Mobtown Blues

Way Down Yonder on the Li'l Tallapoosa

I've been struggling for weeks now to compose a post that adequately encompasses the long weekend I spent with my wife and friends recently in rural Alabama.  Now, when I say "rural," I don't mean "rural" in the Maryland sense, where McMansions are swiftly eroding the farmland, and where one is never more than a 20-min. drive from the multiplex and the Panera.  No, when I say we were in rural Alabama, I mean that the place where we stayed was a miles down a dirt road, with little but vast, creeping fields of kudzu between us and the nearest gas station a couple of zip codes away.

After racking my brain trying to come up with a way to adequately summarize my experience in one of the deeper parts of the Deep South, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not up to the task.  Either I write the Cliff's Notes or I write 'War and Peace;' there's no middle ground.  So here are some of the things I've been telling friends, family, and coworkers, when they ask "what in the world were you doing in rural Alabama this summer?"

Among other things, I: visited a chicken farm, went four-wheelin' in the mud in a Dodge Caravan, saw a dead armadillo, drove past Booger Hollow Road, tried my first crawdad, listened to my friends outsing a lightning storm, shared a smoke with a guy in a rebel flag doo-rag, drank muscadine wine, ate at a roadside barbecue stand, did yoga on the front porch at sunrise, discussed the decline of the African-American Sacred Harp tradition, made several trips to and from Lower Cane Creek Primitive Baptist Church, listened to impromptu mini-lectures on astrology and homeopathic remedies, talked about pockets of Yankee sympathizers in Alabama during the height of the Civil War (or "the Late Unpleasantness," depending on your perspective), learned about the now-defunct custom of dropping live turkeys from the second floor of the courthouse in LaFayette (pronounced "luh-FEHT"), and heard all sorts of startling things about Nathan Bedford Forrest and the organization he founded, the one that's abbreviated by repeating the eleventh letter of the Roman alphabet three times.

I also attended the funeral home visitation for a singer who died unexpectedly the day of our arrival.  She wasn't someone I knew in any way well; I had sung across the hollow square from her a couple of times, is all.  But the singing we conjured for her and her family, about 50 of us packed in a little anteroom next to the room where she was laid out for viewing, was just about the richest, most reverent, most powerful singing of my experience.  As we sang for our departed fellow singer, I looked around the room at the people around me.  I saw young people and old people, Northerners and Southerners, black folks and white folks, liberals and conservatives, atheists and Pentecostals, their voices all raised in hymns of praise and lamentation.  Beyond them I saw the family members of the deceased, many of whom had never heard this music before.  Some of them hugged me afterward, astonished that folks would drive all the way from Maryland and sing for someone they barely knew.  And I thought: this is how I want it to be when I die.  This is what we do for each other.  This is, to quote Raymond Carver, what we talk about when we talk about love.

One afternoon, my friend with whom we were staying took the group of us down to the Little Tallapoosa River, its waters depleted from the drought that has scorched the southeast for months.  After chasing off the cows that, like us, were trying to beat the 100-plus degree heat and stifling humidity with a dip in the river, we waded into the muddy water and lay ourselves down.  Our host's cousin drove up on a John Deere ATV, bearing locally grown, orange-colored watermelons.  As I spit the seeds out into the drowsy current, I found myself thinking of my father, how he had spent most of his young adulthood trying to find a way out of the South, its poverty, its religion, its culture.  I wondered what he would think of myperiodic excursions to Georgia and Alabama, of the bonds I have developed with the sort of people he fought so hard for get away from.  I skipped a chunk of watermelon rind across the suface of the water and figured that wherever he is, he's probably getting a kick out of the irony of the whole thing.

I rose and toweled myself off.  The sun was just beginning its slow, red decline, the air shimmering with heat and moisture.  In a few hours, we would be kicked out of a seafood restaurant by armed Randolph County sherriff's deputies.  The South was beginning to grow on me. 

