70 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, and
Georgia, but not the coastal areas—had preserved a tradition dating back to New
England in the 1700s.
With historical perspective, the Southern practice looks more like a trans-
formation than a simple survival of the Northern practice. Psalmody had been
sung in New England by rural people, city dwellers, college students, and Cal-
vinist churchgoers of all ages, singing in the name of art as well as praise. In
the Southern Uplands, however, hymnody—in effect, the psalmody of the
nineteenth century, when hymn singing had eclipsed psalm singing—took root
among rural plain folk with stern views of religion and generally old-fashioned
ways. And perhaps nothing marks Southern hymnody as a countrifi ed tradition
more clearly than the musical notation in which it circulated.
Many Southern tunebooks used the four-shape notation that Little and
Smith’s Easy Instructor had introduced in 1801. Shape notes, although they origi-
nated in the Northeast, were used there for only a short time, instead taking root
in the Southern singing traditions, where for two centuries they have helped
countless singers learn to sing accurately at sight from printed music books.K The practice of shape-note
singing remains strong today.
Here, a participant leads singers
arranged in the traditional square
at a Sacred Harp convention in
McMahan, Texas, in 1998.K The anonymous British
psalm tune Mear, as
printed in shape notes in
William Little and William
Smith, The Easy Instructor
(Philadelphia, [1801]).shape notes172028_03_063-085_r3_ko.indd 70 23/01/13 8:12 PM