(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Ozarks Notebook: An 1840s Hymnal Finds a New Voice in Northwest Arkansas [1]
['Kaitlyn Mcconnell', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2025-07-11
An old tradition has a voice in the Arkansas Ozarks, where Sacred Harp, a hymnal for shape-note singing that has become known as a style all its own, has found followers two centuries after it was first printed in the 1840s.
It’s not the only place where Sacred Harp is at home. In fact, there are many communities in the United States and abroad where the style is popular. But I’m writing about it today because it reminds us that traditions can begin anew, or for the very first time, and have a meaningful impact on lives today.
In this case, Sacred Harp wasn’t a thing in the Ozarks years ago. One expert I spoke with said that he hasn’t found evidence that Sacred Harp was regularly historically practiced in the Ozarks at all. Even today, other forms of shape-note tradition are far more common across the region. An example is in Brockwell, Arkansas, where a singing school has been teaching the seven-note tradition since the 1940s.
But in spaces in northwest Arkansas, young and old are coming together twice a month to learn and share the Sacred Harp tradition – and build community.
“It’s people just getting together to sing for fun – it’s not a performance,” said Cory Winters who participates with the Arkansas Sacred Harp Singers. “When you go to school for music it’s about performing, and this is just for fun and for community. I enjoy the historical side of it, but I also enjoy the musical side of it.”
What Is Sacred Harp?
A group of about 10 people were singing the day I stopped by the Folk School of Fayetteville, a city tucked in the state’s northwest corner that’s home to the University of Arkansas. They faced each other from opposite sides of a small room, separated by vocal parts on songs that everyone took turns suggesting.
Participants got the chance to lead the largely Christian-themed songs, a role that took them to the middle of the space, a place called the “hollow square,” where they moved their arms up and down with the music, which was intense.
“It is a sound that the first time you hear it, you either love it or hate it because it’s a big sound,” said Charley Sandage, a musician in Mountain View, Arkansas, who grew up in the Sacred Harp tradition and has led singing schools. “When I had an active group here, I said, ‘The one thing that Sacred Harp singers do not practice is subtly.’ You just rear back and sing.”
Hands grasped copies of The Sacred Harp, the hymnal that was originally published in the 1840s and has survived through various editions. The book, however, lives: I’m told a 2025 version set to release in September received 1,200 new songs for consideration.
It’s not the only book that focuses on four-note tradition; another hymnal called The Missouri Harmony predates it by a couple of decades. But Sacred Harp was one of most popular books, according to the Library of Congress, and “as a result of this popularity, the style of singing is also sometimes called ‘sacred harp.’”
Despite its name, no harps or instruments of any kind are involved in singing Sacred Harp songs. Instead of a traditional musical staff, four shapes, a triangle, circle, square and diamond, represent different syllables. The style was easier for folks to sing without accompaniment or having significant musical knowledge.
“Shape notes were developed in order to provide an accessible way for singers with little or no literacy skills to read musical notation,” noted the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “Settlers carried the tradition with them as they migrated from colonial America into other parts of the country, including the Southeast and eventually the Ozark Mountains. Itinerant ‘singing masters’ typically led classes at a local church or schoolhouse during months with less agricultural work, after which students possessed the skills necessary to sight-read vocal music.”
What I’ve learned in researching this column is that the sun had largely set on Sacred Harp’s first heyday by the early 1900s. For example, a community in southern Arkansas set aside a Sunday in 1910 for the “old folks” to come and sing “the old Sacred Harp.”
“The day is set apart exclusively for the old people to come together one more time and enjoy themselves,” noted the Huttig News. The newspaper was from a town south of the Ozarks, but still represents how folks saw the style of music by that time.
That’s not to say it completely disappeared, particularly in Southern states. “While the use of this system of learning and singing hymns declined in the early to mid-20th century,” that Library of Congress article notes, “there were some communities where it remained strong, and it has enjoyed a revival today, especially in the South.”
That revival came in the mid-20th century, and is thanks to folks like Hugh McGraw, who felt a calling to help spread the gospel about this style of music. A native of Georgia, McGraw learned of the tradition as a child, but an epiphany in his 20s changed his life and the music world.
