Aside from the Holy Bible, the book found oftenest in the homes of rural southern people is without doubt the big oblong volume of song called The Sacred Harp. It is not a church hymnal, though its contents are religious songs. Most of those who use it and know it well, if asked what sort of music it was, would answer: "Well, I reckon it's just Old Baptist song." Not a bad answer, this, despite the probability that the book was never used in Old or Primitive Baptist church services. But ask such people why it is called Old Baptist music, if the Baptists made it themselves or if they adopted it from elsewhere, and when, and where, and how, and why—and their answers, if any, would probably be vague and various.
This little book is intended to give answers to such questions. For the hoary Sacred Harp is now (1944) just a hundred years old, and it is therefore quite appropriate that those concerned with the remarkable volume should give some thought to its past.
The search for the beginnings of the types of song embodied in the Sacred Harp takes us back in time to a little before the birth of our United States, into the last years of the American colonies, or about 200 years ago. All Baptists were then Old Baptists. They were also country folk in the main and very much opposed to, and opposed by, those other religious denominations which centered in the few cities and towns along the eastern coast and were linked with the government. But the Baptists were growing fast in those days, perhaps because they were "the outs," the religious "leftists." And as they grew in numbers they grew also in their antagonism to all control either from the government or from any centralized religious (even Baptist) authority.
Freedom! Complete freedom of religion was the Baptist watchword. What wonder, then, that in the Revolutionary War for freedom from Britain, the Baptists played an extremely important part. What wonder, then, that after the war was won the Baptists who had suffered so grievously at the hands of the magistracy should be in the vanguard of those who saw to it that the new constitution of the new United States should guarantee them that freedom which they had so long striven for and so long been denied—the freedom to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience.
The new free nation was born. The Baptists found themselves not only free but inspired with unbounded zeal to develop their manner of worship independently, without any contamination from the older established religious orders.
One taint could come, they felt, from their singing the songs of the governmentally-linked denominations. The Baptists had not given much thought to group song in earlier times. Some congregations had not sung at all. So while Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Roman Catholics had sung psalms (perhaps because of this) the Baptists remained quite cold to psalm singing. But song was in the air. They had to sing something. So they decided, quite reasonably, to develop their own body of song. And this is just what they went about doing.
It was while George Washington was still alive that the country Baptists—then the fastest growing and soon to become one of the largest denominations—began to develop what we know now as Old Baptist music. The way they went about it was this: Their preachers collected a lot of hymns which had been written by Baptists or by those others like Isaac Watts, John Cennick, and John Newton whose religious ideas were much like those of the Baptists. These hymns they published without tunes in books like the Dover Selection, Dossey's Choice, Mercer's Cluster, The Baptist Harmony and Lloyd's Hymns. For many, many years these tuneless books were all they had and all they needed. Indeed, they didn't use even these as we do our hymnals now-a-days, with a book in every seat. Probably the preacher had a copy. But as for the rank and file, they depended on the preacher to "line out" the hymn and "hist" the tune, a practice which has not yet entirely died out among some groups, notably the negro Baptists. So from the point of view of the singers, the songs—and certainly their tunes—deserved the name "unwritten music"; and that is what they were called generally.
What was this unwritten music? What tunes did the preachers "tone" and everybody sing without ever having seen such melodies in notation? The Sacred Harp with its scores of Old Baptist tunes gives the answer. But it was not the first tune book of such music. The very first collection of that sort appeared forty years before the Sacred Harp was born; and, strange to say, it appeared among the backwoods Baptists of New England. It was Jeremiah Ingalls' Christian Harmony, published in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1805. And still other books, before the Sacred Harp and after it, added to our store of that unwritten music, now written, with the result that we have today some 600 different recorded tunes of this type.
We have the tunes. But where did the Old Baptists get them? For nearly twenty years this question has bothered me. I can answer it now with a degree of certainty: By and large the Old Baptist tunes found in the old books of the Sacred Harp sort were and are melodies of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. They are airs which have been sung for hundreds of years in those parts from which most of our forefathers came, and were brought by our forefathers to these shores—unwritten music, but fixed in the memory of those forebears.
But these remembered tunes did not have religious texts. They had been sung usually with worldly words—old love songs or ballets such as "Barbara Allen," "Lord Lovel," "The Bailiff's Daughter," "The Wife of Usher's Well," and "Captain Kidd." And many of the remembered tunes, fiddle or bagpipe melodies for example, had no words at all. To such known and loved tunes as these Baptists began to sing their equally beloved religious poetry. This was the way Old Baptist music came into being.
It may make the process of "spiritualizing" the older worldly songs clearer if I gave an example. Take "Wondrous Love" in the Sacred Harp. Its tune and its stanzaic structure were borrowed from the worldly song about the famous pirate, Captain Kidd. The link between the two songs may be seen clearly if one sings the "Wondrous Love" tune to the following words:
My name was Robert Kidd, when I sailed, when I sailed,
My name was Robert Kidd, when I sailed;
My name was Robert Kidd, God's laws I did forbid,
So wickedly I did when I sailed, when I sailed,
So wickedly I did when I sailed.
