through" became part of the tradition, and was rarely omitted even on commercial recordings of sacred harp music.