“I walked into a singing — after I was done married and had a family,” he is quoted as saying by the National Endowment for the Arts, which selected him as a NEA National Heritage Fellow in 1982. “And I heard this music, and something just petrified me. Says you got to do your thing. So I began studying and teaching, composing, and singing this music all over the country.”
That drive turned into a mission that helped re-establish Sacred Harp in the national consciousness for new generations and in expanded spaces, an effort that was aided by the folk movement.
“Hugh McGraw became the Johnny Appleseed of this tradition, and it resulted in a kind of metamorphosis (and) broadened the audience,” Sandage said. “It really, really tended to take root in university towns because people who taught music would be intrigued with this alternate way of reading.”
However, this new iteration shied away from the songs’ religious significance. As academic spaces began adopting the tradition, it evolved into a more secular tradition. (In a way, the runway for that reality began years before, when the tradition was favored by the Primitive Baptist denomination, which has a flavor of predestination. In layman’s terms, that means they don’t need to witness or preach to you because whether you’re going to heaven has already been decided by God, and neither they nor you can do anything about it.)
“What happened back in the ‘50s and ‘60s when Sacred Harp was first ‘discovered’ and started to become part of the folk music scene, people – whether they were Jewish or Catholic or atheist or whatever – could go to these Sacred Harp singings in really rustic places in Alabama and Mississippi and places like that and sort of fit into that atmosphere,” said Dr. Brooks Blevins, the foremost academic voice about Ozarks history.
Today, it’s true in northwest Arkansas, too.
“The songs are from church music, but this isn’t a church,” says Allison Langston, a member of the group. “For some people, this is a religious practice, but … it’s private. We don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about politics, we don’t talk about religion. It’s social.”
Tim Eriksen, a Sacred Harp authority and folk musician, regularly visits northwest Arkansas to teach about the legacy tradition. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
Sacred Harp Singers Today
All of that takes us to the Fayetteville folk center, where the group of Sacred Harp singers gathered back in May. Fayetteville is a college town, but the singing is open to anyone in the nearby rural area and beyond.
The day I was there was a special deal. It was a training and singing that was in addition to the twice-monthly gatherings they typically host, complete with the remains of a potluck lunch in back.
During a break, I spoke with Dr. Tim Eriksen, a Sacred Harp authority and folk musician who has a PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and was interviewed by the BBC in April about Sacred Harp. He periodically travels to Arkansas from Massachusetts to give the Sacred Harp trainings.
“I just started doing it because I liked it,” says Eriksen, who found the style through record albums many years ago. “A friend of mine and I got Sacred Harp out of the library and started singing out of it, and we thought it was cool. Got some other friends involved, and eventually realized it was a thing, not just some historical book; it was something that people did.”
He sees evidence that the tradition has a future, citing the pending publication of the new version of the Sacred Harp hymnal. That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s secure, especially in more rural areas where smaller groups can lose numbers quickly.
That’s true with the Arkansas group, which lost singers through the Covid-19 pandemic. A lot of its members were older, says Langston. It also lost a key leader in 2023 through the death of Dan Brittain, a significant Sacred Harp leader from Arkansas who brought the tradition to musicians around the world.
And it’s a reminder that, for traditions to continue, there have to be new people ready to step in and serve. Today, while music is part of the magic, it seems people’s search for community is another driving factor. It’s a reason Langston decided to join a few years ago.
“During the pandemic, I just was so desperately lonely and needing connection,” she said. “And Sacred Harp – the community is really about connection and relationships. It just fit.”
It’s also true for McKenna Mullis, who began attending about two and a half years ago after moving back to Arkansas post-college and hasn’t stopped since.
“I love singing, always,” she told me. “I did choir growing up for a decade and I enjoyed singing in a group, but I didn’t necessarily enjoy the disorganization of a jam. There’s not a lot of places for acapella music…As someone who doesn’t play instruments to accompany myself, there’s something really intriguing about just voices and the lack of perfection, which I think really off-puts some people. For the rest of us that’s the best part of it. That it’s this kind of raw, imperfect, not very pretty sounding practice.”
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://dailyyonder.com/ozarks-notebook-an-1840s-hymnal-finds-a-new-voice-in-northwest-arkansas/2025/07/11/
Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/