The "Captain Kidd" tune was already a very old and widely sung melody when it was picked up nearly 250 years ago and associated with the tale of the wild pirate who was executed in England in 1701. There were several forms of the melody, all of which had nevertheless a clear family resemblance. The "Wondrous Love" tune is one. Three other forms are "Mercy's Free" (Original Sacred Harp, p. 337), "Saints Bound for Heaven" " (Original Sacred Harp, Denson Revision p. 35), and "You Shall See" (Jackson, Down-East Spirituals No. 272).
One by one the sources of the Old Baptist songs in the worldly folk airs have been found. The search for the sources has been made easier by three circumstances: (1) Those who have been interested in recording the worldly folk songs have been many; (2) they began their labors much earlier than I did mine; and (3) they have recorded, in the Old Country and this, a very large number of tunes which I have been able to compare with their close kindred, the religious folk melodies.
So the answer to the questions, what the Old Baptist tunes were and where they came from, is sure. They were not to any extent "composed" tunes, those made by individuals. They were folk tunes, made and made over by ages of singing by the race from which we all have sprung. These tunes with their comparatively recently associated spiritual texts ("Wondrous Love" is probably not more than 125 years old) were sung lustily and without need of book or musical notation.
While religious music of the sort we have been discussing was developed first largely by the Baptists, as we have explained, they couldn't hold it. It was too good, too infectious. By Andrew Jackson's time it had spread also to other denominations. William Caldwell made this clear in the preface to his Union Harmony of 110 years ago (Maryville, Tennessee, 1834) He declared there that "Many of the tunes which I have reduced to system and harmonized have been selected from the unwritten music (italics mine) in general use in The Methodist Church, others from the Baptist and many more from the Presbyterian taste." And when we examine Caldwell's tunes we find them to be largely the same as those in other country books of the time and in the Sacred Harp of ten years later.
As the Old Baptist music spread into other denominations, it spread also into the all-denominational camp meetings. And in that environment it underwent a change which gave the world a new variety of the same music, one which became known as the "chorus song" or the "revival spiritual song," a sort which may be recognized by the much repetition in the texts through refrains and choruses. This song type is represented in the Sacred Harp by "The Morning Trumpet," "I Have a Mother in the Promised Land," "I Belong to That Band," "Old Ship of Zion," "Old-Time Religion" and many others. In this form few of the chorus songs were really Old Baptist; and this simply because that denomination leaned originally toward predestination and thus did not adopt the revival method of growth widely.
The chief practical reason for the development of the repetitive revival spiritual song was simply the combination of a great desire to sing with an equally great scarcity of books to sing from. We all know how more people will sing and sing louder when they are not bothered with a lot of verses which they can't or won't learn. And it was due to just these conditions that "The Old-Time Religion" and hundreds of other textually easy songs sprang from the big revivals which had their beginning in southern Kentucky around 1800 as camp meetings and quickly spread with the revival movement over the land. From these facts it is easy to see also why the negroes were quick to adopt precisely this simple variety of the white man's songs and to make them their own to such an extent that they have been looked on widely, although erroneously, as of negro origin,—as "negro spirituals."
I must mention also another kind of music. This kind was neither Old Baptist nor camp-meeting music nor even folk music. I refer to the "fuguing tunes" and their close relatives, the "odes and anthems" which are found in profusion in the Sacred Harp as well as all country song books in America for a hundred years before the Sacred Harp appeared. Where did the fuguing tunes come from? And how did they happen to get into the books of Old Baptist music? To answer the first question properly we must go back rather far.
As far back as 200 years before Sacred Harp, that is 300 years ago, groups of singers in Europe and the British Isles had their great fun in singing a number of tunes at once. They called it "polyphony." Another sort of song-fun, one growing out of polyphony, was to have one voice start a tune and other voices come in one at a time, beginning the same tune a bar or two apart. This was somewhat like the older "round," but as it became stylized the different voices soon came together in good harmonic fashion and ended that way. This song structure became known as the fuguing tune form (from the Latin word meaning appropriately to flee). It became widely popular in Britain and later also in the singing schools of the American colonies and remained so till some time after the Revolutionary War. William Billings' fuguing tunes, many of which are to be found in the Sacred Harp, are typical of the compositions of scores of New England musicians which filled the numerous singing school song books of the northeast.
Now for an answer to the second question: how did the fuguing tunes happen to get into the southern books of Old Baptist music? This is how it came about: The Old Baptists, as we have seen, had no written-musical tradition of their own. So when they went about the establishment of such a tradition, that is, of putting their own songs into notation, nothing was more natural than that they should adopt for its style of presentation the forms already established, the singing-school forms. So the Old Baptist music, never originally much more than a single tune affair, was dressed up in harmonic clothes—three and four parts. And once the Old Baptist singers found themselves and their songs in the singing-school atmosphere, nothing was more natural than that they should take over into their own collections also a selection of the most popular fuguing tunes, odes and anthems.
It was the backwoods Yankee, Jeremiah Ingalls, mentioned above as the first man to publish Old Baptist music, whose Christian Harmony contained the first mixture of that music with the singing-school fuguing songs.
It is somewhat hard to understand why this sort of song mixture, soon to be found in one book after another in the middle states and in the south, should have appeared first in New England where the Ingalls book was the first and last of its kind. The phenomenon is best explained perhaps by the fact that while the movement of combining the two kinds of music was a general one in the American countryside, there were in the northeast strong influences coming from the cities which were antagonistic to both sorts and which tended to alienate even the country people from them, while in the other parts of the land, these home-grown varieties of music were received with open-armed friendliness.
