Skip to content
Web-Only Feature

“To Darkness, Fire, and Pain”

Sacred Harp Singing, Ruralness, and the Southern Gothic

by Jonathon M. Smith

On a late autumn evening in 2005, I drove an hour out of Atlanta to Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church near Bremen, just a few miles east of the Georgia-Alabama border. The building sits only a few hundred feet from I-20, but the route to the church—about a half-mile past a gas station and through a wooded area—somehow made it seem much more remote. Driving in the dark, I let my imagination wander; the orange glow of Atlanta disappeared and the darkness around the church, with few streetlights, left me uncertain. I had never been to the church before but knew it as an iconic site for Sacred Harp singing—an early American a cappella style of singing that found its way into contemporary popular imagination through the film Cold Mountain. 

Inside Holly Springs Primitive Baptist, brash fluorescent light fixtures illuminated the church’s entirely wooden interior. Although I knew several singers from this area of Georgia, my imagination turned the excursion into a Southern Gothic fantasy. I did not know who I would encounter. My prior experience with Sacred Harp singing occurred in urban centers like Atlanta and Greenville, South Carolina, but not in the small country churches historically associated with the music form. I recognized a handful of singers whom I had met in singing communities before or seen in photographs online, but I worried whether I would be welcomed. I recall being especially struck by the dour expression of an elderly woman sitting in the alto section and the appearance of a tall, ponytailed man with a goatee and a less-than-complete set of front teeth. And I regret saying that even before entering the church, I had framed my expectations about the people I encountered based on stereotypes of rural southern backwardness, imagining the local singers as suspicious of outsiders and prone to violence.  

In hindsight, I am embarrassed by my perspective that evening. Having been raised in a rural southeastern setting, I understood these as stereotypes and recognized that they are usually false, even harmful. Still, fed by narratives of rural southern depravity and danger, I had imagined this space, barely outside of the Atlanta metropolitan area, as a secluded segment of rural America situated in an earlier time where old ways still existed. I quickly learned that the singers I met that evening did not fit those stereotypes at all, and over many years of singing, I would become close friends with many of them. Clearly, Sacred Harp at Holly Springs wasn’t the rural southern experience that I was primed to expect. 

As a doctoral student, I explored how regional “imaginaries”—culturally determined conceptions that give meaning to places—shape the experience of Sacred Harp singers. And in interviews with members of Sacred Harp communities from across the United States and abroad, many relayed similar anxieties about traveling to singings in the rural South, often referencing Southern Gothic tropes of potentially dangerous people from the backwoods. Beyond that, they associated Gothic not just with the South as a region, but with rurality as a condition. As literary scholar Bernice M. Murphy describes, Gothic narratives in American literature frequently center on rural spaces, the basis for a genre she defines as the “rural gothic.”1

These gothic tropes both affirm the perceived authenticity of their practice and distance them from competing social conceptions of the South. Outside the context of Sacred Harp, negative representations of southernness frequently emphasize the prominence of evangelical Christianity, conservative politics, homophobia, and white supremacy. Sacred Harp, through the lens of the Southern Gothic, offers participants one way of reconciling their love for a cultural practice that has deep roots in the US South with their rejection of the regressive social order often associated with the region. Southern Gothic offers a lens for telling stories about Sacred Harp that situate participants in “authentic” rural southern settings, while establishing a distance between the storyteller and the place, dismissing problematic aspects of the region’s complicated histories of oppression and conflict as remnants of a haunted past rather than ongoing structural failings in the present.

Illustrations by Phil Blank.

Sacred Harp singers form a music community using The Sacred Harp, an oblong hymnal utilizing a four-shape notation system. First published in Georgia in 1844, it was one of many “shape-note” tunebooks of the nineteenth century. Sacred Harp sessions, called “singings,” include annual events that last all day or a full weekend (these are called all-day singings or conventions); others happen more frequently, where local communities gather for a few hours on an informal basis, as in Holly Springs. Participants (not “performers”) sing with no musical accompaniment or audience. Singings generally take place in small churches or meeting rooms and are usually understood to be religious events, although they are not associated with any particular denomination. 

