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Shape-Note Singing Lesson Addresses the Following Teachers Bring to Their Students the Educational Power of Standards: Museums and Other Community Resources

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Shape-Note Singing Lesson Addresses the Following Teachers Bring to Their Students the Educational Power of Standards: Museums and Other Community Resources OCT 00 hape- ote inging esson GRADES 3-8 SUBJECTS I Music Publication of this issue of Smithsonian in Your I History Classroom is made possible through the gener- ous support of the Pacific Life Foundation. ontents 3 Essay 10 Lesson Plan Keeping the Spirit Alive The purpose of Smithsonian in Your Classroom is to help A Shape-Note Singing Lesson addresses the following teachers bring to their students the educational power of standards: museums and other community resources. It draws on the National Standards for Arts Education (Music Content Smithsonian’s exhibitions and programs—from art to zool- Standards) ogy—to create classroom-ready materials for grades 3–8. I Singing alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music Each of the four annual issues takes an interdisciplinary Reading and notating music approach to a single topic. The Smithsonian invites teach- Understanding relationships between music, the ers to duplicate the materials for educational purposes. other arts, and disciplines outside the arts Understanding music in relation to history and You may request an audiotape, large-print, culture braille, or disk version (Mac or PC) by writing to National Standard for History the address listed on the back cover or by faxing your I Regional folklore and culture contributions that name, school name, and address to 202-357-2116. Please helped to form our national heritage specify the issue you are requesting. Photo Credits: Cover: ©Miriam A. Kilmer Pages 4, 7, and 13: ©Miriam A. Kilmer Page 5: William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan Pages 6 and 8: ©Lauren Piperno/Kingston Page 9: Birthplace of Country Music Alliance Music in cover image used by kind permission of Hugh McGraw of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company. 2 usic education in eighteenth-century America was, in one respect, like music education today—there was precious little of it. New Eng- tenor, bass, alto, and treble— land, however, had the singing schools of itinerant face each other to form a “hol- teachers, some of whom were the first American low square.” Each singer has a composers. They wrote their own choral settings chance to “lead a lesson” by standing in the center of the for sacred texts, music that was boldly melodic but square, selecting a song or set often quite inconsistent with rules of harmony. of songs, and beating the “Nature is the best Dictator,” declared the best tempo with up-and-down known of them, William Billings of Boston, a strokes of the arm. The singings are sometimes all-day sometime tanner and municipal stray-hog catcher. affairs, with a break for a big Nature gave way to European refinements in potluck meal called “dinner on church music reforms early in the nineteenth cen- the grounds.” tury, but by then teachers had carried the work of The term “lesson” is a ves- tige of the singing schools. Billings and the other “tunesmiths” to the western Some singings begin with an and southern frontiers. In the South, especially, actual lesson, an introduction this Yankee music took hold, as did the medium in to the shapes and a first which it arrived, shape notes. opportunity to join one’s voice to the antique harmonies of the songs. We intend this issue The shape-note method of singing from of Smithsonian in Your Classroom as something written music first appeared in a book called like that. The appeal of the music cannot be The Easy Instructor, printed in 1801. It used four fully understood without singing it, and learn- syllables for the seven notes of the scale and gave ing to sing it is still as good a way as any to each syllable a distinctive note head: a triangle begin associating the sight of a note with its for fa, an oval for sol, a rectangle for la, and a sound. If your students are able to follow the diamond for mi. Before the Civil War, southern steps of the lesson plan—led by you or a music publishers sold hundreds of thousands of shape- teacher at your school—they will be the latest note songbooks, the most enduring of which inheritors of a long history that they will help was The Sacred Harp, first printed in 1844. keep alive. Revised editions are still used today in pockets There are dozens of shape-note recordings of the South where “Sacred Harp singings” are in print. Some of the earliest were made by an unbroken tradition, and by people across the Folkways Records, which the Smithsonian country who have come to the tradition in the acquired in 1987. To supplement the issue, last