I want to speak now of Sacred Harp music as it is found on the page and as it resounds from a thousand singing "classes" in as many courthouses, school auditoriums, and country churches over many southeastern states on most Sundays and many "Saturdays before" throughout the year and the years. And I shall speak of it first chiefly from the casual listener's point of view. Not that the listener's judgement of this music is important. It is not. This is not listener's music. It is singer's music. Listeners at singings are comparatively few. By and large they are those sturdy country people who have grown up with this music, know it thoroughly, love it, but for various reasons prefer to listen, and this by hours on end. I shall not discuss the music from these listeners' angle. It is the casual, first-time hearer of the music that I have in mind, and I shall try to portray his reaction. For while it is not important it is interesting.
It is quite usual to hear first-time hearers say, after listening to a few pieces: "It all sounds just alike," or "It is all minor music," or "I can't hear any tune to it."
I shall not discard such criticisms as simply untrue and the result of pure ignorance. There are elements of truth and untruth in them. And I shall try to point out these elements.
Sacred Harp music is four-part music. The four parts have been composed in such a manner that each voice part is equally "eventful" and thus interesting to the singer. This is quite different from present-day usage in choral music where all voices play a role subordinate to the soprano and thus are reduced often to long strings of notes, monotonous in themselves. When the other parts are brought up to an almost equal importance with the melody, as in the Sacred Harp, this part is bound to lose a deal of the prominence which the modern ear feels it should have.
Another condition in Sacred Harp singing submerges the tune even more deeply. I refer to the practice of each harmonic part (except the bass) being sung by both men and women. This mixture of male and female voices on the same part gives Sacred Harp singing one of its distinctive qualities and differentiates it still further from the usual practice according to which the sopranos and altos must be women and the tenors must be men. The casual hearer does not like this quality; does not realize what it is due to. So he casts the music aside with the disdainful remark that "it all sounds just alike," or that he "can't hear any tune to it."
The other criticism so often heard is as to the music's being "all minor." This criticism is just not true. Fully half the songs in the Sacred Harp are major (or in the "ionian" mode) and while the rest are in varying degree minor-sounding and while many of them are cast in the "natural" minor there are few "harmonic" minor tunes.
I cannot go into a full proof of the above statement here. I shall simply say, by way of suggesting its truth, that a tune, to be surely harmonic minor, must contain the seven tones of that scale, with lowered third and sixth and with the raised seventh in full cadences. The lowered third is often met with. But the sixth is almost always omitted from otherwise minor-sounding tunes (if not from the other harmonic parts). And the seventh is nearly always sung as a lowered or natural tone, even though it may not be printed as such.
There is still another type of minor-sounding scale or mode met with here and there in the Sacred Harp. It is that scale which has the lowered third and seventh and the perfect sixth. This is what was called in olden time the "dorian mode." In its lower tones it sounds minor (due to the lower third) and in its upper reaches it sounds major (due to the perfect sixth). It has been blurred in some instances in the notation because it was confused, by those who first recorded those old unwritten dorian tunes, with what they took to be "minor." But the mode comes out clearly in such beautiful tunes as "Wondrous Love" where the printed d-flat is sung regularly as d-natural. Other songs where the perfect sixth of the dorian mode is sung though not printed are on pages 38, 74, 126, 142, 183, 211, 300, 302, 396, and 447. As far as I have been able to find, the only tune in the Sacred Harp which is not only sung in correct dorian but is printed that way, too, is "Jordan's Shore" whose sixth was corrected, in the 1911 James edition, from the earlier wrong f-natural to an f-sharp by George B. Daniel.
In speaking of leaving out or neglecting the sixth of the scale in natural-minor tunes, we are reminded of other gaps or omitted tones in these old folk tunes. The natural-minor tunes often omit the second as well as the sixth. And the major tunes often omit the fourth and the seventh. In such instances we have left, as actual tones employed in the tune a five-tone scale in its different forms—forms which are very old in the music of Europe and America and are found in the music of primitive peoples the world over. Over half of the tunes in the Sacred Harp are gapped. They are, that is to say, either five-tone or six-tone melodies. One familiar example out of the hundreds is "Plenary" (p. 162) which all will recognize as the old Scotch folk tune "Auld Lang Syne."
We must remember that the tones of the gapped scales are the basic ones historically, and that the two left out are the less important ones in melody and that they have entered our music in comparatively recent times. We must bear in mind also the fact that the fewer-note tunes are appropriate to a fewer-chord harmonic treatment. With these facts in mind we can easily understand the effect of the Sacred Harp songs on the understanding and sympathetic listener. They impress such a hearer as strong, manly music. There is no effeminate ear-tickling in the Sacred Harp songs. And this manly strength, this austerity even, may be another reason why the casual hearer, with ears tuned to modern major musical niceties, mistakes it for music that is "all minor."
There are still other noteworthy features of the Sacred Harp which demand a word of comment. Among these are the forms of the book, its pages of "rudiments," and its unique notation.