Identifying as a Sacred Harp singer often suggests having a significant social identity beyond a mere pastime. Beginning in the 1960s, individuals far from Sacred Harp’s homeland in the Southeast who had been introduced to the tradition through folk music channels began to form their own singing communities based on the organizational structure of southern conventions. With the support of many longtime southern singers, they began establishing their own regular singings and conventions, starting in New England and fanning out across the country by the end of the twentieth century. New participants are embraced regardless of where or when they came to the music practice. At century-old singings in the South, new singers from outside communities are encouraged to participate fully, sitting among the local singers and leading songs.2

Nonetheless, particularities of place are very meaningful to Sacred Harp. Although The Sacred Harp includes hymns from all over and employs a shape-note system developed in the Northeast during the early nineteenth-century, Sacred Harp singing is strongly associated with the American South. As a participant at singings, I have been especially attuned to the ways in which the rural South is much more than simply a geographical designation for many Sacred Harp singers. Both popular accounts and academic descriptions of Sacred Harp singing inevitably emphasize its history in the South, and singers’ own discussions of their practice frequently point to the South as a font of authenticity, understanding that southern singers with deep family ties to the music sing Sacred Harp truly or correctly. New singing communities outside of the Southeast frequently invited longtime singers from the region to conduct singing schools, recognizing southern singers as the arbiters of “traditional” practice. At singings, in newsletter articles, in online discussion boards, and on social media sites, singers have prompted new participants to travel to southern singings in order to experience “authentic” Sacred Harp singing. As one singer from Minneapolis pleaded, “I urge you to go South as soon as you can. The old singers are passing away.”3

Descriptions of Sacred Harp singings, in the popular imagination and scholarly realm, often use “southernness” beyond physical locations to envision cultural spaces. Understandings of southernness frequently overlap with conceptions of rurality in this discourse. As educator Christopher Stapel has argued, “rural” constitutes “material places” that exist outside of urban environments, while “ruralities” are the “subjective meanings [that] actors attach to a given . . . space.” Many Sacred Harp singers have equated rural settings with a particular set of connotations and meanings that intersect with conceptions of temporality. As ethnomusicologist Kiri Miller  documents, participants have characterized the experience of traveling to singings in rural (southern) spaces, both in sound and place, as a journey back in time: “Searches for the ancient, exotic, primitive, and out-of-the-way are still very much alive and meaningful for some Sacred Harp singers.” From this perspective, Sacred Harp singing that takes place in rural locations can read as “authentic”—an expression of the past that can still be experienced in the present by leaving the “modern” world of the city.4

A frequent assumption that underlies narratives equating rurality with authenticity is that rural spaces are isolated. This presumption has informed descriptions of Sacred Harp singing since the early twentieth century. Some of the first outside promoters of Sacred Harp were a group of early twentieth-century writers in the United States, known as the Southern Agrarians, who issued a manifesto in 1930 titled I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. They interpreted Sacred Harp’s communal practices and longstanding history as evidence of positive values being preserved in rural communities. Donald Davidson’s essay, “The Sacred Harp in the Land of Eden,” for example, reimagined a community in Macon County, Georgia, as an unspoiled “Eden” that “has kept alive, almost unwittingly, the all-day singings which have been a feature of life in the South since eighteenth-century times,” preserving a vital music form that he saw as an antidote to the “sterile musical culture” of the modern world.5

The Labor Day Singing at Shoal Creek Church in eastern Alabama’s Talladega National Forest is an iconic example of a remote singing described as being “miles removed from civilization.” There are few surviving written records about the building itself, a log structure with no electricity or plumbing, which was part of a settlement that local historian Joseph M. Jones suggests “did not last long as a map destination [because] it was just too hard to make a living in the hills and hollows of the mountainous country, which became best known for its whiskey.” In its opening scene, the documentary Awake My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp (2006) appears to transport the viewer back in time as the camera moves down a red dirt road through the forest and arrives at the old church. The event is hardly typical—singers are inconvenienced by the lack of artificial light, air conditioning, and modern bathrooms—but the church’s isolation makes singing there seem, as Awake My Soul suggests, like an authentic experience of Sacred Harp.6

