An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 3 | SOUTHERN AND FRONTIER DEVOTIONAL MUSIC 71

Thanks to a mixture of regional, class, and religious prejudices, musical

reformers soon branded shape notes a crutch needed only by ignorant rural

singers. That attitude did not stop their spread, however, especially in regions

where the reformers’ message did not reach, such as New York State, New Jer-

sey, Pennsylvania, and the Ohio River Valley. After 1810, as the frontier pushed

westward, new shape-note collections began to appear in cities and towns far-

ther and farther from Boston and Philadelphia. And while favorites from New

En gland at fi rst dominated the shape-note repertory, new tunes by local compos-

ers were also welcomed. The new pieces tended to emphasize the very features

of New England psalmody that the reformers strove to eliminate: stark “open”

sonorities, alternating with the harmonic collisions that could arise when each

voice goes its own separate way. Ananias Davisson, the Virginia-born composer

and compiler of Kentucky Harmony (Harrisonburg, Va., 1816), the fi rst shape-note

tunebook printed in the South, argued that such dissonances “answer a simi-

lar purpose to acid, which being tasted immediately before sweet [i.e., the open

sonorities], give the latter a more pleasing relish.”

Southern hymnodists were not the only composers to add to the sacred rep-

ertory. In 1805, Vermont composer and compiler Jeremiah Ingalls published The

Christian Harmony (Exeter, N.H.). Inspired by the musical practices developed in

the camp meetings of the Second Awakening, Ingalls fi lled his tunebook with

folk hymns, in which religious words—many from the Baptist and Method-

ist preachers who led the wave of revivalism—were set to secular tunes. One

such hymn combines a tune called Innocent Sounds with words by the En-

glish Methodist Charles Wesley, relating how timid worshipers have let the devil

Kentucky

Harmony (1816)

Jeremiah Ingalls

K The Upland South

embraces the higher

elevations of several states

and is defi ned by culture

and history as much as by

geographical features.

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