Usually held in the summer months and typically lasting for two weeks, these singing schools were conducted by graduates of similar schools or one of the several southern normal schools. In the days before movies, radio, and television, singing conventions were heavily attended.Ĭommunity singing schools provided a constant supply of competent singers and persons capable of leading congregational singing. They took place at periodic intervals, from monthly to annually. These audience-participatory events were organized at community, regional, and eventually state levels. Singing Schools and ConventionsĪlthough seven-shape songbooks found wide use in southern rural churches, their widest distribution was among singers and attendees at singing conventions. Many Georgians are still writing songs for the songbooks that are used at present-day singing conventions, but they have to look to other states for a publisher. Publishers also promoted their songbooks by organizing quartets who traveled around the South, singing the publisher’s songs and selling the songbooks in which the songs appeared. Many of Georgia’s early southern gospel singers were also composers of songs set to the seven-shape notational system and popularized by their fellow singers. Consequently there was a demand for songwriters. To enhance sales, publishers included in each new book several previously unpublished songs. It has been estimated that by 1930 some 200,000 of these songbooks were sold each year in the rural South. Typically, seven-shape songbook publishers placed on the market one or two books per year. The last of these to cease publication was Henson, who retired from the business in 1967. The most influential publishers in Georgia were J. With the Ruebush-Kieffer conglomerate as a model, publishing companies, musical periodicals, and normal schools that were dedicated to the furtherance of seven-shape note singing sprang up throughout the South. There, the seven-shape advocates Ephraim Ruebush and Aldine Kieffer established a songbook publishing house, inaugurated a musical periodical championing rural music and the seven-shape note system, and opened the Virginia Normal Music School, the country’s first educational facility devoted to the teaching of the seven-shape music system. Image from Wikimedia.Ī driving force behind the seven-shape system among rural singers arose during the 1870s in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The tune "Windham" as it appears in The Sacred Harp, 1911 edition. Aikin of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, published his Christian Minstrel, a songbook employing a seven-shape system, and many rural singers began following the new system. Inspired by European musical practices, some American musicians wanted to adopt a seven-shape system. It has survived as a defining characteristic of Sacred Harp singing, sometimes referred to as “fasola” singing.
The first system that achieved a significant following consisted of four shapes.
The motivation behind the shape-note system was the belief on the part of music instructors that the use of distinctive shapes to identify the musical notes fa, sol, la, and mi would make it easier for singers to sight-read, thereby improving the quality of their singing. The innovation in music that led directly to the emergence of the southern gospel trend was the introduction around 1800 of shape-note musical notation. Southern gospel music, whose performers and audiences are primarily white, is to be distinguished from the popular sacred music of African Americans, which is usually referred to as Black gospel music, or simply as gospel music.
Georgians have been in the forefront among the composers, publishers, and performers of music characterized by close harmonies and a strong religious lyrical content. Over the years Georgians have made significant contributions to the creation and survival of southern gospel music.
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