One of the archetypal narratives in framing a singing as “authentic” is a story of getting lost. Before smartphones became ubiquitous, participants discussed the necessity of a “singings map” or an online repository of longitude-latitude coordinates for their GPS units or navigation apps. Today, when singers announce their upcoming events at the end of all-day singings, I have heard numerous versions of how a GPS or smartphone “won’t find the church.” As a Paste Magazine article on Sacred Harp in Alabama described it, “Folks drive for hours to all-day singings . . . at rustic gravel-road churches . . . If you’re searching for one, Google Maps will only get you so far.” Some locations were indeed difficult to find, but as southern singings began to accommodate the broader community from the late 1970s onward, local convention officers would create road signs to direct vehicles down some of the more confusing byways. One of the best examples, now iconic for singers, is a handmade sign for the Lookout Mountain Convention at the plain cinder-block Pine Grove Church near Collinsville, Alabama. The sign itself signals a bygone era for many visitors and has been featured in numerous singers’ social media posts. In this very publication in 2003, writer and Sacred Harp singer David Carlton described his first trip to Pine Grove, when he found himself beginning to wonder as he entered the “deep woods,” “if [he] was in the right place at the right time,” asking himself, “Why would anyone come up here?”7

Yet tales of remoteness often seem overstated for effect. Another singing location, Wilson’s Chapel in West Georgia, the longtime home of the Chattahoochee Convention, was among the sites most often described in announcements as being difficult to find. I was certainly confused while traveling there the first few times, since the church is located on a dirt road, which could be mistaken for a driveway, that dead-ends at a large reservoir. While visiting singers often feel lost when going to the church, this is part of the imagining of a rural place: they don’t exactly know where it is, they were told that they could not find it with a GPS, and they heard stories of how far in the woods the church is located. Still, despite the complicated directions and unpaved road, the church is only a few miles outside Carrollton, a medium-sized town in West Georgia with a population of about twenty-seven thousand, and just an hour from Atlanta. As one singer who regularly travelled from an adjoining state told me, “It seemed so backwoods the first time I came, but if Carrollton keeps growing, it’s going to be in somebody’s backyard.” What is most important for visitors to sites like Wilson’s Chapel, regardless of how isolated they truly are, is that they are imagined as being far from urban spaces—and thus, from the modern world. I suspect that the cultural significance of isolation in Sacred Harp singing is why, despite the fact that Wilson’s Chapel is clearly marked on most navigation apps (Google Maps will indeed get you there), singers continue to trade tales about getting lost on the way to the Chattahoochee Convention, and those announcing the singing continue to issue warnings about how difficult it is to find.8

Not all descriptions of Sacred Harp’s allegedly isolated rural roots imagine an idyllic past as a marker of authenticity. Some use Southern Gothic tropes to frame these rural communities as sites of backwardness, depravity, or even terror. This imagery aligns with Bernice Murphy’s conception of the “rural gothic,” which plays on a sense of difference and fear, usually by the urban elite. Her argument draws from early American anxieties of “wilderness” and delineations between “civilization” and “savagery,” which parallel colonial conquests of Indigenous North America. Murphy analyzes how popular films, such as Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), Deliverance (1972), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), have fueled such ideas, depicting rural spaces as dangerous and mysterious sites where inhabitants maintain backward ways of living that threaten educated, urban, “modern” subjects. The “redneck” or “white trash” characters in these films are imagined as dangerous, aggressive, and hostile to outsiders, the “‘Other’ to the urban, industrialized, and ‘civilized’ North.”9

