An Introduction to America’s Music

74 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR

from this world only after singing the melody of Sounding Joy, which he had

composed to words by Isaac Watts.

W hite seems to have achieved eminence in the Upland South as a typical fi g-

ure, not an extraordinary one. A 1904 account of The Sacred Harp’s history indi-

cates that he and King relied on their friends’ and neighbors’ taste in singing: the

collection was shaped by gatherings in and around White’s house, where people

would “sing the songs long before they were published in book form.”

The Sacred Harp emphasizes old favorites over new pieces. Familiar numbers

in the third edition (1859) include Old Hundred, Daniel Read’s Sherburne,

and folk hymns such as New Britain and Plenary, the latter a setting of Watts’s

funeral hymn “Hark! from the tombs a doleful sound” to the tune of “Auld Lang

Syne.” The third edition also contains Wondrous Love (LG 3.2), a Southern folk

hymn whose secular antecedent was a song about the pirate Captain Kidd.

Wondrous Love shows a kinship with camp-meeting songs in that it repeats

short phrases of text. The poetic form is unusual, scanning as 12.9.6.6.12.9, cor-

responding to none of the typical meters of versifi ed psalms or hymns. The fi rst

stanza’s many incantations of “Oh! my soul!” and “for my soul” to the same short-

short-long rhythm creates an exclamatory, awestruck mood. Just as important

is the way the melody begins: with the fi rst fi ve words sung three times, each

time at a higher pitch, and climaxing on the highest note of the piece precisely

at the midpoint. The tenor melody’s downward movement in the second half

of the piece balances the fi rst half’s upward trajectory. That shape allows the

text’s main argument to unfold over a whole stanza, while hammering home,

measure by measure, an emotional response to the miracle of Christ’s sacrifi ce.

By the stanza’s end, only one phrase—“that caused the Lord of bliss”—has gone

unrepeated.

Also striking is the way the voices move, often locking together in parallel

fi fths and octaves, forfeiting the independence of line featured in earlier New

England psalmody. But if the effect of intertwining voices is lost, a rugged power

is gained, especially in the second phrase (repeated as the last phrase), where

every interval between tenor and bass except the fi nal one is a fi fth.

The impact is heightened by the full-throttle sound of the voices, as heard in

folklorist Alan Lomax’s 1959 fi eld recording of an all-day singing in Fyffe, Ala-

bama. The vocal production—at maximum volume, with no apparent attempt to

blend the voices into a more conventional choral sound—is characteristic of the

Southern Sacred Harp singing tradition. Also part of the tradition is the practice

of male and female voices singing both the tenor melody and the treble (soprano)

line, so that each part is doubled at the octave.

Wondrous Love endures as a part of a singing tradition that distilled the atti-

tude of religious praise into an untutored, heartfelt utterance.

Southern shape-note hy mnody, or Sacred Harp sing ing, as it has also come to

be known, has proved to be remarkably long-lived—displaced but never obliter-

ated by later musical fashions. Even as George Pullen Jackson was “discovering”

Sacred Harp singing in the 1930s, the composition of new tunes in this rugged

folk style was very much alive. Indeed, one of the fi nest tunes in later editions of

The Sacred Harp is Soar Away, an inspired blend of folk hymn and fuging tune

written in 1935 by A. Marcus Cagle of Villa Rica, Georgia.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a resurgence of interest in

shape-note hymnody, with local and regional groups springing up throughout

LG 3.2

text and melody

harmony

vocal style

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