Category: Shapenote Music
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Sources of the Sacred Harp and Southern Harmony
Many of the songs in the 1844 edition of The Sacred Harp are original, representing composers including B.F. White and E.J. King, the compilers of the book. How did the songs that are not original enter the book? About half of the songs in The Sacred Harp match songs in William Walker’s The Southern Harmony…
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Judgment Anthem
I completed a new, ten page shapenote edition of Justin Morgan’s JUDGMENT ANTHEM, available for download here. It’s a real choral showpiece, with multiple key changes and solo sections. Asahel Benham published JUDGMENT ANTHEM in his Federal Harmony in 1790. It was the first anthem ever published in shapes, appearing in the first shapenote book,…
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Did Lucius Chapin write the Amazing Grace tune?
The melody sung to John Newton’s 1779 hymn “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound” is, without a doubt, America’s best-loved hymn tune. An 1828 manuscript by Lucius Chapin (1760-1842), who was famous in his day as a hymn tune writer, raises the possibility that Lucius was its composer.
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Long-lost Shenandoah tunebook found
It’s rare to discover lost shape-note songs, let alone entire books, so I was completely floored to find that a copy of the long-lost James P. Carrell’s Songs of Zion (1821) was recently cataloged by the University of Virginia. Songs of Zion is a 64-page collection of shape-note tunes published by Ananias Davisson one year after his A Supplement…
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Charts and graphs, oh my!
Charts and graphs, oh my! Being a mathematically-inclined person, I’m always interested in the stories one can tease out of data… Now that we’ve got the book mostly mapped out, I made a chart displaying the first publication dates of the songs. Each dot in the chart represents a song. Given that we started with…
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“One of the most beautiful of those old minors”
The editions of The Kentucky Harmony and The Tennessee Harmony are roughly 60% minor; even the early editions of The Easy Instructor are over 50% minor. For comparison, The Sacred Harp (1991) is only 28% minor, though I’ve heard that the actual balance of songs called in singings is less heavily skewed. In addition to…
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Questioning the Unanswered Cadence
There’s sometimes an audible gasp from the class after singing REDEEMING GRACE, THE HUMBLE PENITENT, or Allison Blake Steel’s arrangement of HICKS’ FAREWELL. Why the surprise?
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Morgan’s Judgment Anthem, newly typeset
UPDATE: Our friends Becky, Leland, Cheri, and Ivy in Northampton recorded JUDGMENT ANTHEM! You can hear and download it from Soundcloud. I just completed a new shape-note edition of Justin Morgan’s JUDGMENT ANTHEM, available for download here. It’s a real choral showpiece, with multiple key changes and solo sections. Asahel Benham first published JUDGMENT ANTHEM in…