Sacred Harp has frequently been interpreted through this perspective in popular media. One example is the article “Shout and Sing the Good Old Way,” published in Paste Magazine on the release of the documentary Awake My Soul and an album of the same name. The article describes Liberty Baptist Church in Henagar, Alabama, and foregrounds “Sand Mountain [as] a haunted house of a place,” highlighting accounts of snake handling from the well-known Dennis Covington book, Salvation on Sand Mountain. Adding further punch, the article concludes that “the area is nicknamed ‘Meth Mountain’ for obvious (and frightening) reasons.” Although Sand Mountain has a long history of Sacred Harp singing, many people outside the area are familiar with the region only from Covington’s account, which had broad distribution and was a finalist for the National Book Award. After returning from a singing on Sand Mountain in 2011, a singer asked me at our next local evening singing in Knoxville, Tennessee, if they had “got the snakes out” while I was there. The comment was meant mostly in jest, but he proceeded to warn me that—as he had learned from Salvation on Sand Mountain—many churches in the area have cages of serpents at the ready. Yet Covington describes a version of Sand Mountain that Sacred Harp singers in northeast Alabama do not recognize as an accurate representation of their community. A singer from Sand Mountain laughed as he told me how visitors who were familiar with Covington’s book had occasionally asked him about snake handling—which he understood to be a waning practice of an exceptionally small number of local churches, none of which hosted Sacred Harp singings. The book, he said, “makes us all look bad.”10

Despite their romanticized character and myopic representation of rural southern spaces, such narratives create and perpetuate stereotypes that can inspire genuine unease or even fear in outsiders. My own discomfort with imagined rural spaces is hardly unique. Several singers shared with me the concern they felt, before traveling to a southern singing, that the journey could be confrontational. Although these sorts of stories are usually shared as humorous recollections among singers whose subsequent experiences revealed that the perceived dangers were unwarranted, the initial fear was nonetheless very real. After attending a singing in 2007, I learned that a first-time participant was anxious prior to his trip because, as a young liberal Jewish man from the Northeast, he anticipated that he would be viewed as an “outsider” in the South, and he was concerned he might be harassed by locals. This fear was serious enough that he secretly packed a pocketknife for added security. The dangers did not materialize—he enjoyed the trip and would later spend numerous summers singing Sacred Harp in Alabama and Georgia—but the representations of rural danger and depravity that informed his understanding of the South had a significant impact on his early experience.11

Aspects of Sacred Harp singing also resonate with the aesthetic conventions of folk horror film. The genre emerged in 1970s British film but has grown to encompass southern rural gothic horror. Writer and folk horror authority Adam Scovell argues there are four markers of the genre: rural locations, isolated groups, skewed morals or beliefs, and violent supernatural happenings. And while film is the dominant medium, music also makes up part of the genre. Archivist and writer Clare Button’s work details how even music written long before the genre existed is now interpreted through a folk horror perspective. For instance, she describes how British traditional songs performed by artists in the second folk revival evoked for listeners “a nostalgic ‘new Albion’ haunted by the weird and primal.” Primarily discussing the great wave of folk music collecting in England during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the interest in ballad singing in the folk revival, Button asserts that English song was full of placemaking, haunted by the “growing industrial landscape,” “destruction of the rural,” and “questions about interpretations of natural and supernatural phenomena” that elicit nostalgia for an imagined premodern world.12

This sense of austerity and loss is also reinforced in many of the hymn texts in The Sacred Harp. These songs are strikingly different from those in the most popular Christian hymnals in contemporary use, which feature nineteenth- and twentieth-century gospel texts that emphasize sentimentality and optimism, and that focus on the benevolence of a gentle, loving deity. By contrast, the majority of hymns in The Sacred Harp were written in the eighteenth century, employing language of divine wrath, human depravity, and imminent mortality that strikes many contemporary readers as stridently pessimistic. Songs like “Melancholy Day” include “dark,” “doleful,” or “haunting, ancient” lyrics about human helplessness in the face of mortality. The text, written by Isaac Watts in 1709, declares:

Death, ’tis a melancholy day,

To those who have no God,

When the poor soul is forced away,

To seek her last abode.

