Fasola, the Original Article

Artist and historian Linda Griggs happened on my writing about the Sacred Harp tradition and wrote a note to say that 2 p.m. this Saturday, March 19, there will be a singing at Convention Hall in Asbury Park as part of festivities surrounding the Smithsonian Institution's "New Harmonies" exhibit. Sacred Harp is the title of one of the most popular songbooks in the tradition known as "shape-note" or "fasola," a widely practiced amateur congregational singing. The songbook has been in continuous publication since 1844 and many of its songs originated in earlier published volumes. The singing is free and anybody can join in to try it out.

Griggs researched an article that was published in the Asbury Park Press. She found that the writers behind one of the original fasola songbooks were most likely from New Jersey--Hopewell, specifically. The style, she writes,

was nearly wiped out in the north by the mid 1800's
by Lowell Mason and the "Better Music" movement. It persisted in both
White and Black churches in the South and is one of the roots of
bluegrass and country. Johnny Cash, the Louvin Brothers and Hank
Williams all sang Sacred Harp.

Lowell Mason, whose family owned a piano-selling business, was interested in promoting a stricter European style music education and degraded the amateur singing as "buckwheat notes." But the tradition survived and as Southerners moved North to factory jobs in the 20th Century, they brought the shape-note singing back with them. Sacred Harp sings could still be found in New Jersey into the 1970s. The 1990s saw a revival of interest in the style and there are now regular Sacred Harp singings in Montclair and Princeton.

The Smithsonian's "New Harmonies" is on display at the Asbury Park Public Library, 500 First Ave., through April 17 and features photos, videos and memorabilia related to American roots music.

Griggs, who has a studio on the Lower East Side in New York City, is a fascinating character with her hands in many different historical and artistic projects. Her own artwork makes use of texts, drawn directly onto the canvas.. The style seems inspired both by common artwork of early 20th Century rural America and by "outsider art" which often deals in simple expressions of mystical experience.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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More Sacerd Harp Singing

The clip I put up in the last post was intended to show that the power of this style lies in the singing, not necessarily in the polished sound. But my friend Jean on Facebook took issue with that logic, pointing out that as a writer on classical music, I should be taking pains to show this vital American tradition in its best light.

With that in mind, here's a video clip of a Sacred Harp Singing Convention where the singing is of a little bit better quality. Still it hopefully gives a clear example of the power of what is essentially an amateur, participatory style.

Notice there is no audience apart from the singers themselves! This is no rehearsal. They aren't training for some future goal or opportunity. This is the complete experience. A bunch of people in a room singing together. That's it.



And here is a professional choir singing a tune by early American Sacred Harp composer William Billings. The difference in performance quality is clear and the music is revealed as even more beautiful, if less visceral.



--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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Sacred Harp Recording

As promised in Sunday's Music Notes column in the Asbury Park Press, here's an mp3 file of three live versions of the song "Jordan" from the Sacred Harp songbook. The first is a large amateur group singing in solfeggio--also known as the fasola system. The second is the same group singing the same song but with the actual words instead of the "singing school" syllables. The last is a quartet. Pete Brady, a member of the quartet, called the D-Major Singers, created this mp3 and sent it to me. He writes: "The first two are from a tape called 'Showers of Blessings,' from the 1995 Garden State Sacred Harp Singing Convention. The last is from one of the D-Major Singers CDs."

In the quartet especially you can hear how the tenor line--the high male voice--has the melody, while the bass and the upper voices add harmonies.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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More on 'Shape-Note'

Last week's Music Notes column in the Aug. 29, 2010 Asbury Park Press on Sacred Harp singing mentioned that the "singing schools" style went out of fashion in the Northeast in the beginning of the 19th Century, but was preserved in the South and Southwest. The songbook The Sacred Harp from which the style takes its name, was published in Georgia in 1844 and has never gone out of print.

A couple more things need to be added to that history to give a more reasonably complete picture. First, the style died out in the North because it was considered vulgar. Had the more educated elite in the South had their way, it would have died out there too.

The taste of the time presumed that culture of any real value had to come from Europe. Anything made here was cheap imitation. As the economies in northern cities took off, those place shunned the second-fiddle, homemade culture in favor of the imported variety.

Shape-note was built on European traditions, but it was nothing like them. It was rowdy, democratic and required no education--not even an initiation or a profession of faith--to participate. You showed up, you were in. You learned the songs by singing them.

The areas that embraced this music and never let go were, at first, the wilder parts of the U.S., populated by working men and women who necessarily put less emphasis on education and refinement--Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. Undoubtedly many of the folks in those parts envied the rich and would have followed them if they could. But as a rule, they were not rich. And to a very real extent, their lives literally depended on their ability to revere far simpler pleasures.

Here I could stretch the point to emphasize the empowerment provided by shape-note singing, the vitality of a congregation that needed no leader and the fear that such unmarshalled power could have aroused in the leaders of America's frail religious, economic and political societies. Probably there is some truth in that.

But maybe we don't need to go there. Maybe it's enough to say that this music, powerful for unlearned, represented the image of the dumb, backwoods hick that the socially elevated and "cultivated" Americans were hoping to banish.

As a side note, this history can't help but remind me of the current suspicions--by Tea Party-ists and others--about the secret society of "elitists" of New York and the Northeast forcing the rest of the country to live according to its standard. While it may be empty rhetoric now, that bad blood goes way back and has some basis in truth. It seems only slightly ironic that the North's great centers of education--New York, Princeton, Boston, Philadelphia--now embrace shape-note singing as a living American tradition. But with great centers of wealth and learning now located in the South and the West and the tracks of commuting paths blackening the continent's vast distances, all such purely geographical distinctions have to be taken as trivial.

And so to the second point: shape-note is a living tradition. Each generation since that of the first New England composers has added to the body of music that congregations perform. While the style is tightly constrained, it is not simply a recreation of the past--not a "living history" of the usual type, not merely a reenactment. The music is ever-changing. Each performance is really alive in the here and now--to which composers respond with even more here and more now.

I would love to see this tradition spread to every community--to hear the sweat and toil, the aggravations and indignities of common life expressed in full-voiced song challenging all the powers that be, to have political anthems and moral arguments composed and sung by opposing congregations in boiling shape-note battles. To have politicians answer the congregations in call and response. And if the candidate can't sing--bring on the hook.

Why not.

--C.
http://www.theandofone.blogspot.com