The Southern Harmony Influence

For many, putting away the beautiful color and décor of Christmas can be a sad time.  It’s a shame that the Feast of the Epiphany is no longer treated as it used to be as one of the great and festive seasons on the Church calendar, for its message of Jesus bringing Light to the world can certainly brighten a gloomy mood! You can hear it in the music of the season.  Isaiah’s prophecy of people walking in darkness until the great Light appears has been paraphrased and set to at least two hymn tunes in The Hymnal 1982.  There’s the ubiquitous John Mason Neale who tells us about the sages who “…by light their way to Light they trod…” And, of course, there are various star of wonder tunes, not the least of which includes “Star in the East” whose tune is taken from The Southern Harmony.

William Walker

The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion tunebook was compiled by William Walker and first published in 1835. During the nineteenth century, this was the most popular of the hundreds of singing-school tunebooks, and today, many of its harmonies are represented in other hymnals and songbooks.  In our own Episcopal hymnal, six tunes are taken directly from The Southern Harmony, while many other hymn tunes are represented—albeit not with those William Walker harmonies. Still, each of those six tunes is very familiar: Star in the East for Epiphany, Middlebury a sweet hymn sung during Easter, Holy Manna appears twice—once for Martyrs and once in Christian Responsibility, and Wondrous Love, Restoration, and Charlestown are the other three.

William Billings

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, especially during the antebellum years, singing schools were popular centers for informal instruction in reading music.  These schools developed out of a controversy in the method of congregational singing.  Because of the general public inability to read music, singing in a congregation was limited to singing melodies learned in the oral tradition—known as “the usual way.” But New England reformers, led by Massachusetts ministers John Tufts and Thomas Walter, felt it important that music be sung true to the composer’s wishes, which entailed reading the music.  This method became known as “regular singing.”  William Billings, often referred to as “the father of American Choral Music,” was the first to form one of these singing schools in Stoughton, MA. He was a composer whose style of music was heavily influenced by both American folk traditions and the fuguing tune style of the West Gallery tradition in Britain. (A fuguing tune is similar to a canon where two to four voices overlap each other singing the same tune, but end in unison. New Jerusalem, composed by Billings’ contemporary Jeremiah Ingalls in 1796 with words from Isaac Watts, is an example of a fuguing tune.) Billings’ style of music composition became the forerunner of today’s “singing” traditions.

While the folk traditions lend themselves to learning in “the usual way,” the fugue structure is benefitted by “regular singing.” Thus, master singing teachers developed methods for easing the learning of sight reading music.  To that end, shape note music and “fa-so-la” syllable training was born. Shape note singing is often referred to as Sacred Harp singing, so named for the tunebook published by White and King in 1844.  Today, most of the “singings” in America use the Sacred Harp book. The Sacred Harp, like The Southern Harmony, uses the four-shape system, or “fa-so-la-mi” syllables.  

When a song is begun, the singers sing the tune by the syllables first and then sing the words of the verses.  This is reminiscent of the days of the singing schools when the object was to teach sight reading.  By the twentieth century, shape note singing was almost extinct, but for a few churches in the South that still used shape note hymnals.  A revival (in urban settings, of all places) for American folk music traditions brought back shape note singing and “singings” can now be found all over the country.  “Singings” are not rehearsals or performances; they are gatherings of singers who meet to sing the old Sacred Harp songs.  While the tradition rose out of religious settings and the music are hymns, psalms and anthems, “singings” are entirely secular these days. If you’ve never heard shape note singing, your first audition of it may be quite shocking!  The tone is very raw and earthy and the volume is LOUD. 

It’s a curious and circuitous route that hymns in our hymnal take.  A tune that derives from a catchy folk tune sung in the public houses of Britain during the days of the Restoration migrates to America. The tune is adapted and set with a psalm and becomes familiar as a hymn to Colonists in New England churches.  It is collected into a hymnbook compiled for use in the Deep South and given all new harmonies. It virtually disappears in the Northeast until it is collected, complete with new harmonies, into a songbook whose purpose and audience is secular. As the tune once again fades into near extinction when the secular purpose no longer holds public sway, a new revival takes note and the tune is included in a modern hymnal, but given credit as originating from a Southern songbook. And so it will continue.