couple of decades. Smithsonian Folkways has put sound clips of The new singers observe the practices of three songs on a Web site: southern Sacred Harp groups. The four parts— 3 spaced harmony, with intervals of fourths and fifths rather than thirds, which one singer likens to “a picket fence with a few of the boards missing.” Some of the early southern works were based on tunes from the camp-meeting revivals that began in Kentucky and Ten- nessee around 1800. The revival movement was in reaction to nearly everything we associate A shape-note singing in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with eighteenth-century rationalism, and the reaction was extreme. In her 1832 travel book Domestic Manners in America, Frances Trollope, outhern ccents mother of the English novelist Anthony Trol- Sacred Harp songs were never accompanied by lope, described a firelit camp meeting as harps. The reference may have been to the harp Nathaniel Hawthorne might have described an of David, the psalmist, or to the human voice as assembly of the possessed. an instrument. The singing is a cappella, and the “About a hundred persons came forward, emphasis seems always on the music produced by uttering howlings and groans so terrible that I the singers. Each song is rehearsed by a singing of shall never cease to shudder when I recall them,” the syllables, which can be as passionate as the she recalled with a shudder. “They appeared to rendition of the text. drag each other forward, and on the word being Most of the peculiar characteristics of the given ‘Let us pray,’ they all fell on their knees; music date back to the New England composers. but this posture was soon changed for others The melody is carried by the tenors rather than that permitted greater scope for the movements the upper voices, and the singers sometimes of their limbs; and they were all soon lying on double the parts: a few tenors might join in on the ground in an indescribable confusion of the highest line, but sing it an octave lower; heads and legs.” sopranos might sing the tenor line an octave This new kind of worship, boiling up from higher. William Billings prescribed this “con- the hearts of the people, was accompanied by junction of masculine and feminine voices” as a the people’s own music—familiar dance and means of giving extra body to the sound. ballad tunes turned into hymns. The shape-note But in the South the music became, in standard “Wondrous Love,” for instance, many ways, southern. By 1815, the shape-note derived from the ballad “Captain Kidd.” In the locus had shifted to Virginia’s Shenandoah Val- original, the pirate recounts his crimes and ley. The composers there favored a widely depredations: 4 I murdered William More “growth of two separate, hybrid traditions, which As I sailed, as I sailed. were similar enough to permit a back-and-forth movement of songs, but sufficiently different to The adaptation kept only the framework of keep this exchange a stimulating one.” melody and meter: The first collection of African American com- positions was The Colored Sacred Harp, published What wondrous love is this! in 1934 by Judge Jackson, a farmer and business- Oh, my soul! Oh, my soul! man in the wiregrass country of southeastern Alabama. The works are basically in keeping with The distribution of the songbooks followed the New England models, but the parts are some- the general movement of the Scots Irish—the times arranged into a call and response, a form Protestants of Northern Ireland—most of whom brought from Africa, and the singers take great came first to southeastern Pennsylvania and then liberties in embellishing the notes, as in older settled in the Appalachians. In Sacred Harp spirituals and newer gospel music. singing there are still Celtic traces: tones held like the drone of a bagpipe; leaps between the raditions and onventions notes of gapped scales, but with the lilt or the Sacred Harp singing is a very deliberate tradi- burr flattened into a twang. tion. Groups meet at a set time once a month, After the Civil War, the books passed into or as often as once a week, and attend annual the hands of African Americans, who made the regional singing conventions, where they observe music equally their own. As folk music collector businesslike rules of order. A chair presides, call- Alan Lomax wrote about southern music in gen- ing each member up to lead, and a secretary eral, the isolation of the South fostered the records the selections of songs. Just before the The frontispiece of William Billings’s 1770 songbook The New- England Psalm-singer was engraved by another revolutionary figure, Paul Revere. 5 break for the meal, there is a “memorial lesson,” rather than too simple. As a Tennessee singing- a time to honor singers who are ill or have died school teacher put it, “What man gives two of since the last gathering.
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