Sacred Harp singing is style of community singing named for a tune book published in 1844 using note heads of four different shapes. For most of the twentieth century, this tradition was confined to the rural South. Now it is making a resurgence throughout North America.
Neither the concept of community singing nor the shaped note notation nor even the style of the tunes originated in the South. William Little and William Smith of Philadelphia introduced the system of four shapes (triangle, oval, square, diamond) corresponding to four syllables (fa, sol, la, mi) in 1801. They wanted to make learning to sing in a style well established in the Northeast.easier. During the late colonial period, several New England singing instructors (William Billings was the best known) had published many books of hymns and what they called fuging tunes, which they taught with a four-syllable system.
Many readers, at least of my generation, may remember being introduced to singing by the syllables "do re mi fa sol la ti do." I had to learn it at least as early as third grade. A song named "Do, a deer" from The Sound of Music became very popular, and readers who did not have to learn to sing from those seven syllables in school at least know them from the song. So what's up with teaching from four syllables?
Actually, the idea of teaching singing from syllables dates back to 1025 (that is not a typo), when Guido of Arezzo devised syllables as a faster and more accurate means of teaching choir boys to sing Gregorian chant. Before his idea, everyone had to teach by rote. No one had yet devised a way to write music down.
Guido's system is based on a chant that has its six phrases start on successively higher notes, so he used the first syllable of each word. There are seven notes in a scale, but chant melodies didn't always use all of them. Eventually other teachers expanded Guido's system so that his six syllables would start on any one of three notes. That way they could teach all of the scales then in use by moving from one "hexachord" to another.
Two different improvements developed in the following centuries. Teachers on the continent simply added a seventh syllable, resulting in the familiar "do re mi" syllables. The English dropped the two lowest syllables and used only "fa sol la," with "mi" added to indicate one of the half steps in a scale. A very influential book by John Playford (1655) codified the so-called "fasola" system. Parish clergy found it very helpful. For the next hundred and fifty years, rural singing teachers published many tune books and included instructions for learning to sing the tunes using "fasola." Meanwhile, English musicians working in urban areas adopted the European system.
William Billings and his contemporaries learned about music through these English tune books. As they wrote and published their own tune books, they repeated all of the instructions for how to learn the tunes using "fasola." A later generation, who learned the "do re mi" system and realized that it was used and taught in all of the major musical centers of Europe, thought that Billings et al. had made up a system based on sheer ignorance of music. They advocated a style of music based on what was then becoming known as "classical" music.
Eventually led by Lowell Mason, the classicists drove the "uncultured" songs based on "fasola" out of the cities of the Northeast and into the country side. The Little and Smith tune book of 1801 sold very well to the west and south of Philadelphia, but not so well to the north and east. Many other shaped-note tune books followed the same route. Southern Harmony appeared in 1835, the first book to include Southern folk tunes. It was influential and very successful, but not as successful as The Sacred Harp (1844).
The Sacred Harp has appeared in several subsequent editions. For a while, it was the only shaped-note, fasola tune book available. So in the areas of the rural South where the old English style of community singing survived, naturally it became known as Sacred Harp singing.
David Warren Steel has a large web site on Sacred Harp Singing, including video and audio samples. You can find a link to buy the current 1991 edition of The Sacred Harp, which includes new tunes by living composers, at that site.
Facsimiles of the 25 most popular tuned from Southern Harmony are available online. There are three lines of music, and the tune is the one in the middle. That is one of the hallmarks of the style. Some tune books have four lines of music. In either case, the tune is always second from the bottom, not the top line as in standard hymnals today.
For fuller information, read my blog posts American shaped notes tune books and the fasola tradition and The English headwaters of American hymn singing.
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