Category: Read the Old Paths
Stories about people and events central to the history of our music.
Shape-Note Singing in Mississippi: A Preliminary History
While studies of Sacred Harp singing have concentrated on Georgia, Alabama, and Texas, the shape-note traditions of Mississippi have remained comparatively obscure. In 1933, George Pullen Jackson wrote, “I have not learned that there is in Mississippi any comprehensive state Sacred Harp organization.” He also suggested that “the rarity of singers from that state attending…
Building Community Harmony: Thirty-Three Years of Illinois State Sacred Harp Conventions
“I am going to bring nine people to Paxton, Illinois to organize a state convention. Saturday, May 25 is the date. St. Louis will be next.” That’s what Hugh McGraw, executive secretary of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company, wrote on a note tucked in a shipment of books to St. Louis singers in 1984. Meanwhile,…
What I’ve Learned from My Sacred Harp Elders
My love of Sacred Harp began with my grandfather, Jim Fields, who took me to a singing school in 1958, when I was ten years old. H. N. “Bud” McGraw was the teacher. I was immediately in love with the music, the warmth, and the welcoming hugs for a little newcomer. Some of the other…
Philadelphia, Birthplace of the Shapes and Center of Shape-Note Publishing
The original 1844 edition of The Sacred Harp bore the name and address of a Philadelphia publishing house: T. K. & P. G. Collins. Although B. F. White’s journey from Hamilton, Georgia, to Philadelphia would have been several days long, he published four editions of The Sacred Harp with Collins, both before and after the…
Orin Adolphus Parris: At Home Across the Shape-Note Music Spectrum
We often think of Sacred Harp and gospel music as opposites. Especially for singers from the 1991 Edition, the style can seem anathema; its relative exclusion a sign of the tunebook’s fidelity to the “old paths” invoked in its dedication. According to Raymond Hamrick, the first act of the book’s music committee was to “erect…
I Remember: Ruth Denson Edwards on Her Sacred Harp Childhood
A note from the editor: In this essay, “Queen of The Sacred Harp,” Ruth Denson Edwards shares memories of her musical childhood home. Just about every day somewhere in the world Sacred Harp singers find joy and spiritual fulfillment singing songs written by the Denson family members who gathered around a big log fire to…
The Twentieth Century Looks at William Billings
A note from the editor: When Raymond C. Hamrick returned to Sacred Harp singing after World War II he was immediately drawn to the music of the eighteenth-century New England composer, William Billings. Billings also piqued Hamrick’s scholarly curiosity as this article—first published in The Harpeth Valley Sacred Harp News 1, no. (May 7, 1965)—demonstrates.…
The Curious History of Shape-Notes
A note from the editor: In this essay, first published in The Harpeth Valley Sacred Harp News 2, no. 4 (September 20, 1965), Hamrick places shape-notes in the context of American vocal music history, from their advent in the colonial era through the twentieth century. Hamrick’s evocative retelling of this story capitalizes on what at the…
Sojourn in the South: Billings Among the Shape-Noters
A note from the editor: Raymond C. Hamrick contributed this article to a 1996 special issue of the Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning 7, no. 1, devoted to eighteenth-century New England composer William Billings. In an April 2014 interview, Hamrick recalled that the journal’s associate editor, Jonathan Bellman, a professor at the University…
“My Interest Was in the Background of the Music”: Raymond C. Hamrick and Alan Lomax in Conversation
Editor’s Note: Alan Lomax interviewed Raymond C. Hamrick during a break in 1982 June memorial singing at Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church in Bremen, Georgia. An outspoken and prolific folklorist, Lomax attended the convention with a large crew to record the singing and interview prominent participants for his acclaimed 1982–83 PBS series American Patchwork. Never…
