Contents
 List of Illustrations
 Recommended Sound Examples
 Source Recordings
 Acknowledgments
 Introduction: In Search of Tradition
 1 A Venture to the Field
 2 Travels to the Center of the Square
 3 "Well, You'll Learn": Transmission, Affiliation, and Competence
 4 "Speaking May Relieve Thee": Texted Events and Eventful
 Texts
 5 "A Strange Land and a Peculiar People": Mediating Local
 Color
 6 "At Home in Transience": Traveling Culture and the Politics
 of Nostalgia
 Notes
 Bibliography
 Index
 List of Illustrations
 1 "Holy Manna (59), a tune often used to open a singing
 000
 2 The hollow square seating arrangement 000
 3 Shape-note scales from the Rudiments of Music¿
 000
 4 Received ideas of the rural South: a New Yorker cartoon and
 a San Francisco newspaper advertisement 000
 5 The empty square at the 2006 All-California Convention 
 000
 6 The full square at the 2006 All-California Convention 
 000
 7 Laura Webb Frey and her daughter Jenna beating time at the
 2005 Georgia State Convention 000
 8 Sacred Harp commemorative markers for B. F. White and the
 Denson brothers 000
 9 Gravestones featuring references to Sacred Harp singing 
 000
 10 "Parting Hand" (62), a tune often used to close a convention
 000
 11 Hollow squares as a singer might experience simultaneously 
 000
 12 How leading may feel as affective experience
 000
 13 "Mear" (49b), a plain tune 000
 14 "Save, Lord, Or We Perish" (224), a nineteenth-century
 fuging tune 000
 15 Excerpt from "Rose of Sharon" (254-59), with difficult off-
 beat entrances and a relaxed, swinging conclusion 000
 16 "Sweet Morning" (421), a camp-meeting song 000
 17 The chorus of "Morning" (163t) may cause leaders to mix up
 their beat patterns 000
 18 Directions for raising the sixth degree in minor, from the
 Rudiments 000
 19 Excerpts from "Wondrous Cross" (447) and "Morning Prayer"
 (411); the moveable-tonic shape-note notation renders key
 signatures redundant 000
 20 Isaac and Mary Rowe McLendon of Georgia in the 1890s 
 000
 21 Annotations in the books of Claie simon and Virginia
 Douglas 000
 22 "Don't be a stranger!" The song "Jackson" (317b), composed
 by M. F. McWhorter, as part of an invitation to honor McWhorter¿s
 family 000
 23 "Granville" (547), a 1986 song that now embeds memories of
 September 11, 2001 000
 24 Chris Noren¿s cover image for September Psalms,
 commemorating the events of September 11, 2001 000
 25 Two cardboard fans used by singers 000
 26 Map and directions to the Lookout Mountain Convention 
 000
 27 Detail from a flyer for the 1999 Minnesota Convention 
 000
 28 "Liberty" (137), a patriotic song 000
 29 "I'm Going Home" (282), tune that appeared in the movie Cold
 Mountain 000
 30 Detail from the cover of A Midwest Supplement
 000
 31 Promotional flyer for the 2004 Midwest Convention
 000
 32 Excerpt from "Loving Jesus" (361) 000
 Recommended Sound Examples
 The following sound examples come from a small selection of
 publicly available recordings. They include tracks from two
 recent conventions at which the author was present, one
 historical compilation, and two commercial recordings. The code
 at the end of each listing refers to the original recording, disc
 number (if applicable), and track number. Consult the source-
 recording key that follows for information on obtaining these
 recordings.
 1 "Holy Manna" (59) / A1-14
 2 "Clamanda" (42) / B1-17
 3 "Parting Hand" (62) / A2-32
 4 "Mear" (49b) / C2-2
 5 "Save, Lord, Or We Perish" (224) / A1-13
 6 "Sweet Morning" (421) / C1-7
 7 Memorial Lesson by Marcia Johnson (1999) / A2-16
 8 "I¿m On My Journey Home" (345b) / D2-3
 9 "The Golden Harp" (274t) / D2-13
 10 "Evening Shade" (209) / E-4
 11 "Cowper" (168) / E-3
 12 "Cowper" (168) / C1-2
 13 "Idumea" (47b) / E-20
 14 "North Port" (324) / E-9
 15 "Liberty" (137) / A2-21
 16 "I'm Going Home" (282) / F-9
 Source Recordings
 A In Sweetest Union Join. Double-disc set recorded at the 1999
 United Sacred Harp Convention, held at Liberty Baptist Church in
 Henagar, Alabama (Community Music School of Santa Cruz 2000).
