The old stand-bys are dying off. This is the way of the world. But it bereaves the living and fills them with doubts as to the coming years. Will there be other tireless and excellent teachers like "Uncle Seab" and "Uncle Tom" Denson? Will southern family and neighborhood groups keep on singing as of yore? We don't know the answers.
But there is one fact which may comfort lovers of the old-time sings: The songs themselves will not die. For musical people over the entire United States are coming to know them as they were never known before, and are coming to a recognition of their beauty. This recognition and the rebirth of interest in the songs have followed the appearance, twelve years ago, of the present author's book, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, in which the Sacred Harp music and singing institution were portrayed.
The new interest in this music has been shown chiefly by leading American composers and choral leaders. Among the new apostles of the old lore are Henry Cowell, Carl Buchman, Ellie Siegmeister, E. J. Gatwood, Don Malin, Melville Smith, John Powell, John Jacob Niles, Harvey Gaul, Hazel Gertrude Kinscella, Annabel Morris Buchanan, Hilton Rufty, and Charles Bryan. All of these have made and published excellent arrangements of Sacred Harp melodies in form suitable to modern choral groups. And some of them, like Henry Cowell, have made settings patterned consciously "after the sparse harmonies of the early American folk hymn," patterned, that is to say, after such harmonies as we find in the Sacred Harp.
Randall Thompson, director of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, has interwoven Sacred Harp melodic themes with the music of his cantata, "The Peaceable Kingdom." Van Denman Thompson has done the same in his "Evangel of the New World" as has also Lewis Henry Horton in his "The White Pilgrim." Melodic material from the same source has formed the background of symphonic works by John Powell, Charles Bryan and Roy Harris, and of an organ fantasia, "Garden Hymn," by Arthur Shepherd. And Virgil Thompson wove several Sacred Harp tunes into his screen score for "The River," a government-sponsored picture.
A goodly part of the renascence has centered around the fuguing tunes. Jeremiah Ingalls and his peers, pushed aside for over a hundred years by the Better Music Boys, by everybody, indeed, but the Sacred Harp folk,—are now coming into their own. Prominent among the revivers of fuguing tunes are Miss Kinscella, Mr. Buchman, Clarence Dickinson, Mrs. Buchanan, and Joseph W. Clokey. Together they have published dozens of the old "fugues" only slightly altered from their eighteenth-century forms.
An indication of the widening popularity of old American song as found in the Sacred Harp may be seen in the one piece, "The Poor Wayfaring Stranger." It has been variously arranged and published. One choral arrangement of the beautiful melody, made by the present author and the late E. J. Gatwood, has enjoyed a sale of over ten thousand copies. And for years a noted ballad singer who calls himself "the wayfaring stranger" has broadcast a weekly radio program from New York and has used this song as his theme.
When Sacred Harp singers learn of all this enthusiasm for their old-time songs, shown by practically all leading native American men and women of music and extending to all parts of the land, they will, I feel, have reason to be hopeful as to the future of their beloved art.
