Sacred Harp hymnwriters and composers
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The Sacred Harp is a shape note hymnal, originally compiled in 1844 by Benjamin Franklin White and Elisha J. King in Georgia and used to this day in revised form by Sacred Harp singers throughout America and overseas.
The music of the The Sacred Harp is eclectic in origin, and can be roughly grouped into the following categories of songs (listed chronologically).
- a few very old songs of European origin
- songs by the New England composers of ca. 1770-1800, sometimes referred to as the "First New England School". The best represented such composer is William Billings.
- songs from the period 1800-1844, written as the center of participatory sacred music shifted geographically from New England to the rural South. A well-known song from this period is "Idumea", by Ananias Davisson.
- from roughly the same period, a group of folk tunes converted to multipart hymns, a practice at which William Walker excelled.
- songs by Southern composers from White and King's own singing community, centered in Georgia and Alabama
- camp meeting songs
- new songs: The practice of composing new Sacred Harp tunes was never abandoned, and many of the songs in current editions date from the 20th and 21st centuries. They are written in the style of earlier work.
The words of Sacred Harp music tend to be older. While some composers wrote both tune and lyrics for their songs, a very frequent practice was (and is) to rely for words on the work of earlier, mostly English, hymnodists. The composer would select hymn lyrics that metrically fit the tune. The lyrics of Isaac Watts were used for this purpose more than any other.
[edit] Chronological list
The following is a list of the hymnwriters and composers of The Sacred Harp, arranged chronologically by date of birth. Entries are annotated with "C" for composers, "H" for hymnwriters, and "CH" for composer/hymnwriters.
- Samuel Crossman (1623-1683) (H)
- Isaac Watts (1674-1748) (H)
- Philip Doddridge (1702-1751) (H)
- Charles Wesley (1707-1788) (H)
- Joseph Hart (1712-1768) (H)
- Benjamin Beddome (1717-1795) (H)
- Anne Steele (1717-1778) (H)
- John Cennick (1718-1755) (H)
- William Hammond (1719-1783) (H)
- John Newton (1725-1807) (H)
- Edward Perronet (1726-1792) (H)
- Samuel Stennett (1727-1795) (H)
- William Cowper (1731-1800) (H)
- Augustus Montague Toplady (1740-1778) (H)
- William Billings (1746-1800) (CH)
- John Rippon (1751-1836)
- John Leland (1754-1841) (H)
- Daniel Read (1757-1836) (C)
- Nehemiah Shumway (1761-1843) (C)
- Stephen Jenks (1772-1856) (C)
- Ananias Davisson (1780-1857) (C)
- B. F. White (1800-1879) (CH)
- William Walker (1809-1875) (C)
[edit] Books and scholarly articles
- Cobb, Buell E. (2001) The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 0-8203-2371-3
- Jackson, George Pullen (1933) White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-486-21425-7
- Folk song scholar Bertrand H. Bronson traces the folk tune "Samuel Hall" through various incarnations ("Captain Kidd", "Admiral Benbow", "I Had An Apple Pie,"), arriving ultimately at the song "Wondrous Love", which appeared in Southern Harmony and later in The Sacred Harp. Source: "Samuel Hall's Family Tree," California Folklore Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Jan., 1942), pp. 47-64. Available on JSTOR.
