An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 3 | SOUTHERN AND FRONTIER DEVOTIONAL MUSIC 69

authorities and away from God. On the other hand, music centered on praise

emphasized conviction and purity of heart over moral improvement. The pur-

suit of edifi cation by musical means became a driving force in the churches and

meeting houses of the urban Northeast, matched by the vigor with which evan-

gelical revivalism’s music of praise reached out to “plain folk” in the remote cor-

ners of the young republic.

SINGING PRAISES: SOUTHERN AND FRONTIER

DEVOTIONAL MUSIC

In 1933 George Pullen Jackson, a New England–born professor of German at

Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, published a book—White Spirituals

in the Southern Uplands—about a remarkable practice he had encountered among

“plain folk” in the region. Gathering on weekends, groups of Southerners staged

all-day “singings” of sacred music, and they brought their own books: oblong

volumes of psalm and hymn tunes, fuging tunes, and anthems set mostly for

four-part chorus with the melody in the tenor voice. They seated themselves

according to voice part—treble (soprano), counter (alto), tenor, and bass—in a

rectangle with open space in the middle. Into that space stepped a succession of

singers from the ranks, each leading the group in two or three pieces. Typically,

before adding the words to a piece, the group would sing the notes on four syl-

lables: fa, sol, la, and mi (a form of solm ization, as described in the box on page 72).

Jackson, who found the singers’ note-reading ability astounding, learned that

most had attended singing schools. They tended to vocalize at full blast, paying

little heed to voice quality and making no attempt to blend—but with no audi-

ence in sight, such things didn’t seem to matter.

While the singing promoted by the New England reformers always included a

human audience, which it tried to please and edify, singers in Jackson’s Southern

tradition made music to glorify God; theirs was an attitude of praise. According

to their understanding, the power of the music and the absorbed concentration

they brought to their singing made it worthy of the recipient, no matter how

it sounded. Neither self-awareness nor an audience played any role, for when

human judgments of musical quality began to be made, Jackson warned, “at that

moment, this singing of, for, and by the people loses its chief characteristic.”

Conversations at the singings he attended helped Jackson understand what

these gatherings meant to the singers. “Every time I go to one of these singings,”

one veteran confi ded, “I feel t hat I a m attend i ng a memor ia l to my mot her”; when

one of her favorite pieces was sung, it was “as if heaven itself hovers over the

place.” Pleasure in making music was also part of the attraction. But in the end,

the spiritual environment seems to have left the deepest impression. Many of

the people imagined heaven as “a place where they will meet again those beloved

singers who have gone before, and sing again with them, endlessly.”

SHAPE NOTES AND SOUTHERN HYMNODY

Jackson’s research revealed these singings to be the tip of a historical iceberg.

Rather than keeping pace with religious and musical change, people in the

Upland South—which includes the Shenandoah Valley and parts of Maryland,

all-day singing

music of praise

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