In vain to heav’n she lifts her eyes,

For guilt, a heavy chain,

Still drags her downward from the skies,

To darkness, fire and pain.13

Death is not only a frequent theme in The Sacred Harp’s hymns; it is also commonly discussed at Sacred Harp singings. At most gatherings, it’s treated reverentially, especially during the memorial lesson—a pause during the day of singing in which appointed speakers are invited to offer a few comments in memory of those who passed during the year. Kiri Miller describes memorial lessons as “public performances of grief,” adding that they “may inspire empathy even in those who don’t know any of the names on the memorial lists . . . Speakers invite the class to prepare themselves for the day when their own loved ones are missing from the square, they encourage preemptive nostalgia as a prelude to grief. To earn the right to this nostalgia, newcomers must invest themselves in the task of perpetuating the singing tradition.” Such empathy arises between singers of disparate backgrounds at the point where religious dogma and spiritual freedom meet on common ground: the totalizing human experiences of death and loss.14

As Miller asserts, many Sacred Harp singers see this frank approach to mortality as a healthy alternative to the hushed avoidance of the topic in most modern discourse. And many singers see Sacred Harp’s direct, unflinching treatment of death as a liberating experience. Confronting death with a positive perspective is especially pronounced in hymns that combine upbeat, even playful melodies with doleful, death-centered texts. The gospel-tinged “Morning Sun,” for example, is a jarringly discordant combination of a bouncy, cheerful major tune, and a solemn, even morbid, text. 

Youth, like the spring, will soon be gone,

By fleeting time or conqu’ring death

Your morning sun may set at noon,

And leave you ever in the dark

Your sparkling eyes and blooming cheeks

Must wither like the blasted rose;

The coffin, earth, and winding sheet

Will soon your active limbs enclose.15

A similarly upbeat rendition of the solemn “Weeping Mary” was featured in the remake of The Ladykillers, a Southern Gothic film from 2004. On his way to murder the sleeping Marva Munson, “the General” is frightened by a cuckoo clock with a spring-loaded Jesus figure, and through several comical interruptions, he falls down the stairs to his death all while “Weeping Mary” plays on a phonograph out of frame. This 1940 recording, performed by the Roswell (Georgia) Sacred Harp Quartet, highlights contemporary fascinations with the disembodied voices of singers’ past. The scratchy sounds of shellac discs, the singing styles from a previous era, and the pairing of somber texts and melodies with ragtime appeal all evoke a romanticized rural South of the past.16

Journalist Gordon Campbell argues that recordings of this era, including Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), would come to illustrate Greil Marcus’s concept of the “old, weird America,” claiming that these performances “came from a more spacious time in America’s cultural history when music making . . . hinted at a world that was vast and mysterious.” Marcus himself asserted that the recordings in Smith’s anthology, including those of Sacred Harp singers from Alabama, created “the bizarre [and] made the familiar strange, the never known into the forgotten, and the forgotten into a collective memory that teased [at the] listener’s conscious mind.” This imagined sense of strangeness and mystery strikes contemporary listeners as compelling, much in the way that folk horror films, Southern Gothic narratives, or murder ballads are simultaneously creepy, unsettling, and intriguing—even thrilling.17

Although new singers may find Sacred Harp texts unsettling, experienced singers often consider their “scary” or “dour” character a positive quality. Reed Schilbach, a longtime singer from Washington state, explained that she loves “spooky songs,” both in text and tune. Her favorite text is from “The Lone Pilgrim” (“and in a low whisper I heard something say”), which she finds compellingly eerie. She appreciates this quality of the music, even finding a sense of spiritual uplift in the frisson of Sacred Harp’s most chilling tunes. As she described, “There’s a physiological response to those spooky songs that’s part of the pleasure of singing this music . . . there is a lot of spiritual food in that music.”18

More than a quarter of the tunes in The Sacred Harp (including “Melancholy Day”) are written in the minor mode, giving an air of sadness, grief, or fear, which many participants find compelling. Mike McGonigal of the blog Wondering Sound, for example, expressed feeling “positively transported” by “melodies that are subtle, dirge-y, counterpoint-heavy,” harmonies that are “supernatural, booming, sepulchral . . . that [are] otherworldly, wholly strange, alien-sounding, and delightful.”19

The conception of Sacred Harp as an unsettling remnant of an “old, weird America” makes shape-note music a popular signifier of a gothic or haunted past, while impacting singers’ understanding of the social and physical spaces their music occupies. Sacred Harp’s association with grief, melancholy, and despair has mostly positive connotations, adding a compelling sense of a romanticized, intriguing past to the music’s meaning. Although singers and observers are enthusiastic in celebrating these “gothic” aspects of their music practice, they are quick to distance Sacred Harp from histories of actual pain—especially in expressions that supported racist ideologies and social practices that characterize much of the history of its southern homeland.

