by David Wright
For the past fifteen years, I have been both a Quaker and a Sacred Harp singer. I have found the two practices to be consonant and mutually enriching, each enlarging and sustaining the other. Considering each through the lens of the other has helped me to learn and understand things about both of them. I have come to see Sacred Harp singing as representing an independent discovery and application of some of the truths experienced and professed by Quakers.
The Sacred Harp, first published in Georgia in 1844, was one of hundreds of “shape-note” hymnals circulated in the 19th century. In “shape-note” notation, an inspired pedagogical innovation dating from around 1790, the musical note heads are printed in shapes corresponding to the degrees of the scale, which makes reading music and singing harmony easier by linking visual cues to musical intervals. The notation system and rudiments of music theory were taught to thousands of people in singing schools conducted by semiprofessional, sometimes-itinerant singing masters. Like many of the other shape-note hymnals, its repertoire drew on folk hymn tunes and spirituals in oral circulation and on earlier American and European religious music. The hymnal preserved, and in later editions developed, a distinctive style, termed “dispersed harmony” by its practitioners- an unaccompanied three- and four-part folk polyphony.</>
The Sacred Harp survived where so many other shape-note hymnals did not, preserving a living oral tradition with an ongoing meaning and purpose in the present day. Its survival was due in large part to its editor, B.F. White, who created a structure to promote the use of the book: he established conventions – associations or gatherings for the purpose of singing, not affiliated with any particular denomination or religious organization – which used The Sacred Harp as their songbook. Two conventions founded in the 1850’s are still meeting annually, and Sacred Harp singing has been an important part of family and community life in (mostly rural) areas of Georgia, Alabama, and Texas for generations. In the last 35 years it has spread around the country, particularly to urban centers in the Northeast and Midwest and on the West Coast.</>
We Quakers in the liberal western Yearly Meetings refer to our central spiritual practice as “unprogrammed” worship. If I were to attempt to sum up what goes on at a Sacred Harp convention for those familiar with the Quaker term, I would call it “unprogrammed singing.” Similarly, I have found it possible to explain Meeting for Worship to other Sacred Harp singers by comparing it to a Sacred Harp singing convention. Sacred Harp singing is a form of worship for many of its participants, often not the only one they engage in, and could accurately be called another form of unprogrammed worship despite its boisterous activity. Describing the non-hierarchical, non-performative practice of Sacred Harp singing to those unfamiliar with the tradition can be as difficult as explaining to non-Quakers what we do in worship in the absence of a priest, liturgy, or sermon.</>
Today’s Sacred Harp conventions last for one or both days of a weekend. Officers approved by the convention in a brief formal business session perform various tasks to ensure the smooth functioning of the singing. Prayers are offered to open and close each day and at other significant times. Local singers provide a potluck-style meal at the noon hour (traditionally called “dinner on the grounds”) for all present. Apart from this repast, and occasional short recesses, the assembled “class” sings almost continuously, one song after another, from morning to mid-afternoon. Any singer who wishes may, in turn, lead a song (“lesson”) of his or her choosing. </>
Like Quaker worship, a Sacred Harp convention, though without programming, is not without forms; it has such forms as have proved, through long experience, to serve “not as an end, but as a means toward the attainment of the end, which is communication with God, and fellowship with one another” (North Pacific Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice) – to facilitate a direct experience, both individual and shared, of the Spirit. Each convention, like each Meeting for Worship, despite being outwardly identical in form (especially insofar as selections are limited to songs from the one book), takes on its own character and shape based on the participants present, their unspoken interaction with each other, and their sensitivity to the needs of the assembled group and the workings of the Spirit. </>
In the absence of an audience or a choir director, Sacred Harp singers sing for themselves, each other, and God, each contributing his or her own peculiar individual voice to a singing the way each worshipper contributes his or her silent listening or spoken ministry to a Quaker Meeting. At a large singing, the overall effect – rather than the smooth, impersonal blend favored in other forms of choral music – is of a massive, vibrant wall of sound in which numerous individual voices may be distinguished from the texture at any given moment. While singing, the singers sit in a hollow square with one voice part on each side, facing inwards. This spatial arrangement abolishes performer/audience or choir director/choir divisions just as Quaker worship spaces abolish the altar/congregation or pulpit/congregation divisions of other religious traditions, just as Quaker belief and practice abolished the clergy/laity division. </>
