By Dean Poling
THE VALDOSTA DAILY TIMES (VALDOSTA, Ga.)
VALDOSTA, Ga.
August 17, 2007 10:22 am
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The Georgia city of Hoboken has been fundamental in keeping the Sacred Harp song form alive for decades and helping to revive its popularity in more recent years.
To commemorate this contribution, Hoboken has installed signs along all of its access roads, noting that the city has been home to Sacred Harp music since the mid to early 1800s.
Next month, the Okefenokee Heritage Center recognizes Hoboken’s Sacred Harp traditions with a program featuring the area’s Sacred Harp singers. Also, the center will recognize Dr. Laurie Sommers and Tina Rowell for their work on the center’s Sacred Harp exhibit. Sommers is a name that should be familiar to many Valdosta residents through her work with the former South Georgia Folklife Project in recording and preserving regional folk traditions as well as her performances with the Valdosta Symphony Orchestra. She is the Sacred Harp exhibit’s curator.
Though Sacred Harp has a growing following in the region, many may still not be familiar with this distinct American form of music.
Sacred Harp is a term applied to a religious singing style with roots in the 19th century starting in New England and traveling south mainly via the Appalachian mountains to northern Alabama and Georgia.
In Sacred Harp singing, singers form a square with each side representing a different part of four-part harmony, so that one side is the female alto section; another, the male bass section; another side, male and female treble section; and a fourth side male and female tenor section. Using the hymnal, each section sings the appropriate bars of music using the musical scale.
For the opening, the lyrics are not sung. Instead, the singers voice the note on the scale which has led to some people referring to Sacred Harp singers as “fa-so-la” groups. “Fa-so-la” being sounds on the vocal musical scale. The Sacred Harp singers perform the opening with their voices in a fashion similar to a church organist playing the verse instrumentally before the choir sings the lyrics. Once the Sacred Harp singers “sound out” the song, they then sing the lyrics and verses.
The Sacred Harp music form essentially died out several decades ago, with few exceptions in pockets of the South such as Hoboken, where it has been passed along from generation to generation. The Hoboken Sacred Harp Singing Community performed a few years ago in Valdosta.
“The first documented leader of Sacred Harp sings around Hoboken was Lazarus Dowling, who returned from the Civil War and began teaching singing, and leading sings,” according to the Okefenokee Heritage Center. “There is no documentation of Sacred Harp singing prior to this time, but it can be supposed that shaped-note singing was practiced in the area since 1821 when a local Primitive Baptist church was established about four miles southwest of Hoboken. The church, named High Bluff Church, still exists today and is an active house of worship and singing.”
Dean Poling writes for The Valdosta (Ga.) Daily Times.
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• Sacred Harp
The Sacred Harp celebration.
When: 6:30 p.m., Sept. 15.
Where: Okefenokee Heritage Center, Waycross.
Admission: Free.
More information: Call (912) 285-4260.
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