TOGETHER IN harmony

Sacred Harp singing just might be the most beautiful music you've never heard. Grab a pew and a cardboard fan, and listen.

Before you meet the singers, you hear the voices. Their broad, powerful harmony, unaccompanied by instruments, has a primitive, visceral quality. It's the music of plank floors, cardboard fans, and dinner on the grounds, of windows raised to the open air and voices raised to God.

Perhaps more than any other music, Sacred Harp is a shared experience. You can't play it on a piano or sing it by yourself. To really get it, you have to sit down on a roughhewn pew, share a hymnal with someone who learned these great old songs before they learned their multiplication tables, and work your way around to singing your heart out.

This music began in England centuries ago, as a way to teach harmony to people who couldn't read music. Sacred Harp hymnals use shaped notes, each shape representing a different tone on the scale-hence the nickname fasola singing. Singers face each other in the traditional "hollow square" and take turns leading hymns, which they call lessons, barkening back to the popular singing schools of yesteryear.

Alabama native Buell Cobb is an authority on Sacred Harp and an enthusiastic member of the singing community. He chuckles when he remembers one woman's response to her first exposure to the music: "She said, 'I can't believe y'all have been doing this without me!' "

"It draws people from every walk of life, who probably would have never met under any other circumstances," says Don Clark, who organizes the annual singing and quarterly services at Mount Pisgah Primitive Baptist Church in Stroud, Alabama. Don grew up with Sacred Harp. His wife, Karen, a lifelong "folkie," discovered it later in life. "We've made good friends from all over the country," he says.

Though Sacred Harp migrated to New England first, it found a lasting home in the rural South, particularly Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. In some areas, individual families have played a pivotal role in perpetuating the music. If you saw the movie Cold Mountain, you heard some of the South's Sacred Harp community, recorded at Liberty Baptist Church in Henagar, Alabama.

One of the legends of Sacred Harp is the late African American singer and composer Judge Jackson of Ozark, Alabama. His daughter Pauline Jackson Griggs explains the difference between gospel and Sacred Harp, both of which were part of her childhood: "Gospel singing has lots of spirituality to it. It makes you move. Of course, Sacred Harp is more solemn. I like gospel singing, but I love Sacred Harp. I could sing Sacred Harp all the time-if I had the breath.

"We're praising God with our own vocal chords," says Pauline. "It's just like we're talking to God through a song. Just like 'Amazing Grace.' We kinda pull that song out when we sing it: Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!' And the more we say it, the deeper it rhymes within our hearts."

Copyright Southern Progress Corporation Sep 2006
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