Shouting Down the Devil

There’s a certain point during a good all-day Sacred Harp sing, usually midway after the noon meal, when the class really takes off, when the energy in the room becomes invigoratingly volatile.  That’s when experienced leaders start calling anthems and minor-key fuguing tunes, when the pitch of the session creeps upward a step or two, when sweat starts flowing down faces, and when spontaneous bursts of applause occasionally punctuate particularly well-led songs.  The overall feeling is one of a roller coaster just about to come off the track, and Sacred Harp singers treasure it.

This sort of singing experience was on my mind a few days ago, over the weekend of the 155^th Chattahoochee Sacred Harp Convention in Carrollton, Georgia.  Following the sing at Wilson’s Chapel on Saturday, a longtime singer told a group of us about an elderly male treble, a member of a Pentecostal church, who would get so exercised during the course of an especially lively Sacred Harp sing that he would start “getting happy” right there on the bench.  When I asked my friend whether this behavior was frowned upon by the non-charismatics in the room, he replied that it rarely elicited a comment, since most singers understood the source of the spirit that moved the old treble.

Now, if I was at a singing and someone started “fallin’ out” during the middle of ‘Eternal Day,’ I can’t say I would be as nonchalant as the singers my friend described.  Heck, there are some folks that I sing with on a regular basis who would probably faint dead away at such an unrestrained display of religious fervor.  Even so, I too can see what would move a person to such emotional heights during a singing.

This is intense music.  Its unorthodox melodies, dispersed harmonies, and frequently stark lyrics can sound harsh and jarring to the unfamiliar ear. If the poetry that accompanies so many of the songs seems bleak and uncompromising (“Your sparkling eyes, your blooming cheeks / must wither like the blasted rose, / the coffin earth and winding sheet / will soon your active limbs enclose”), consider that the world can be a pretty bleak and uncompromising place, and sometimes pretty tunes with pretty words just aren’t up to the task of helping one deal with it.  When we sing “my spirit triumphant shall fly,” or “I’ll soar away above the sky,” the music wheels and dips and ascends like a bird on the wing.  When we sing “oh, for a shout of sacred joy,” the music literally shouts for joy.  Sacred Harp music is about the important things: victory and defeat, permanence and transience, perdition and redemption.  The acknowledgement of the suffering that pervades this world, and the hope of a better world to come.  Life comes at you hard and fast, and this is music that rises to meet it.

For me, Sacred Harp singing is a necessary complement to the experience of unprogrammed Quaker worship.  I’ve always cherished the deep pools of silence that are to be found in contemplative religious practice.  At the same time, there are moments in life that demand a “shout unto God with the voice of triumph” (Ps. 47) or a “cry for help” (Ps. 5).  When I speak with God, it is not only in the stillness of my heart, but also in the fullness of my voice.  It is not only an inward, private conversation, but one that calls out to be shared in the company of a community whose voices are raised in song.

When a class of Sacred Harp singers really gets going, as the Chattahoochee Convention did a couple of weeks ago, it is like being in the midst of a storm.  Leading a song within the hollow square is like standing in the eye of a hurricane.  We give voice to happiness and our grief, we shout down the devil and bring despair to its knees.  And yet, despite its forcefulness and intensity, the singing is neither wild nor uncontrolled.  The roller coaster is kept on its track by a restraint born out of respect for the tradition and for each other.  As we were reminded during the memorial lesson at this year’s Chattahoochee Convention, those of us who let this music into our lives build those lives upon a rock.  And when we die, there will be a community of people – many of whom we never met – who will sing for us.  And I, for one, can’t think of any better way to spend my time, or to end it.  

Put the Taste of the South in Your Mouth, Redux

Splashing about in the bath-temperature waters of the small lake hiyatop Alabama's Mount Cheaha a couple of weeks ago, a friend came up with a single phrase that neatly encapsulates the substance of all 550-odd songs in the 1991 revision of The Sacred Harp tunebook:

"OhmysouldeathJesushallelujah!"

Yep, that pretty much covers it.  You could throw in a "boy, I can't *wait* to die and receive the reward that I know is coming to me because I've been so faithful," or a "Y'all gonna burn if yew don't get right with the -- yeah, buddy, I'm talking to yew."  But really, "ohmysouldeathJesushallelujah" captures the spirit of the lyrics rather nicely.