Despite the significant African American population in Macon County, Georgia, Donald Davidson described that “Eden” as an entirely white space in the 1930s. Scholars have critiqued the racist foundation of the Agrarians’ imagined South—Davidson, for example, promoted Confederate apologetics and advocated for racial segregation. The assumption that Sacred Harp was a white musical practice was reinforced by musicologist George Pullen Jackson, whose research on Sacred Harp, beginning in the 1930s, framed the music as the cultural property of Scots-Irish settlers and their descendants. Jackson defined Sacred Harp and other shape-note songs as “white spirituals,” arguing that white settlers established a uniquely American music form that predated African American spirituals. Folklorists, musicologists, and other observers boosted this perception throughout the twentieth century by whitewashing Sacred Harp’s history, neglecting the influence of African American musical forms, or framing African American Sacred Harp communities as exceptions within a white musical culture.20

Prior to the late twentieth century, Sacred Harp singings were almost entirely segregated by race. Numerous African American Sacred Harp communities flourished through the first half of the century, but they were mostly ignored by Sacred Harp promoters and were even dismissed by scholars like Jackson as mere imitations of a white musical form. Although singings were eventually integrated, Black and white singing communities rarely sang together—a reality that continues into the twenty-first century. Today’s singings are predominantly white, and even though people of color are welcomed and encouraged to attend, Sacred Harp singing remains largely a white space.21

The perception linking isolation and authenticity reinforces the assumption that authentic Sacred Harp is a white musical practice. Published descriptions of African American Sacred Harp singing have seldom employed language highlighting rurality and isolation. This is explained in part by the fact that most accounts were written by white observers. Lacking deep understanding or access to certain communities, they primarily attended singings that were located in cities like Ozark, Alabama, rather than those in the rural locations where African American singers also met. Furthermore, many contemporary writers have recognized the complexities of their own social positionality and have avoided using language in their descriptions of African American Sacred Harp practice that could be interpreted as othering, including those tropes that interpret rurality as backward or violent. Lastly, African American Sacred Harp communities diminished substantially by the end of the twentieth century, and they no longer hold regularly scheduled singings.22

Sacred Harp originated in the slaveholding economy of west-central Georgia in the area just north of Columbus. As musicologist Warren Steel has demonstrated, numerous early Sacred Harp singers and composers were themselves slaveholders, and many supported or fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Over ensuing decades, Sacred Harp singing was racially segregated, including in texts. African American singers in Southeast Alabama, for instance, sang from an edition of The Sacred Harp published regionally by white singers, but African American composers were refused the opportunity to publish their own Sacred Harp compositions in the volume. In the mid-twentieth century, Sacred Harp singing still reflected the region’s systematized racism. A Sacred Harp singer from Massachusetts who visited a singing in Georgia in 1966 noted that white singers exhibited “the usual deep-set, automatic and unselfconscious prejudice against” African Americans. It was not until the last quarter of the twentieth century that Sacred Harp singers made a conscious effort to integrate singings.23

Conversations abound in the singing community to address why Sacred Harp has not attracted a more diverse audience. While there’s not one answer to this question, multiple non-white singers that I spoke to expressed their sense of discomfort or anxiety about traveling to singings in places that they associated with the politics of white supremacy. For them, it was impossible to separate the history of race in the South with their contemporary experience. Representations of Sacred Harp that drew from Southern Gothic tropes offered me a perspective—as a white participant—to interpret the sense of unease or being out of place as a compelling form of adventure. But as literary scholar Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet has described in her study of Richard Wright’s work, the Southern Gothic can evoke a very different set of associations for people of color. For participants from communities that have been the subject of extensive historical violence in the maintenance of white supremacy, the romantic trappings of the Southern Gothic fall away.24