 Distributed by CD Baby (http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/ushma) and the
 Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association
 (http://www.fasola.org/shmha). Available as streaming audio
 through CD Baby.
 B/C 150th Anniversary Chattahoochee Sacred Harp Singing
 Convention. Two separate double-disc sets recorded at the 2002
 Chattahoochee Convention in Cross Plains, Georgia (Denney 2002-
 3). B is Saturday; C is Sunday. Distributed by Morning Trumpet
 Recordings (http://www.morningtrumpet.com).
 D Joe Beasley Memorial Sacred Harp Album. Double-disc set of
 songs recorded by Joseph Beasley at Alabama singings in 1954 and
 the 1970s (Seiler 1999). Distributed by the Joe Beasley Memorial
 Foundation (http://joebeasleymemorialfoundation.org). Available
 as streaming audio through Pilgrim Productions
 (http://www.pilgrimproduction.org/sacredharp/beasley/beasleyharp.
 html).
 E Rivers of Delight: American Folk Hymns from the Sacred Harp
 Tradition. Professional recording by the Word of Mouth Chorus
 (1979). Widely available.
 F Cold Mountain [soundtrack]. Includes two Sacred Harp songs
 recorded at Liberty Baptist Church, performed by a diverse group
 of singers (Burnett 2003). Widely available.
 Many excellent historical recordings and tune books can be
 obtained through Morning Trumpet Recordings
 (http://www.morningtrumpet.com) and Rising Dove Fine Arts
 (http://www.risingdove.com).
 The 1991 revision of The Sacred Harp tune book can be
 obtained by contacting the Sacred Harp Publishing Company. The
 executive secretary, Richard Mauldin, can be reached at
 [email protected] See http://www.originalsacredharp.com for more
 information.
 Acknowledgments
 I must begin by thanking the singers¿and I will never feel that I
 have finished. The Chicago Sacred Harp singers, writ large,
 supported my singing and my research from the beginning. Special
 thanks are due to Ted Mercer, Ted and Marcia Johnson, Dean Slaton
 (in loving memory), Suzanne Flandreau, and Lisa Grayson for their
 help with interviews, reading drafts, fact checking, and general
 feedback. I had been citing Steve Warner's work on the sociology
 of religion for some time before I realized that he was the same
 man who brought joy to the bass section at every Chicago
 convention; since I made that connection he has proved doubly
 meaningful in my work. John Plunkett not only housed and
 transported me to singings virtually every time I visited Georgia
 but got me involved in ambitious historical projects of his own
 devising. He has shared all of his findings from interviews,
 archival research, and travels to far-flung Southern cemeteries.
 Richard DeLong, David Lee, and Kelly House were gracious enough
 to read and comment on sections about themselves or their
 families, always a peculiar experience. I can't thank them enough
 for their support and encouragement. Carolyn Deacy provided me
 with housing, delightful companionship, and a window into
 California Sacred Harp singing on many occasions. Gary and Sarah
 Smith always welcomed me (and dozens of other singers) into their
 Alabama home. D. J. Hatfield's friendship, scholarly work, and
 voice have informed every page of this book. In my own generation
 of singers, Megan Jennings, Mark Miller, Aaron Girard, and Duncan
 Vinson often challenged my understanding of the "newcomer"
 experience in productive ways. Aaron was a constant presence for
 much of my work and was generous with his ample gifts as a
 singer, musicologist, writer, and editor. All the participants on
 the fasola.org listservs deserve thanks for their thoughtful,
 knowledgeable postings over the years; in these pages I have only
 been able to address a tiny fraction of what I learned from those
 online discussions.