In case you're wondering why I was wading around in my swimming trunks in the middle of Talladega National Forest -- and well you might -- it was on the occasion of my second pilgrimage to the Chattahoochee Sacred Harp Convention in Carrollton, Georgia.  This annual event is neither the largest nor the loudest Sacred Harp gathering in the world, but it's arguably the oldest.  Singers from western Georgia, eastern Alabama, and beyond have traveled to the area around the Chattahoochee River just about every summer for the past 154 years.  For the last few dozen of those years, the convention has been held in a chapel erected specifically and solely for that purpose.  The exterior is simple brick, the interior is all wood of a dark gold, and when the singing really gets going, it sounds like the building is going to levitate from its foundation.   

The phenomenal singing is a big reason I look forward to the Chattahoochee Convention, but it's not the only one.  There's also the eye-popping variety and quantity of food at the dinner-on-the-grounds: an epicurean riot of cobblers, casseroles, pork products, poultry, black-eyed peas, and at least three different types of fried okra.  (And one must not forget the endemically Dixie delicacy known as the fried pie.)  There's the quiet prayers offered by Mr. Lonnie, the nonagenarian convention chaplain, who never fails to give thanks for another opportunity "to sing these old songs."  Most of all, I appreciate the warmth and hospitality that we motley gaggle youngish singers from up North have encountered the last couple of years that we've traveled to Carrollton.  The generosity and acceptance that have been extended to us by so many Georgian and Alabamian singers is humbling, not to say surprising.

There's a lot of hoohah that Sacred Harpers in the North hear about their southern counterparts.  Although shape-note singing as we know it arose principally in the northeastern U.S., it migrated fairly quickly to the South, where it has been maintained generation after generation by individuals and families who put their own stamp on the tradition.  As a result, the voices of southern singers, especially those who hail from Georgia and Alabama, are frequently regarded as authoritative by Yankee singers, many of whom came to Sacred Harp during a resurgence of interest during the 1970's.  There's a good deal of self-consciousness outside the Deep South about whether northern singings retain the integrity and "authenticity" of southern forms and customs.

This concern is understandable.  When folks in places like Massachusetts and Illinois began singing this stuff a couple of decades back, they really didn't know how the music was "supposed" to sound.  That is, until some Southerners whose families had been singing for years on end ventured northward and provided some instruction based on their own experience.  Naturally there' s going to be an acknowledgement of and respect for Southern ways of singing Sacred Harp, given that it has remained a living and evolving tradition in certain areas since the early 19th century.

However, I've seen that acknowledgement and respect manifest itself as unquestioning reverence on a number of occasions.  Not that that's necessarily that bad of a thing, but it becomes problematic when that reverence leads to caricaturization of Southern singers and sweeping, contradictory overgeneralizations about the way Sacred Harp music is sung in the South.  In the short time that I've been part of this tradition, I've heard variations on the theme "In the South...!" so many times that I cringe to think of it.  "In the South, people beat time really fast!"  "In the South, they beat time really slowly!"  "In the South, you'll get yelled at if you tap your foot when you're in the hollow square!"  "In the South, they raise the sixth in this song!"  "In the South, men wear ties to a sing!" 

In the South, in the South, in the South.  The picture of Southern singers that was drawn for me when I began singing Sacred Harp -- of stern traditionalists ready to glower disapprovingly if I led a fuging tune before 10:00 a.m. during an all-day sing -- was oddly at variance with my experience of Southerners I actually knew.  My own father, for instance.

I have discerned a tendency among some northern Sacred Harpers to view southern singers as ethnographic curiosities, quaint convervators of a revenant folkloric tradition steeped in the myth of an idealized rural communitarianism.  On a couple of disturbing occasions, I've also heard southern singers stereotyped as humorless, horn-rimmed glasses-wearing, finger-wagging xenophobes who regard women in trousers and men with earrings with the utmost suspicion and distaste.  But such stereotypes are damaging, be they of the negative or positive varieties.  They fail to take into account that Southerners are no more homogeneous or easily categorized than any other group of people.  They gloss over the fact that Southerners are white and black and Hispanic, Christian and Jewish and Muslim and atheist, liberal and conservative, gay and straight and in-between.  Most have CNN, cell phones, Yahoo accounts, PTA meetings, college degrees, and opinions about the Lebanese crisis.  They're not Mammy Yoakum or Jed Clampett.  Southerners might hold singings out in the scenic boondocks of the piedmont, but that doesn't mean that most of them live there.

