Rebirth for Dead Letter

The longer I sing shape-note music, which is going on 23 years now, the firmer is my conviction that shape notes, those curious symbols of early America, can help instigate a cultural transformation. I have said so all over letters to the editor, email listservs, Facebook group pages, private correspondences, and other people’s blogs, but all to no avail. In fact, a member of one music educators’ Facebook group I joined apparently took so much affront to the idea of shape notes that he deleted my post.

Below is a 2018 letter to the editor I wrote to The Christian Chronicle, the newspaper of the Churches of Christ, trying to make the case for the cultural treasure they’re sitting on with their shape-note heritage and what good they could do the world if they would promote shape-note singing in the culture at large. No response. So, I thought I would just start a blog and publish it myself. Here it is:

Shape Notes for the Rest of Us

Hiding in the pews of the Churches of Christ is a cultural treasure of early America with which vast swaths of society were once familiar. It is those curious shapes in their hymnals and they hold the key to no less than a possible cultural shift, a singing renaissance with multiple benefits for a fractured and dissonant society. Easy to learn with much less training compared to conventional round notes, shape notes can facilitate an experience of which the great masses are unaware: the utter joy of communal a cappella harmony.

I am not a member of the Church of Christ and can probably count on one hand the number of times I have attended a Church of Christ worship service. I am, in fact, one of your renegade cousins in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). After our split at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the things our side lost was a strong tradition of congregational singing which shape notes greatly aided. Church of Christ congregations, being one of the greatest repositories of shape-note music in the world, are important heirs to that ingenious musical pedagogy and in a position to spread it.

Growing up in Disciples churches where the organist overpowered any thoughts the congregation may have had of its congregational voice, I never knew the power of joining in mass harmony until, for job-related reasons, I moved to the American South. In mostly tiny, mostly rural churches from the Carolinas to Texas, congregations are outnumbered by visitors who come together for the sole purpose of all-day singing. The most common of these singings uses The Sacred Harp, an oblong book of sacred songs that most hymnals purged long ago. These singings combine people for whom singing is worship, fellowship, heritage, culture, catharsis, fun, or any combination thereof, no questions asked.

The musical notation in The Sacred Harp predates today’s seven-note scale, relying instead on just four notes: mi, fa, so, and la. It has its own internal logic which makes total sense to the people who sing it, but is unlikely to win over your average music teacher. What could win said teacher over is the seven-shape shape-note system in Church of Christ hymnals, as well as in several other denominations and traditions, as it follows the do-re-mi relative scale which everyone learns in school (or at least from The Sound of Music!). With shape notes, people of pedestrian musical abilities or less can do what musicians train for years to do, and still many professionals cannot, that is, pick up music and just start singing it. No counting sharps and flats, lines and spaces just to calculate what the next note is—the shape kindly tells you.

Every music teacher, every chorus and chorus director, every community organizer no less should be on to this. All music written with notes can be rewritten with shape notes. If musicians could overcome their prejudice against what early in American history unfairly grew into a symbol of backwoods crudeness, they would amaze themselves with what they could accomplish. They would also help cure the pernicious lack of self-confidence to sing pervasive among Americans. The Churches of Christ, through their musicians, universities, publishers, and the very example of their members’ facility with this notation, can serve as the instigators for sharing the gift of shape notes with the rest of us. If people could join voices in song, then from experience they would want to join voices in song. People of seemingly irreconcilable differences would seek each other out just to sing and the world would be a little closer to that heavenly kingdom.