 I owe my introduction to critical thinking, writing, and
 Sacred Harp singing itself to four extraordinary teachers and
 singers at the Putney School: George Emlen, Alec Ewald, Joe
 Holland, and Hugh Silbaugh. It is no exaggeration to say that
 this project began when I was a teenager under their tutelage. In
 later years, my mentors, colleagues, and students made the
 writing process a pleasure. Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Richard Wolf,
 Sean Gallagher, Martin Stokes, Phil Bohlman, Carol Oja, Ginny
 Danielson, Leo Treitler, Ruth Solie, Lewis Lockwood, Tom Kelly,
 Regula Qureshi, and Henry Klumpenhouwer have supported my work
 with erudition, warmth, and all manner of advice. My friends and
 colleagues Molly Kovel, Lilith Wood, Christina Linklater, Anneka
 Lenssen, Victoria Widican, Te-Yi Lee, Mary Greitzer, Sindhu
 Revuluri, Petra Gelbart, Natalie Kirschstein, Sarah Morelli,
 Anicia Timberlake, and David Kaminsky helped me imagine making a
 happy life in academia. Laurie Matheson, Judith McCulloh, and the
 staff of the University of Illinois Press have made the
 publication process smooth, swift, and even occasionally fun. The
 Press's two readers offered not only invaluable feedback but also
 much-appreciated encouragement.
 I gratefully acknowledge the material support I received
 from a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities; term-time and summer
 research grants from Harvard University; the Alvin H. Johnson AMS
 50 Fellowship from the American Musicological Society; and a
 Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of
 Alberta. On another material front, the Sacred Harp Publishing
 Company has graciously permitted me to reproduce a wide range of
 materials from the 1991 revision of The Sacred Harp.
 Finally, thanks to the many branches of my family for their
 support. My partner, James Baumgartner, has earned my undying
 gratitude by learning to sing with me.
 <epigraph>
 Ye fleeting charms of earth, farewell,
 Your springs of joy are dry;
 My soul now seeks another home,
 A brighter world on high.
 I'm a long time trav'ling here below,
 I'm a long time trav'ling away from home,
 I'm a long time trav'ling here below,
 To lay this body down.
 ¿"White" (288); text from Dobell's New Selection, 1810
 Introduction: In Search of Tradition
 On a summer Saturday morning in the South, at the end of a gravel
 road, cars filled in the fringes of a clearing where a plain
 white building stood. Off to the side, coolers and covered dishes
 were scattered on a long cement table shaded by a roof. There was
 a cemetery in back, and just behind that there was a highway¿down
 a drop-off and through a screen of brush, trees, and kudzu, its
 presence betrayed by a near-imperceptible hum. A different sound,
 a steady pulse of voices, came from the building. A latecomer
 pulled in, hopped out of his car¿from which the soundtrack to O
 Brother, Where Art Thou? briefly blasted¿and headed for the
 building, a bag of cough drops and an oblong dark-red book in
 hand. He slipped in the door; it stood open for a moment as he
 filled out his registration form, and a few lines of song roared
 into the sweltering air:
 
 Then He'll call us home to heaven,
 At His table we'll sit down;
 Christ will gird Himself, and serve us
 With sweet manna all around.
 ("Holy Manna" [59]; see Figure 1, Sound Example 1)1
 I had also arrived late; a sudden summer storm had forced us to
 the shoulder of the interstate for a while. I knew from the
 fragment of song that we had only missed the very beginning of
 the singings¿"Holy Manna" is a popular choice for the first song
 of the day. Now there would be the opening prayer, which we knew
 we shouldn't interrupt by coming inside. So we took a few moments
 to gather our things, smell the wet ground, distribute some paper
 fans among ourselves. I shook out the skirt of my summer dress,
 grateful that I didn't have to wear long sleeves and long pants
 to look respectable. Then we went in, made ourselves nametags,
 chose seats in the appropriate vocal sections, and sang from our
 copies of The Sacred Harp.