I think the most important things for northern singers to keep in mind as they interact with the southern branches of the Sacred Harp tradition are the same things that are important for anyone venturing into an unfamiliar environment: respect for others and confidence in one's own integrity.  When in Rome (whether the one in Italy or the one in Georgia), it's generally a good idea to take cues from the Romans.  But just because the tradition in Rome is to beat a particular song in cut time doesn't necessarily mean that you should be afraid to beat it in four.  This is particularly relevant when you consider that a singing in Carroll County, Ga., has a remarkably different flavor from one in Fayette County, Al. -- or even from another singing in Carroll County.  Southern singings are no more monolithic than Southerners themselves.

I suppose I'm particularly sensitive to this because of my years practicing Soto Zen in America, where there are endless debates over how closely to hew to Japanese forms and practices.  When I started sitting zazen, I was one of those students who swished around importantly in my black robe, and couldn't wait until I received a Sino-Japanese dharma name, so I could swish that around importantly as well.  At one point, I believed that the more Japanese trappings a zen group affected, the more "authentic" it was.  At the other end of the spectrum were zen teachers who refused to use any Japanese nomenclature whatsoever, or even to keep a Buddha image in the meditation hall.  After a few years, I realized that it's important to balance respect for a tradition's origins with a respect for its evolution.  Doubtless there were no few Japanese zen practitioners in the 17th century who stressed about whether and how to adhere to Chinese cultural paraphernalia.

So I say go to southern singings.  To quote the sign outside Brad's Barb-B-Que in Oxford, Alabama, put the taste of the south in your mouth.    Heck, go to northern and western and midwestern singings, too.  Join your far-flung fellow singers "in a song with sweet accord," as Isaac Watts would have it.  Meet new people and eat their food.  Be respectful, be attentive, but mostly, have fun.  You're always going to run into a few sourpusses, so don't pay them much mind.  And remember to taste the fried pies. 

Farewell Anthem

In his seminal book about Sacred Harp, Buell Cobb quotes an old southern singer as saying that it's "good music to die on."  Indeed, many of the over 500 tunes in the 1991 revision of The Sacred Harp accompany lyrics that are chiefly concerned with death, dying, and the life to come.   In combination with the ethereal harmonies that characterize the tradition, Sacred Harp does seem particularly suited to sending souls forth to whatever awaits them beyond the joys and sorrows of this present world.

Yesterday a small group of us gathered at Arlington National Cemetery to pay our respects in song to the recently departed relative of a local singer and friend.  Presumably due to the number of funeral services conducted daily at the Fort Myer Chapel, the pace of the service was brisk, though not perfunctory.  Most of the allotted twenty minutes were filled with singing, punctuated by brief prayers, scripture readings, and a lovely, heartrending eulogy delivered by our singing friend, who selected the songs for the occasion. 

We sang Nashville as the ashes were borne into the chapel by a soldier from the Old Guard.  Following a prayer we sang Ortonville, and Evening Shade was sung after the scripture reading.  This was followed by Wells, and then by the incomparable Farewell Anthem.  As the remains were commended to God we sang The Hill of Zion, and Bethel as they were carried from the sanctuary.  At the gravesite under a stormy sky we sang Traveling Pilgrim, which Sacred Harpers in some areas of the South traditionally sing at interments.  After the requiem we sang Arkansas, and then closed with A Cross for Me.

