101 Random Songs and Hymns in Shape Notes

Two posts ago in this blog, I mentioned my collection of random songs in shape notes, but once I reached 101 songs, that seemed like an auspicious number to compile into one document, which I’ve made available here as a PDF. All the songs are ones that spoke to my heart in one way or another. Often a flood of emotions would roll over me as I entered the notes and typed up the words. My wife would be in the next room and say, “Don’t cry.” “I’m not,” I would answer as I wiped tears off the keyboard. If you were to sing any of these songs and only a tiny bit of those emotions sprung up as you sang them, I feel our hearts will have understood each other. I’ve avoided songs with copyright problems, so feel free to download and share with as many people as you can get to sing with you.

Some people reading this will be familiar with shape notes and some won’t. If you’re in the latter category, there are lots of sources that explain shape notes. I’ll just mention my own explanation under the heading “The logic of shape notes” in an article I published here. If you’re in the former category, you may have such a strong association between the notation and the particular repertoire written in that notation that using shape notes to sing anything outside of that repertoire might feel odd, even scandalous. But shape notes themselves are just a device, a technology that works just as well for any tonal music as it does for 200-year-old Protestant hymns. Fortunately, history saw fit to see that certain tiny churches in remote reaches of the rural American South would preserve that technology from the early American period to the present. One thing important to me which I kept from the old-book shape-note tradition is putting the melody in the tenor line for most of the songs. I think it brings out the harmony better that way, but beyond that, I’m steeped in the old-book democratic ethos of no one part standing above the others, which is literally what “soprano” means. There are, however, a few songs that come out a non-Western tradition or are originally Western songs but so heavily influenced by their native culture that I didn’t want to mess with them other than to put them into shape notes. I did feel comfortable putting the melody in the tenor for most of the Japanese songs and the one Korean song because they’re both influenced by Western music, or in some cases of the Japanese songs, are actual European or American songs that Japanese sing in Japanese.

I know it sounds grandiose and self-important, but I’ll risk it anyway to say that I’m on a mission to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, that is, in impassioned a cappella group harmony. In my opinion, the greatest failing of the field of public music education is that it consciously banished shape notes from its curriculum from the start, leaving to atrophy the public’s general aptitude and appreciation for singing. Society is all the poorer for it. After I dispel all the banal arguments music educators present against shape notes, I’m left with one argument that I can’t dispel: Short of religious music, there’s nothing written in shape notes to teach. While this collection has a portion dedicated to religious music, it also has a sizable chunk of secular music from which to start. From there, I intend to transpose more secular music into shape notes and would encourage others to do the same. The more that people start to sing music in shape notes, the more that music might become available in it, converting a vicious cycle of shape-note poverty into a virtual cycle of shape-note abundance.

As will be apparent from the table of contents, I arranged the songs in loose chronological order by the categories of traditional songs, songs of peace and solidarity, religious music, Japanese songs (including non-Japanese songs currently or once popular in Japan and with Japanese lyrics), and songs in other languages. The last category has one song each in Croatian, Hawaiian, Korean, Russian, and Solomons Pidgin (dialect of the Pidgin spoken throughout Melanesia). Some songs overlap two or more categories. The category just for Japanese songs owes to the fact that my mother was Japanese, that I now live in Japan, and that I have loved Japanese songs since my teenage years. The songs in non-roman script—Japanese, Korean, and Russian—have roman letters appended to their respective scripts. Of course each language, whether it uses roman letters or not, has its own sound system, but a minimum amount of research will tell the determined singer how to pronounce the words passably enough to sing them. It should be reassuring to know that all of the other languages are far more regular in their orthography than the notoriously convoluted English spelling. Under the non-English songs, I have also included English translations, rough as some of them may be.

As a last note to shape-note singers more comfortable in the four-shape system of the Sacred Harp, I put everything in the Aikin system of seven shapes, first, because it’s a little easier for me than four shapes, but second, because most people are already familiar with the seven note names and the idea of octaves if from nothing other than the Doremi Song. Regardless of the relative merits of four shapes versus seven, I think the jump to shape notes would be less high for people if it could incorporate what they already know. However, if four shapes are more comfortable with whatever singing community you’d like to try this with, the software I used to create this sheet music can also transpose everything into four shapes as well (or, for that matter, into round notes). It is called MuseScore and is freely available at the MuseScore website. To convert any song into four shapes, you would need to download its MuseScore file and open it in that program. The conversion process isn’t quite self-evident, but if anyone is interested, leave a message and I can walk you through it.