Traveling Home is a compelling account of how the vibrant musical tradition of Sacred Harp singing brings together Americans of widely divergent religious and political beliefs. Named after the most popular of the nineteenth-century shape-note tune-books which employed an innovative notation system to teach singers to read music Sacred Harp singing has been part of rural southern life for more than 150 years and has recently attracted new singers from all over America. Blending historical scholarship with wide-ranging fieldwork, Kiri Miller presents an engagingly written study of this important music movement. Kiri Miller is an assistant professor of music at Brown University and the editor of The Chattahoochee Musical Convention, 1852-2002: A Sacred Harp Historical Source book.
Surely, some of you remember singing out of those shaped-note hymnals at Church some time ago. I grew up on the shape notes found in the Jimmie Davis hymnal, signing with fire and points, but that was the way we did it. It was a rural church, and indeed, in West Virginia, we had them too. Shape Notes. Told us what to point. What to highlight. How to sing.
Even for those of us who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.
Anyway, I am reading this book for review, and since it is one of my favorite types of music, I thought I might start to talk about it.
For those of you who may be interested, you can download songs in this genre (for a fee of course) from Amazon.