More than once the coordinator of the singing was approached by friends and family members of the deceased, complimenting us on the music and inquiring if we sang as a group for different events, and whether we would sing at their church, and what were are rates, and so on.  These well-intentioned queries were met with courteous but unambivalent demurrals.  We are not a band, we are not a choir.  We are a community.  When we sing, it is neither for a fee nor for the pleasure of a well-received performance, but for each other and ourselves.  Many of us sing for the glory of God, to feel the divine Presence flow through and reverberate within voices raised up in thanksgiving and praise.

Yesterday, singing in the pouring rain among countless rows of white headstones, surrounded by the fallen of too many bloody wars, I discovered anew the reasons why I am drawn time and again into the heart of the hollow square.  When I sing each week and each month, I experience the pure and immediate pleasure of making prayerful music in concert with my dear friends and fellow singers.  But as I realized yesterday, there's more to it than that.  Singing each week and each month also prepares me to be present for those friends and fellow singers when they need it most.  To be a witness and a comfort to them in times of both grief and celebration.  Likewise, the singing helps prepare my spirit for its own times of testing.

In Mark Helprin's novel A Soldier of the Great War, a character experiences death as everything running together, "like a song."  I can't imagine a more beautiful, more redemptive, or more right way for life to end.  I hope and I pray that when my time comes, it comes for me in that manner: with everything running together like a song.  And if it does, I believe that the sound of that song will be like the ones we sang yesterday at Arlington in honor of our friend and her family.  It will be, I believe, good music to die on.

Shape note bonanza!

For everyone out there who have never sung shape-note music but are dying to hear what it sounds like (all three of you), look no further.  Pilgrim Productions has assembled a dazzling online catalog of shape-note songs in mp3 format, all available for download at no charge.

There's so much good stuff there I don't know where to start.  I would definitely recommend newbies who would like a good sense of what an "archetypal" Sacred Harp sing sounds like to check out the tracks recorded at the 150th Chattahoochee Convention, in particular New Jerusalem, Mear, and Vilulia.  Since the songs, style, and sound vary from singing to singing, region to region, it's fun to compare and contrast the Chattahoochee recording of "Mear" with the recording of the same song made by the Old Harp Singers of Wears Valley, TN.  For a sound that is quite different from both of those, listen to the prettified -- but pretty -- rendition of Walpole by Village Harmony, an impossibly cute gaggle of fresh-scrubbed New England teenagers.

I was particularly excited to learn about an Anglo/Choctaw singing in Union, Mississippi where songs from the Sacred Harp and the Christian Harmony are sung in both English and Choctaw.  According to the site, missionaries introduced shape-note hymnody to the Choctaws in the early 19th century, and the tradition has persisted to this day, complete with hymn texts written out in native language.  Listen to the hauntingly beautiful Christmas song 'Star In the East,' first in English, then in Choctaw.

Choctaw shape-note singers in Union, MS.  Photo credit: Pilgrim Productions.

There's a bunch of other cool sacred music on the Pilgrim Productions site, including blues, bluegrass, conventional choral music, etc.  I'm looking forward to browsing the other categories, but I think the shape-note stuff is going to keep me occupied for a while.  Happy listening!

Now shall my inward joys arise

A couple of days ago I was asked about the main reason people are drawn to Sacred Harp music.   Since I've only been doing it for a short amount of time, I replied that I can't speak with any real authority on the matter, I can only give the reasons that I myself sing.  But in the time since I first stepped into the hollow square, I've heard a number of theories advanced about what it is that brings people of diverse backgrounds to this tradition (or "singing cult" as a non-singing acquaintance rather uncharitably described it).   

Setting up for a sing in Georgia.

The categories below are not, as far as I know, part of any formal, academic classification system.  I just made them up out of my own head.

The Historical Preservationist Theory.  This is the notion that people who sing Sacred Harp do so to reclaim and preserve a relic of America's cultural heritage, sort of like Vintage Baseball or flintlock shooting or something. 

The Folk Revivalist Theory.  Similar to the Historical Preservationist Theory, this explanation puts Sacred Harp in the same category as, say, Morris Dancing: an ancient art form that folkies disinter, dust off, and try on for size on the grounds that it's entertainingly anachronistic.