Its oblong shape (7x10 inches) is that of all singing-school manuals of its time and for a hundred years before its time. It was made necessary by the demands of the notation (one voice only on each staff) and by the demands of harmony according to which the four voices were placed one directly above the other.
The twenty pages or so of "Rudiments of Music" at the beginning of the book represent a feature brought to America from England over 200 years ago. These pages also bring to our minds the times long before individual instruction in music was available to the masses and when the "penmanship schools," the "literary schools" and the singing schools were peers. In the singing schools the one book answered the pupils' needs in helping them learn how to sing and in providing them with a collection of song.
To many, the most interesting feature of the Sacred Harp is its system of solmization and the shaped note-heads which go with it. The fa sol la mi notes are Old English. Shakespeare was familiar with them and has mentioned them in a number of his dramas. The system came with Englishmen to America in earliest colonial times and remained for nearly 200 years as the only system of sol-fa'ing in use in this country, that is, up to a little over 100 years ago when the continental European do-re-mi system was imported into our eastern cities and slowly supplanted the Old English custom. Today the fa-sol-la has completely died out in Britain; so our use of it in the south and in the Sacred Harp represents its sole survival anywhere in the world today.
The shaped note-heads, on the contrary, are an American innovation. Their invention dates from just one year before B. F. White was born. In that year, 1799, two singing-school teachers, William Little and William Smith of upstate New York, decided that a differently shaped head for each of the four notes would make the teaching and learning of singing easier. So they had types made and published a song book, The Easy Instructor, the very first one to use the four-shape notation.
The book became widely popular especially in the middle states. And while the patent notation was all but completely shunned in the northeast, it spread from one songbook to another in the southern and western regions and quickly became the only musical alphabet which the masses of the rural Americans could read.
In those rural regions where the do-re-mi system came eventually into use, the shapes kept pace with the change by increasing to seven; this is the standard notation in the southern rural song books today with the sole exception of the Sacred Harp. A clear idea of the popularity of the seven-shape notation now, 145 years after the shapes were first introduced, may be gained from the fact that the great Methodist Publishing House prints year after year more song books in shapes than in round notes.
In every Sacred Harp singing we hear echoes of old-time singing-school practice when each song is sung first once through with the notes—the words following. This fidelity to the old tradition is entirely commendable. There are but two sorts of song where the notes seem less in place in conventions: in the singing of long anthems, where the notes seem to tire the singers, to say nothing of the hearers, and in those few very fast pieces like "Union" (p. 116) where the notes, different in each part of course, become a pretty bad jangle of sound. Otherwise, the notes and the shapes are a valuable birthright without which the Sacred Harp would not be the Sacred Harp.
The casual listener is apt to sum up his opinion of Sacred Harp music by calling it simply "old-fogy." Now let's see just what this means. The word "fogy" once meant a steward or caretaker. An "old" fogy was thus a tried and trusted one who took care of such things as were worth preserving. We assert confidently that the Sacred Harp songs are those musical goods worth preserving, and that their singers are the tried and trusted caretakers, the "old fogies," of those "old-fogy" goods. "Old-fogy" songs have good company; the language we speak, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the houses we live in, the laws we obey, the God we worship. The English tongue we speak has changed but little in the past thousand years. Chaucer, one hundred years before Columbus discovered America, talked about "grouching" and "wetting ones whistle." The clothes we wear are about the same (aside from fads which come and go and from the fact that we don't make as many of them ourselves) as they have been for many centuries. The food we eat still comes in the main from our old-fogy gardens and fields as it always has; though Mr. Swift and Mr. Armour do help out a little. The houses we live in have some improvements which add to our comfort, but a room, a window, a stair, a door, a chair and a bed—the essentials—are as old-fogy as the hills. As to the laws we obey—they are as old as the human race. For over two thousand years they have remained basically the same—Roman law, English common law on down to the enactments of our own states. One law builds on the other. The word "law" means something laid down, to stay. Something very "old-fogy." The oldest and most changeless of all our institutions is our old-time religion, based on a changeless God, a changeless Jesus Christ, and the moral law which Christian people strive to obey. Few would actually call Christianity "old-fogy."
As to old-fogyism in song generally one might remark that people used to really sing such music, still do so in Sacred Harp circles. As song has been modernized, however, it is sung less and less. It is listened to, at best. And this is probably largely because for some reason it doesn't appeal to the mass of those who would like to sing. Singing is one of man's most wholesome activities. It is far better, one would think, for mankind to sing old-fogy songs than to remain silent, listen to "better" song, and let his God-sent gift of singing lapse into disuse.
I see the viewpoint of the casual hearer of Sacred Harp singing. I understand the reasons for his snap judgements as outlined above. Some of the country people themselves are inclined to agree with him. My advice to all such is like that given by "Uncle Tom" Denson at the beginning of one of his singing schools:
"If some of you don't like this music," he told them plainly, "all I've got to say to you is you'd better get out. If you stay here it's going to get a-hold of you and you can't get away."
"Uncle Tom" gives strength to my conviction that Sacred Harp music must be sung and not heard.