I often contemplate my first experience singing at Holly Springs, especially when driving by on Highway 27 at night when the single street light shines on the small, wooden church. Many of the singers I met that evening are now deceased, some occupying recent graves in the churchyard. It’s fascinating to reflect on the fears I had twenty years ago, especially when these were some of the most cherished pillars of the Sacred Harp community. Like other singers who have recounted similar experiences on their southern journeys—who were excited at the prospect of lost churches at the end of dusty roads—my tale ends with a sense of guilt for assuming danger in the most welcoming of places. Indeed, the ghosts of the rural South, both real and imagined, entice the imaginations of many, regardless of context. Yet the memory of singers, songs, and their sentiments are what haunt the world of Sacred Harp.  

Jonathon Smith research explores the shifting spaces of Sacred Harp singing with a particular focus on imagined and real ruralness, conceptions of the southern United States, Celticism, race, and sexual identities. Currently on the musicology faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he lectures on topics in American and Celtic music. He is an avid Sacred Harp singer and frequently travels throughout the US and Europe for singings.

NOTES

  1. Claudia Strauss, “The Imaginary,” Anthropological Theory 6, no. 3 (2006): 322–344. Strauss relies on Benedict Anderson’s conception of imagined community and Charles Taylor’s theory of social imaginaries. See Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). Bernice M. Murphy, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
  2. John Bealle, Public Worship, Private Faith: Sacred Harp and American Folksong (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Kiri Miller, Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2008), 55.
  3. For a history of Sacred Harp singing, see David Warren Steel, The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Miller, Traveling Home, 28–35; Public comment at the 2016 Minnesota State Convention, September 24–25, 2016, Shakopee, Minnesota; “Passing away” is a common phrase among Sacred Harp singers and references the song of the same name. 
  4. Christopher J. Stapel, “Dismantling Metrocentric and Metronormative Curricula: Toward a Critical Queer Pedagogy of Southern Rural Space and Place,” in Queer South Rising (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2013), 60; Miller, Traveling Home, 143. Raymond Williams critiques the perception equating rural with past and urban with present in The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 297. Sacred Harp’s long association with Primitive Baptist churches may also influence this perception. Although singings are hosted at churches affiliated with a range of denominations, Primitive Baptists have a strong connection to Sacred Harp in part because of their proscription of musical instruments. Despite its common contemporary connotations, however, “primitive” in this context refers to the church established by Jesus in the New Testament. See Joshua Guthman, Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 6.
  5. Donald Davidson et al., I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Donald Davidson, “The Sacred Harp in the Land of Eden,” Virginia Quarterly Review 10, no. 2 (1934): 203, 216.
  6. Laura Camper, “Once a Year, Historic Shoal Creek Baptist Church Fills with Joyful Noise,” The Anniston Star, August 29, 2014; Joseph M. Jones, “Shoal Creek Church,” Alabama Heritage Magazine, Summer 2009, 5.
  7. As late as 2017, discussions on the Fasola listserv called for some sort of singings map because so many places, especially in the rural Southeast, were still difficult to find. Fasola refers to the shapes used in Sacred Harp notation. Sacred Harp is sometimes called “fasola” singing. Kate Kiefer, “Shout and Sing the Good Old Way: A Sacred Harp Story,” Paste Magazine, November 2008, 45; David L. Carlton, “To the Land I Am Bound: A Journey into Sacred Harp,” Southern Cultures 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 50.
  8. Several singers who announced the Chattahoochee Convention’s 2019 session at earlier singings that year noted that the location was difficult to find, and one specifically claimed that the church could not be found on Google Maps.
  9. Murphy, Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture, 138; Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