The Spiritual Enrichment Theory.   I've heard this one from several Quakers who are also avid singers.  It's the idea that Sacred Harp constitutes a component of one's spiritual practice, a complement to the worship experience one finds in church or meeting or synagogue.  Since many Quaker meetings, particularly the unprogrammed ones, are somewhat lacking in group hymn-singing, I can definitely see where Friends who crave a more vocal expression of worship would be drawn to Sacred Harp.  It reminds me of my Zen days, when I encountered a good number of Christians who maintained that Zen practice helped deepen and enhance their spiritual lives. 

The "Community Chorus" Theory.  You like making pretty music with your mouth and you're interested in finding a choir to sing with, but the BSO Chorus went belly up and you don't feel like donning a poofy hat and warbling Thomas Morley madrigals at the local RenFaire.  It's either the Handel Choir of Baltimore or shape note singing, and you just can't stand all the melismas in 'O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion,' so Sacred Harp it is.

There is a danger in being overly reductive, especially when talking about why people choose to engage in one activity over another.  That tendency toward reductiveness is a trap of the academy that folklorists and ethnographers and the like seem to walk into fairly often, and which frustrates a lot of us postmodern historian-types. 

I'm sure that if you put a dozen Sacred Harp singers in a room and asked them why they spent weekends putting hard miles on their cars just to go sing old hymns, you'd get about 51 different reasons.  Those responses might contain all of the explanations listed above, or they might have nothing to do with any of them.  I expect that, like me, many singers are attracted to Sacred Harp for overlapping reasons, which is why when you look around the room at an all-day singing you're likely to see a Primitive Baptist sitting next to an ex-punker sitting next to a (shudder) Civil War re-enactor.

For my part, I can attest that on one level it is gratifying to participate in the continuation of a centuries-old, distinctly American folk tradition.  There's a certain thrill I experience when I call out a song that was composed by a contemporary of Benjamin Franklin, or when I chat in between songs with a person whose family has actively kept up this art form for 200 years.  The historian in me responds to that aspect of Sacred Harp singing.

And I'll admit that part of the reason I do Sacred Harp is because it is entertainingly anachronistic.  I was already into old-time and American roots music when I first heard a recording of this type of music, so a part of me finds it exciting to hook into a little-known part of American musical heritage, and to make these peculiar, somewhat eerie-sounding, Celtic-influenced noises.  As a former classical choral singer, it's also fun to have a group of other people to sing with again, even we don't generally sing for performance purposes, and the harmonies we create are far from conventional. 

The other night a couple of friends of mine and I got up to sing the song "Walpole" from the Northern Harmony at this tepid, folkie open mic night thing at Hopkins.  After sitting through several performances in which people bashed religion, sneered at politicians, and spouted a load of  twee, facile, milquetoasty junior polemics against the current war, I'll confess to some degree of schadenfreude at the shock on  the boomers' faces when they realized that we weren't singing John McCutcheon, and we weren't singing Christine Lavin, and we weren't doing a selection from Rise Up Singing.  Instead what they were hearing was 18th century, minor key, your-loving-savior-died-for-your-
sorry-backside hymnody in weird, dispersed three-part harmonies.  Sing along with that!

Freaking out the folkies at open mic night.

But if I had to choose the principal reasons I spend so much time singing Sacred Harp, I would have to say: community and spirit.

The community aspect that attracts me is not quite the same as the one that might draw me toward any other type of choral singing.  It's an element of the tradition that supports, and in turn is supported by, the singing itself.  The dinner-on-the-grounds potlucks and the post-singing social gatherings are part of it, as are the friendships that are carried on outside of singing-related activities.  But the essence of community in Sacred Harp is found in the hollow square.  It's born anew every time someone steps forth to lead one of those old, powerful songs, and the people who have gathered to lift their voices feel what in Quaker writings is sometimes described as a covering: that deep connection that transcends words and differences in background or belief. 

It's what prompts spontaneous applause from the singers after certain songs are led, and it's why people with radically different lifestyles can sit next to each other and get along just fine.   It's why one is likely to witness much more diversity of race, ethnicity, religious faith, sexual orientation, and social class at a Sacred Harp convention than in most churches, synagogues, or zendos you might find yourself in.  The community that is born in the hollow square is democratic and egalitarian.  It assumes good intentions, and is nurtured by the same vein of spirit that runs through the songs we sing.

