“Like Pieces in a Puzzle”: Online Sacred Harp Singing During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Sacred Harp singers the world over gather weekly to sing out of The Sacred Harp, a collection of shape-note songs first published in 1844. Their tradition is highly ritualized, and it plays an important role in the lives of many participants. Following the implementation of lockdown protocols to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, groups of Sacred Harp singers quickly and independently devised a variety of means by which to sing together online using Zoom (“zinging”), Jamulus (“jamzinging”), and Facebook Live (“stringing”). The rapidity and creativity with which Sacred Harp singers developed ways to sustain their activities attests to the strength and significance of this community of practice, and in this article I describe each modality and provide an account of how it came to be developed and widely used. As a participant-observer, I completed extensive fieldwork across these digital sites and conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 other singers. I found that online singing practices have reshaped the Sacred Harp community. Many singers who did not previously have the opportunity to participate now have access, while others have lost access due to technological barriers or lack of interest in online activities. At the same time, geographical barriers have disintegrated, and singing organizers must make an effort to maintain local identity. A stable community of singers has emerged in the digital realm, but it is by no means identical to the community that predated the pandemic. I also identify the ways in which online singing has proven meaningful to participants by providing continuity in their personal and communal practice. Specifically, online singing allows participants to access and celebrate their collective memories of the Sacred Harp community, carry out significant rituals, and continue to grow as singers. While no single modality replicates the complete Sacred Harp singing experience, together they function “like pieces in a puzzle” (as one singer put it), allowing individual participants to access many of the elements of Sacred Harp singing that are most meaningful to them.

"Your network bandwith is low"

My contribution is a personal account about my experiences with online participatory music-making in the first few months of the pandemic. As an old-time fiddler, I anchored a local Zoom jam and attended a Zoom-based music camp. As a Sacred Harp singer, I participated in regular singings via Facebook Live.

Sacred Positions: A Personal History of Blindness and Singing

This narrative essay explores a blind singer's experience with church singing, a cappella competitions, and Sacred Harp singing. In it, Emily K. Michael maps the conflicts between pervasive disability narratives and audience expectations, as well as the evolving challenges of each genre. Michael discovers that audiences carry the alluring myth of a cure across genres and venues. She comes to privilege the cooperative power of Sacred Harp singing, where personal talent and conventional rehearsal give way to immediacy and welcome. Sacred Harp singing helps Michael transform her own destructive beliefs and the problematic stories of blindness she has encountered.

A Mixed-Methods Study of Affective Difference in the Old-Time Music Revival in Appalachian Virginia and North Carolina

This dissertation examines differences in affective response to music among players of Appalachian old-time music, primarily in Appalachian Virginia and North Carolina. While a small number of musicians with family or community links to previous generations of old-time musicians in this area still play the music today, the majority of contemporary old-time musicians come to old-time as cultural outsiders. Cultural, socio-economic, and political differences are easily observed when these two types of musicians come in contact with one another, but significant differences also exist in the domains of musical behavior and experience between insiders and outsiders. These differences likely serve as a catalyst for the animosity that some insider musicians have towards certain outsider musicians, yet they have been mostly unaddressed in the extant research on the old-time revival. Under ideal conditions, and usually in jam sessions, some old-time musicians (usually outsiders) claim to experience altered states of consciousness that can be variously understood as “flow,” “trance,” or “strong experiences with music.” Other musicians (usually insiders) deny ever having such experiences, yet they are heavily invested in this music and derive great pleasure from their involvement with it. The sound and structure of the music in these jam sessions seems to be more important to outsiders in facilitating these altered states than are extra-musical factors (e.g., the historical significance of a tune), which tend to be more important to insiders’ experiences. To investigate these observations in a more systematic way participant-observation and semi-structured interviews were combined with empirical survey data on personality and demographic factors, musical preferences, and affective response to music in order to examine relationships between these factors. These data together suggest that there are significant and widespread differences in the way that certain subgroups experience old-time music and that, for my participants, Openness to Experience and related constructs correlate strongly with differences in musical behavior and experience. The dissertation concludes with suggestions for how this mixed method approach could be used to investigate other phenomena of interest to both ethnomusicologists and music psychologists, such as the parallel revival tradition of Sacred Harp singing.

“Singer’s Music”

With a turbulent musical fabric of open and parallel fifths, high-decibel vocal production, and a grassroots DIY organizational structure, Sacred Harp singing has been described variously as “Gregorian Chant meets Bluegrass” and “Punk Rock Choral Music.” With historical roots in rural singing schools of New England and the American South, singing from The Sacred Harp tunebook remains a living, growing, and vital musical multinational subculture that operates without auditions, rehearsals, or performances. This chapter discusses participatory and social factors of music outside the presentational frame, the ideas of serious leisure, and philosophical notions of musicking and musical praxis to illuminate ways in which Sacred Harp singing stands apart from the concertizing traditions of Western art music and choral performance.