Latest update of 1844 American songbook reflects new generation of ‘Sacred Harp’ singers

Atlanta – More than 700 singers convened in Atlanta this month to celebrate the latest edition of the songbook at the heart of one of the country’s oldest Christian music traditions.

The Sacred Harp, first published in 1844, contains hymns and anthems written with “shape notes,” designed to aid sight reading. Unlike in standard music notation, each note is a triangle, a circle, a square or a diamond. Each shape stands for a syllable, fa, sol, la or mi, and each syllable corresponds with different pitches.

The convention was the largest Sacred Harp singing in living memory and culminated seven years of work to revise the book. Hundreds traveled long distances to sing the 113 new songs.

“It’s the only time in most of our lifetimes that we’re going to see a gathering like this,” said composer Angharad Davis of Sydney, Australia.

Sacred Harp is centered in the American South, but singers came from 35 U.S. states, three Canadian provinces, Australia, the UK, Ireland and Germany. They sang in tenor, treble, alto and bass sections, without instruments. The so-called “Sacred Harp” is the human voice itself, said alto Lucy O’Leary.

All the songs express Christian faith, with mortality as a prominent theme. “Hallelujah” uses words from 1759: “And let this feeble body fail, / And let it faint or die; / My soul shall quit this mournful vale, / And soar to worlds on high.”

No denomination controls Sacred Harp. Baptists, Quakers, Catholics, Episcopalians, Mennonites, atheists and others sing together, and all are welcome.

For almost two centuries, each new generation has updated the book, which now includes songs by 49 living composers. (Before the latest revision, that number had dwindled to five.)

But the tradition’s vitality did not feel as secure when the last revision was made, in 1991.

Judy Hauff, who composed four songs in the book, discovered Sacred Harp in the mid-1980s. Back then, almost every singer had gray hair, she told the convention.

“I would stand there listening to the roar coming off of these senior citizens and thinking, ‘What would this have sounded like when they were in their 20s and 30s and 40s?'” Hauff said.

At the time, she’d thought she’d never find out.

“We never dreamed we would see the likes of this,” Hauff said through tears, gesturing to the crowd. It included hundreds of singers under 50 — with black, brown, blonde and even purple hair — alongside the old-timers.

Lauren Bock of Atlanta, who composed three songs in the new book and served on the nine-person revision committee, said the increase in young singers is partly attributable to the 2003 film Cold Mountain, which featured Sacred Harp, and to YouTube.

As the pool of singers shifts younger, it also contains more people of color, LGBTQ+ people and non-religious people.

The book’s new composers reflect that. José Camacho-Cerna of Valdosta, Georgia, the book’s first Latino composer, is 27.

“I was in a punk band, I know it’s kinda crazy. That’s something that attracted me to [Sacred Harp], I just thought it was very metal. The 1800s metal,” he said.

Camacho-Cerna is also engaged to marry a man, and he’s among the first openly LGBTQ+ composers.

He grew up in a Pentecostal church that did not accept LGBTQ+ people, and he was surprised to meet so many at his first singings at age 19. Eventually, he said, he started to feel that Sacred Harp people only cared about the music, not other singers’ sexual orientations. It gave him the courage to come out.

“Sacred Harp was a big push for me to say ‘Ok, let’s rip the band-aid off. I can be who I want to be — who I am, and stop hiding myself,” he said.

Composers led their own songs at the convention, standing in the middle of the square of singers and beating their arms up and down to keep time. Camacho-Cerna composed his song, “Lowndes,” after the death of his grandfather in Honduras. Hearing it “in all its glory” for the first time was “life-changing,” he said.

“Without trying to be weird, I could die happy,” he said. “Knowing that I have a legacy, you know?”

Deidra Montgomery of Providence, Rhode Island, the first Black composer added to the book, started work on their song, “Mechanicville,” in 2010.

“Leading my song in a giant class of singers, turning to bring in the different sections in the fugue and seeing all these people I’d encountered in various phases of my time as a singer was euphoric,” Montgomery said.

During recesses, singers approached composers for autographs.

Diversifying the list of composers was not an explicit goal for the new book, said Bock. In fact, she and her fellow revision committee members analyzed songs without knowing their authorship. The new composers simply reflect the current community, she said.

“The people who submitted songs are the people who sing out in the world,” Bock said. “They’re pretty markedly different even from who sang in 1991.”

On the second day of singing, Bock’s daughter Lucey Karlsberg, 8, led “Hallelujah” with other children.

Later, Karlsberg sang with others at the grave of Benjamin Franklin White, who compiled the original songbook. When the next revision comes out, Karlsberg will likely be in her 40s. Asked if she wants to contribute a song, she had no doubt. “I will do it!” she shouted.