Speaking of spirit: for some of us the overtly Christocentric, Protestant nature of the songs can be something of an obstacle.  After some five years of attending Friends meeting, I've only recently arrived at a point where I'm ready to identify myself as a Quaker.  If someone were to ask me if I were a Christian, I'm not sure what I'd say.  Many of my friends who are as deeply committed to this tradition as I are Jewish, or agnostic, or atheist.  Yet here we are, singing songs about free grace, and the wages of sin, and of being lifted to heaven on a tide of blood.  The theology that informs Sacred Harp music can be a real challenge.  But if a decade spent practicing Buddhism has taught me anything, it's to be comfortable with mystery and paradox, and to welcome that which provokes you spiritually.  If Sacred Harp is nothing else for me, it is spiritually provocative.  It's a refining fire that heats and forges and tempers the soul.  And that's what keeps me coming back.

Well, that and the fruit pies at the potlucks.

 

Life imitating art imitating life imitating...

(Originally posted June 8, 2005)

Those familiar with the shape note singing tradition know that a disproportionate number of songs in tunebooks like 'The Sacred Harp,' 'The Southern Harmony,' 'The Missouri Harmony,' and so on are named after places, in many cases the birthplaces of the composers. For instance, in 1792 Lewis Edson composed one of the loveliest tunes ever put together, set it to the poetry of Isaac Watts, and named it 'Bridgewater,' after his home town in Connecticut.  Or they can be named after biblical places, like 'Emmaus,' or after places where a composer stopped to have tea and a nosh, like 'Northfield.' *

A number of other shape note hymns take their titles from people's names, as in the case of 'Amanda Ray' (#493 in the 1991 Sacred Harp), which S. Whitt Denson named for a female relative.  The beautiful, understated tune 'O'Leary' (#501) is another example, having been composed by Ted Mercer in honor of a family of longtime singers he's friends with.

Many songs in these tunebooks, of course, have more conventional hymn-type titles: one of my favorites is E.J. King's incomparable 'Gospel Trumpet.'  You also have 'Garden Hymn,' 'I'll Seek his Blessings,' 'Jubilee,' etc.

What's weird, though, is when you find not songs that are named after places, but rather places that have been named after songs. The homepage for Bangor, Maine admits quite readily that the city was named after "an Irish hymn;" what the site doesn't say is that the hymn in question is an old shape note song. I first heard about this from Tim Eriksen, who also contends that the nearby Maine town of China was named after #163b of the Sacred Harp.

Robert Vaughn, a singer from Texas, recently posted to the shape note listserv a link to info about the town of Vilulah, Georgia. According to the town's historical marker, in 1867 a group of "pioneer settlers" met beneath a "bush-arbor" and "constituted the Vilulah Baptist Church...after the loved hymn-tune -- Vilulia in the old Sacred Harp Song Book..."

Photoby Ed Jackson.  Courtesy of the Carl Vinson Institute of Government, U. of Georgia.

It kind of makes my head hurt. If the towns of China and Bangor were given the names of songs, what were the songs named after? 'China' is pretty self-evident, but what in the world is a Bangor? And then you have Vilulah, Georgia, which was named after Vilulah Baptist Church, which was named after 'Vilulia' in the Sacred Harp, which was named after...what or whom, I cannot say.

You gotta feel sorry for the girl in class named 'Vilulia,' though.

*This is, from all accounts I've heard or read, a true thing. According to the legend, Ingalls and his wife stopped off at a restaurant in Northfield, Connecticut at the turn of the 19th century. Frustrated by the slow service at the tavern, he tweaked some words of Watts that he'd been messing around with, and sang something along the lines of, "how long, dear savior, oh how long/shall dinner hour delay..." At our monthly Sacred Harp singings in Baltimore, we always sing this version before dinner, finishing the verse with "...fly swift, ye idle servants round/and bring the fine buffet."