  10. Kiefer, “Shout and Sing the Good Old Way,” 47; National Book Foundation, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia, accessed August 22, 2023, https://www.nationalbook.org/books/salvation-on-sand-mountain-snake-handling-and-redemption-in-southern-appalachia/; Jonathon Smith, “‘We’ll All Shout Together in That Morning’: Iconicity and Sacred Harp Singing on Sand Mountain, Alabama” (master’s thesis, University of Tennessee, 2009), 52–53.
  11. Jonathon Smith, “Imagined Space in Sacred Harp Singing” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2022), 127–128.
  12. Adam Scovell, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (Leighton Buzzard, UK: Auteur Publishing, 2017); Clare Button, “‘See Not Ye That Bonny Road?’ Places, Haunts and Haunted Places in British Traditional Song,” in Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns, 1: Twisted Roots, ed. Jim Peters et al., vol. 1 (Durham, UK: Wyrd Harvest Press, 2018), 260, 262.
  13. The most prominent hymnodist in the Sacred Harp is Isaac Watts, whose texts appear in approximately one hundred fifty songs in the Sacred Harp. The book also includes numerous texts by eighteenth-century writers Philip Doddridge, Anne Steele, Charles Wesley, and others.
  14. Miller, Traveling Home, 63.
  15. Miller, Traveling Home, 108–109; McGonigal, “Raw Power”; The New England Sunday School Hymn Book, 1830.
  16. See I Belong to This Band: Eighty-Five Years of Sacred Harp Recordings for recordings of both songs, also available at Dust-to-Digital’s Bandcamp site at https://dusttodigital.bandcamp.com/album/i-belong-to-this-band-85-years-of-sacred-harp-recordings.
  17. Gordon Cambell, “On ‘the Old Weird’ Music of America, with a Playlist,” August 24, 2021, https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2108/S00069/on-the-old-weird-music-of-america-with-a-playlist.htm; Greil Marcus, The Old, Weird America (New York: Picador, 1997), 95.
  18. One paper, “Death in Sacred Harp,” analyzed the “death lyrics” of The Sacred Harp as a sort of evangelical tool that singers use to “convert” newcomers to “their religion,” Jessica Tilley, “Death in Sacred Harp” (master’s thesis, Georgia State University, 2007); personal communication with the author, February 2022; Northwest Folklife, Northwest Stories: Shape-Note Singing, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9yPPjabr6g.
  19. Mike McGonigal, “Raw Power: Sacred Harp Singing’s Heavy Delights,” Wondering Sound (blog), May 1, 2005, http://www.wonderingsound.com/spotlight/raw-power-sacred-harp-singings-heavy-delights/.
  20. See Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 102–106; see George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands: The Story of the Fasola Folk, Their Songs, Singings, and “Buckwheat Notes” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933); Jesse P. Karlsberg, “Folklore’s Filter: Race, Place, and Sacred Harp Singing” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2015), 18–19.
  21. Jackson wrote, “If imitation is the sincerest flattery, the Sacred Harp folk should be pleased with the Colored Sacred Harp,” George Pullen Jackson, The Story of the Sacred Harp (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1944), 25; Miller, Traveling Home, 12.
  22. Black musicologist John W. Work III was a prominent exception; see Work, “Plantation Meistersinger,” The Musical Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1941): 97–106; Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association, “The Colored Sacred Harp,” accessed August 23, 2023, https://fasola.org/maps/coloredsh.html.
  23. Steel, Makers of the Sacred Harp, 12–19; Joe Dan Boyd, Judge Jackson and the Colored Sacred Harp (Montgomery: Alabama Folklife Association, 2002); Smith, “Imagined Space in Sacred Harp Singing,” 140. Sacred Harp singers made a notable effort to integrate singings at the National Sacred Harp Convention, founded in 1980; see John Beall, “National Sacred Harp Convention,” liner notes for 2002 National Sacred Harp Convention, recorded June 14, 2002, Alabama Center for Traditional Culture, 2002. 
  24. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, “Jim Crow Gothic: Richard Wright’s Southern Nightmare,” in Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016): 297–308.
Subscribe to Southern Cultures
Subscribe today!

One South, a world of stories. Delivered in four print issues a year.

Subscribe