SACRED HARP SINGING IN WINNSBORO AND ELSEWHERE

by
Joe Dan Boyd

No one remembers the last time Winnsboro hosted a Sacred Harp singing event. At least prior to the event held at the Depot this past Saturday, October 3rd. This one was organized by prominent Sacred Harp singer Karen Willard as part of the national reunion of the Willard family. Other prominent singers included Robert Vaughn and Gaylan Powell.

Sacred Harp singing (a term derived from the name of the songbook used) stands virtually alone as the survival of a tradition which saturated the South after first being disseminated through similar books by “Yankee singing school masters” of the colonial Northeast.

Their art was derived from elements in mid-seventeenth century European “polyphony,” Old English solmization and the uniquely American shaped, patent or character note heads.

(Robert Vaughn is pictured below on the left. Gaylan Powell is below on the right)

Though in the Northeast this cultural antique surrendered with little struggle to the subsequent seven-shape do-re-mi invasion, which in turn lost the all-out war with the unshaped “round head” notes, Southern resistance via the Sacred Harp simply went “underground”—or, more accurately, was ignored by that community of reformers which scholar George Pullen Jackson labeled the Better Music Boys.

And, not until publication in the 1930s of Jackson’s influential scholarship did it become clear that the singing would endure with the ancient song tunes, whose durability was probably never seriously threatened. Jackson’s scholarship helped to create a Sacred Harp mystique, which filtered into folk tradition, adding strength to an already persistent survival of these folk hymns, religious ballads and camp-meeting choruses.

Sacred Harp singers use only four note names (fa, sol, la, mi) for the seven tones of the scale. Each has its characteristic shape for rapid reading, the position on the printed staff indicating its pitch (since there are two fa’s, two sol’s and two la’s in the scale). Songs of the Sacred Harp are written in four harmonic parts: bass, alto, tenor (melody) and treble (high harmony), with all parts except bass sung by both men and women. Over time, practitioners were sometimes called “four-note” singers or “fasola” singers.

Since four-shape composers include a separate staff for each voice, and arrange harmony by placing voices in a “four-staff-ladder” fashion, the book itself has retained the traditional oblong shape characteristic of early singing-school manuals. And, as Jackson explained: “The 20 pages or so of ‘Rudiments of Music’ at the beginning of the book represent a feature brought to America from England well over 200 years ago.”

These “rudiments” were intended to facilitate both self-instruction and the courses of study arranged by traveling singing school teachers who set up shop for days or weeks at a time. It is to such singing schools that we may attribute the growth and survival of Sacred Harp singing. Jackson called the singing schools “the beginning of all group singing” and the cradle of musical democracy in the South.” While no longer widespread, Sacred Harp singing schools nevertheless continue to strengthen the tradition and introduce youngsters to it.

Two versions of the Sacred Harp dominate today’s tradition: The Denson edition in most of Georgia and Alabama and the Cooper edition along the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas. In addition, and against all odds, the tradition has grown over the past half-century, even to include much of the U.S. and some other countries. Thus, today, one may find either version of the book being used almost anywhere.

(Below, Kim Vaughn leads a song)

At the October 3, 2009, Winnsboro singing, I bought a copy of the most recent (2006) revision of the Cooper book from Robert Vaughn, one of the prominent Texas singers who attended.

When I was growing up in the Winnsboro area, during the late 1930s, all of the 1940s and the early 1950s, Sacred Harp singing still flourished here, although I was not a participant. My Uncle J. J. Mills was a fasola singer, but I never got to interview him, as my interest in the tradition was sparked much later, by graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-to-late 1960s when I lived in the Philadelphia area.

During the late 1960s, I attended and recorded what must have been one of the last Wood County Sacred Harp singing conventions, held in Quitman. During that period, I was also introduced to the relatively rare African-American tradition of four-note singing then extant in Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama. This led to my 30-year interaction with that tradition, and an emphasis on yet another songbook, The Colored Sacred Harp. Eventually I wrote a book about all this, Judge Jackson and the Colored Sacred Harp, which is best described at the following link:
http://alabamafolklife.org/AFApublication.htm#jackson