“Like Pieces in a Puzzle”: Online Sacred Harp Singing During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Sacred Harp singers the world over gather weekly to sing out of The Sacred Harp, a collection of shape-note songs first published in 1844. Their tradition is highly ritualized, and it plays an important role in the lives of many participants. Following the implementation of lockdown protocols to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, groups of Sacred Harp singers quickly and independently devised a variety of means by which to sing together online using Zoom (“zinging”), Jamulus (“jamzinging”), and Facebook Live (“stringing”). The rapidity and creativity with which Sacred Harp singers developed ways to sustain their activities attests to the strength and significance of this community of practice, and in this article I describe each modality and provide an account of how it came to be developed and widely used. As a participant-observer, I completed extensive fieldwork across these digital sites and conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 other singers. I found that online singing practices have reshaped the Sacred Harp community. Many singers who did not previously have the opportunity to participate now have access, while others have lost access due to technological barriers or lack of interest in online activities. At the same time, geographical barriers have disintegrated, and singing organizers must make an effort to maintain local identity. A stable community of singers has emerged in the digital realm, but it is by no means identical to the community that predated the pandemic. I also identify the ways in which online singing has proven meaningful to participants by providing continuity in their personal and communal practice. Specifically, online singing allows participants to access and celebrate their collective memories of the Sacred Harp community, carry out significant rituals, and continue to grow as singers. While no single modality replicates the complete Sacred Harp singing experience, together they function “like pieces in a puzzle” (as one singer put it), allowing individual participants to access many of the elements of Sacred Harp singing that are most meaningful to them.

Anthony Johnson Showalter: A Pioneer in Southern Gospel Music Education

Anthony Johnson Showalter (c. 1853–1924) was a music educator, gospel composer, publisher, and considered a pioneer in gospel music and education in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Showalter is notably mentioned in numerous texts and studies related to gospel music; however, little data has been collected regarding the tools he used in singing schools—namely, the rudiment books he wrote and the schools where he used the curriculum. The purpose of this study is to discover Showalter’s possible motivation to begin his career, his determination in writing music education curriculum, organizing singing schools, his reasonings for focusing on seven-shape note style, and his influence into the twenty-first century. Materials analyzed included Showalter’s rudiment books, extant copies of his periodical, “The Music Teacher and Home Magazine,” and interviews at present-day gospel singing schools. Extant research related to four-shape and seven-shape hymnody and education was also reviewed. Findings indicate that Showalter was a progressive student-centered educator who utilized alternate tools in helping many with literacy by organizing the Southern Normal Musical Institute. Showalter created materials and opportunities which were accessible to the advanced and the beginner, hence providing a future for gospel singing schools well into the twenty-first century.

Secular Music in Shape Notes

The distinctive repertory and performance practices of American shape-note (fasola) singing during the early 1800s, while sacred in origin, made a much wider impact in secular realms than one might suppose. The religious connotations of the music were readily accepted on the frontier but did not limit it to purely sacred uses (in other words, public worship). The singing school was a social institution as well as a religious and educational one. Contemporary accounts show that young people viewed singing schools as a valuable opportunity for courting in a relatively unsupervised atmosphere, and several writers noted the apparent discrepancy between the words sung and the deeds done at such gatherings. Tunebooks throughout the era reveal a highly diverse list of secular songs and song types.

Nostalgia, Modernity, and the Reconstruction Roots of Southern Gospel

This chapter traces the emergence of modern southern gospel forward from its Reconstruction roots. It pays attention to the abiding influence of the songbook publisher, songwriter, romantic poet, and melancholic Civil War veteran Aldine S. Kieffer. As the more creative half of the Ruebush–Kieffer songbook publishing empire, Kieffer played an inimitable role in the industrialization of southern gospel at a pivotal moment when shape-note music education was transitioning from a paraprofessional recreation to a commercialized economy based on songbooks and increasingly professionalized music teachers and singers. In the process, this chapter makes the first comprehensive case in extant scholarship for Kieffer as the most important originator of modern southern gospel discourse, an archetypal figure whose work in early southern gospel infuses the music with a lasting concern for tensions between the self and society that arise from sociocultural upheaval in the postbellum South.