Shape-Note Singing
Shape-note singing is a creature of the American colonial and frontier periods, although its roots reach back to medieval times. In Ozark and Arkansas folk tradition, four-shape and seven-shape notation systems were used by people in social settings, in “singing schools,” and in church congregations.
Shape-note singing spread from Colonial New England and took root across the Appalachians, into the frontier South and as far west as Missouri and Texas. All across these regions, “singings” were held, ultimately using books that were mostly variations of William Walker’s 1835 Southern Harmony and Musical Companion. These books, including the Sacred Harp, the Christian Harmony, and regional favorites such as the Missouri Harmony didn’t represent an academic approach to singing; they simply captured a folk tradition in print.
Untrained singers could sing voice parts and fairly complicated arrangements using this approach, and singings became important social events that included “dinner on the ground” and opportunities for young women and young men to interact. Traveling “singing masters” would hold schools, often promoting their own systems of notation.
The shaped-note scale probably known to the greatest number of people now has seven shapes, each one representing a step on the “diatonic” scale that is the basis of almost all music in western civilization, including Ozark traditional music. As shown below, “do,” (pronounced “dough” or “doe”) with its triangle shape, is placed on middle C. But in practice, the leader will simply sound out “Do” at whatever pitch seems to best suit the congregation for a given song. The other steps of the scale fall into place in relation to the placement of “Do,” and the singers take their tones from that relationship – not from lines and spaces.
The seven-shape scale is known to many church congregations that use “old-fashioned” hymnals and to followers of “convention” singings which use piano accompaniment and songs in the tradition of Albert Brumley, the Stamps-Baxter Quartet, and others. The older traditions are still observed in many places across the American South, with no instrumental accompaniment and, most often, using a scale in which the seven steps are represented by only four shapes, with fa, sol, and la used in two repeated cycles.
Sacred Harp, the most popular of these traditional styles, uses these four shapes. In recent decades some of its followers turned evangelical, spreading the tradition throughout the United States. Sacred Harp singings can now be found in most major American cities, from Boston to Los Angeles, as well as in the United Kingdom and even in Poland, at this writing.
The program of the 1941 Stone County Folkways Festival, held at Blanchard Springs, Arkansas, featured singing by both 4-shape and 7-shape groups.
A monthly Sacred Harp singing is held at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale, Arkansas, and an annual Sacred Harp singing is held in Harrison, Arkansas. In Mountain View, Arkansas, a shape-note group gathers monthly at the Ozark Folk Center, and an annual “Shape-Note Gathering” brings singers from North Carolina to Oregon together at the Folk Center each year on the weekend following the Fourth of July weekend.
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