I Belong to this Band, Hallelujah: Faith, Community and Tradition Among Sacred Harp Singers

Team Members/Contributors

Laura Rebecca Clawson Princeton University

About this dissertation fellowship

In recent years, scholars have given increasing attention to lived religion, focusing on how the Christian tradition is instantiated in concrete communities. At the same time, Wuthnow (2003) has argued that music and art have a great deal to do with the continuing vitality of American religion. My dissertation examines a tradition in which religion is lived and sung much more than it is spoken or written; in which centuries-old Christian hymn texts and tunes are, rather than being performed for passive audiences, sung by active participants embedded in the networks of caring and support that make up local communities. As communities are faced with change, the deaths of specific communities in particular or of community in general are often predicted, and Sacred Harp singing is not exempt from this. Its death has been predicted many times over the years, and yet it has persisted and spread outside its traditional home in the south. This surprising endurance and adaptability is suggestive of its importance as a pathway to better understanding community formation and survival.

Sacred Harp singing is a relatively little-known tradition of Christian four-part harmony singing that has existed as a living tradition in the southern U.S. for over 150 years and which has undergone a revival in many other areas of the U.S over the past twenty to thirty years. Because Sacred Harp singing is not a performance medium, but is participatory, practiced by groups of singers in which there is no set membership or audience and because, in contrast to genres such as gospel and folk, it is almost wholly non-commercial, it provides a unique opportunity to consider the power of music as a shaper of community and of spirituality.

I draw on participant observation in four Sacred Harp singing communities. Two—Sand Mountain and West Georgia—are in the South and overwhelmingly composed of lifelong singers, while two—Chicago and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul—are in the North and equivalently composed of newer singers. In each area, there is a different relationship between the act of singing from The Sacred Harp and regular religious worship: In the more rural and remote area of Sand Mountain, several churches continue to use The Sacred Harp as a hymnal in their regular services in addition to having held annual singings for up to 100 years, while in West Georgia, churches do not use the book as a hymnal but have similarly longstanding traditions of annual all-day singing. In the northern cities, by contrast, few singers worship together in church and there are no such longstanding relationships between churches or singers and Sacred Harp singing. These contrasts provide an excellent opportunity to investigate the formation of religious community, and I find that Sacred Harp singing raises a number of questions about congregations, music, and spiritual practice that have been previously unexplored.

Sacred Harp singing has spread regionally and the new northern singers have developed distinct regional cultures and relationships to southern singing and singers, while some southern communities have remained strong and others have experienced a decline. New singers have perpetuated some traditions while altering others, a process that may be accelerating with the inclusion of two Sacred Harp songs in the major film Cold Mountain. These processes have not been adequately covered by any of the existing studies; my study will capture this regional variation and provide a more up to date analysis of the changes in the Sacred Harp tradition and the communities formed around it.

Image Title Year Type Contributor(s) Other Info
  "'I Belong to this Band, Hallelujah': Community, Spirituality and Tradition Among Sacred Harp Singers" 2007 Dissertation Laura Rebecca Clawson