In today’s Appalachian Moments podcast we’ll talk shape music in the mountains and beyond…
Some folks say they couldn’t carry a tune even if they had a bucket, but if you can Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti like Julie Andrews showed us in the Sound of Music, then you’ll be close to singing your way into history via shape notes.
Shape notes were invented in the late 1700s as a way to make sacred music accessible to non-musicians and gained much popularity throughout Appalachia.
The popular hymn Amazing Grace can trace the original music back down the Scottish family tree, but the words we know today were written about the time shape note singing began and thus this new method of singing became forever entwined with that song of hope, faith and saving grace.
Upon first glance the different shapes: triangles, ovals, diamonds and squares, might look complicated, like another language, but the creation was based on simplicity and mass appeal. When early Europeans settled on the frontier they carried with them the ultimate melodic instrument: the human voice, often referred to as the Sacred Harp.
Written music or hymnals were non-existent, and you didn’t find too many fiddles or banjos in church. Shape note singing allowed congregations to sing in 4-part harmony with very little training.
At shape note singings the participants would form in a hollow square design, with people sitting in the section their part featured and facing inward so they could hear and see one another.
Music historian Gavin Campbell stated that shape note singings or singing conventions, held in between planting and harvest, provided generations of participants an important framework within which to understand their relationship to one another and to God. The gatherings also included the 3 P’s: preaching, potlucks and the pursuit of the opposite sex.
In today’s sacred worship world, shape notes could still have a place somewhere between the modern hymnals that are still written for musicians and the praise and worship songs that often display the words on a huge screen but without any musical notation. The modern songs are sometimes referred to as the 7-11 songs…seven lines, sung 11 times. Wouldn’t shape notes help solve that? The power of shape notes is that anyone could pick up a brand new song and have a congregation sing it in 4-part harmony very quickly, how powerful is that?
Call me old school, and in fact that’s true, in that growing up we used the 1928 prayer book and a hymnal that wasn’t far behind. I recall several powerful hymns as a child that did not require a projector or a large screen. To me, it doesn’t get better than a pipe organ and Martin Luther’s nearly 500 year old classic “A mighty fortress is our God.”