The aesthetic values of Sacred Harp are different from those associated with forms of music based on performance to an audience. Each singer retains and shares aesthetic authority, as Quaker worshippers share spiritual/ministerial authority. All singers feel the musical or poetical content of a song on a personal level, while trying to help all others present get the best and fullest experience of each song, and sharing each other’s joy in collaborative music-making and fellowship. In an experience of being made tender in corporate worship, God’s love is felt on an individual level, in response to a deep personal need, yet seems to be expressed or channeled through one’s fellow worshippers. Sacred Harp singing, like Quaker worship, is “a corporate experience which, at the same time, allows a maximum freedom to its individual members” and “a strong, sustaining, group experience, coupled with individual freedom” (George Gorman, The Amazing Fact of Quaker Worship). At the best moments, literal harmony, in the musical sense, becomes an outward token of metaphorical harmony (spiritual unity). The result is a deep fellowship which “lets you see that ye are written in one another’s Heart” (George Fox, Epistle 24). </>
Sacred Harp singings confirm the truth articulated by Quakers, the basis of our belief in corporate worship and the source of its mystery, that the fullest knowledge of the Spirit is one that is not only shared with, but experienced through others – that “The sense of union with God and the sense of union with our neighbors are so closely related that one is best realized when felt in conjunction with the other” (Howard Brinton, Friends for 300 Years). </>
This experience inevitably binds Sacred Harp singers into a community. Singers in both the traditional and “diaspora” areas frequently travel to other people’s singings, extend hospitality to guests at their own home singings, and consider themselves to be part of a single nationwide Sacred Harp community. Many singers grow to cherish the personal connections with other singers – the friendships that develop over the years and the chance to renew acquaintanceships or meet new people at singings – even more than the music itself.</>
Quakerism is often described as an “experiential” faith. The Sacred Harp arose from the camp-meeting revivals of the early 19th century, which fostered a direct individual experience of the Spirit as a component of conversion and personal salvation. A significant body of new religious poetry was produced in this milieu and partially preserved in The Sacred Harp, a certain strain of which treated religion experientially – striving to articulate the individual experience of faith, of conversion, of self-doubt, of the fruits of the Spirit, or some aspect of the life of the religious community. The personal nature of these texts strengthens the emotional grip of the singing. The “experience songs” show that our core beliefs as Friends about the possibility and importance of direct personal knowledge of the Spirit are truthful enough to have been rediscovered or rearticulated independently in religious history.</>
Sacred Harp singing is beautiful, social, and an outlet for my gifts. I also find that it gives me a sense of continuity with the past, a form of community that encompasses the past and future as well as the present. Knowing that others have sung these songs for so many years, I feel a sense of perpetuating an extant sound-world of perhaps considerable antiquity. The human experience preserved in the poetry of the lyrics reawakens my sense of empathy with others, across hundreds of years. Above all, I appreciate the sense that I am participating in the work of carrying on a tradition, something that people in the past carefully kept alive for those who came after them, having found it through experience to be of value. </>
While Quakerism, with its rich history and written record, also offers an opportunity for this feeling of continuity with the past, it seems to be something that Sacred Harp singers “do” better than modern-day Quakers, on the whole. Sacred Harp singers tend to place strong conscious emphasis on preserving the distinctive features of their unique tradition and honoring those who handed it down. Our emphasis on what the Spirit is saying to us here and now, while important, can perhaps cause us to neglect to develop a relationship with our history – to treat our inheritance lightly.</>
I experience Meeting for Worship and Sacred Harp singing as each complete in itself, so that I have no desire for music in Meeting for Worship, or for silence at a Sacred Harp singing. Yet for me they are utterly complementary. I feel in no way divided between two spiritual homes – rather, the correspondences between them appear to me as tangible signs of God’s love, and workings of the Power that lies over all things.</>
David Wright grew up in Mountain View Meeting in Denver, and is now a part of University Friends Meeting in Seattle, Washington.</>
A quick search on You Tube for shape note singing and Sacred Harp turns up hundreds of clips of singing. Your local library may also have a copy of the recent documentary about Sacred Harp singing, titled, “Awake, My Soul”.
Sacred Harp singings are free (an offering may be collected) and open to the public. Two-day annual conventions in the Western U.S. include the All-California in January, the Washington State in February, the Rocky Mountain (alternates between Colorado and New Mexico) in September, and the Oregon State in October. For more information about Sacred Harp singing, and listings of annual conventions and local monthly singings throughout the United States, visit http://www.fasola.org