 This scene is probably a familiar one to my readers. For me
 and for them, it is shaped by layers of associations. In my own
 memories of Sacred Harp conventions, several different arrivals
 at Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church have coalesced into
 this account of the tantalizing moment just before I step inside
 a wood-paneled room that vibrates with voices and thumping feet.
 But most Americans have encountered other versions of this
 arrival at an end-of-the-line clearing where there's a little
 Southern church full of singers¿versions from movies,
 documentaries, public television specials, folklore and
 ethnomusicology writings, a century of local-color journalism,
 and all the other reverent, satirical, nostalgic, or
 condescending representations of community practices in the rural
 South. The revival, the camp meeting,and the family reunion with
 dinner-on-the-grounds¿they turn up often, along with the tale of
 the traveler's discovery of this little pocket of peculiar
 customs and time-worn ritual.2 Such scenes are quintessentially
 local, traditional, and authentic. In my account, the only clues
 to the contrary¿or at least to complications¿are the registration
 form, the nametags, and the car stereo playing a beautifully
 produced Hollywood homage to scenes just like this one.
 The Sacred Harp convention held at Holly Springs every June
 is one of hundreds of gatherings of singers that take place all
 over the United States each year. Many of the voices that filled
 the little church belonged not to west Georgia locals but to
 people from Chicago, New England, Minneapolis, Texas, and
 California. They sat on rows of pews arranged to form a "hollow
 square," with one voice part to a side and everyone facing the
 center (see Figure 2). Singers took turns standing in the middle
 of the square to choose and lead a song from The Sacred Harp.
 They sang all day Saturday and Sunday, with breaks for a sociable
 lunch and for memorial speeches about recently deceased fellow
 singers. Then they drove to homes or airports. Some would see
 each other the following weekend at another singing in another
 state; others might only go to one or two Sacred Harp singings a
 year. A first-time visitor who'd made a long road-trip to Georgia
 to check out this traditional Southern practice might learn that
 a group back home in Ohio had been holding monthly Sacred Harp
 singings for years.
 <Insert Figure 1 @ here>
 <Insert Figure 2 @ here>
 Today the singers who gather at annual Sacred Harp
 conventions include young children born into rural Southern
 "singing families"; Southern urbanites in search of regional
 cultural heritage; American folk music fans from college-age to
 graying; Christian and Jewish singers who have grown dissatisfied
 with their institutional religious experience; early-music lovers
 who think the open harmonies and straight-tone singing have a
 medieval sound; and young punk musicians who appreciate the
 volume, "rawness," and do-it-yourself anticommercial ethos of
 Sacred Harp. Generational, religious, political, and geographical
 differences would ordinarily prevent these people from crossing
 paths at all, let alone forming a tight-knit community. Their
 ideas of just what "the tradition" is are as diverse as the
 singers themselves.
 Some singers, especially in the rural South, sing because of
 long-standing family involvement and religious conviction. Local
 Sacred Harp practice was passed down in rural Southern
 communities for about a hundred years with only intermittent
 interest from urban folk revivalists. These lifelong participants
 are often called "traditional singers"¿although some would say
 that "traditional singing" is more a state of mind and spirit
 than a birthright. Southern singers without family connections to
 Sacred Harp sometimes come in search of an antidote for the
 poisonous stereotypes of the South that they've been swallowing
 for years. As one man told me, "I think one of the reasons Sacred
 Harp appealed to me as a college student was that it gave me a
 reason to be proud of being from Alabama." Other new singers are
 looking for "truly American music," national roots to which they
 can lay claim. They might approach Sacred Harp as one among many
 forms of participatory music making that regained popularity
 during the folk revival of the 1950s-1970s.
 In all these categories of participation there are singers
 who see Sacred Harp as their primary source of spiritual or
 religious experience, as Christians or otherwise. This is
 especially true of those who were brought up with no religion,
 who have "lapsed" from a childhood faith, or who maintain a
 religious affiliation but now feel unwelcome in their places of
 worship¿due to sexual orientation, for example, or to shifting
 political convictions.
 All these people sing from The Sacred Harp, an American
 collection of hymns and anthems first published in 1844 by the
 Georgians B. F. White and E. J. King. Many singers place
 themselves within a single national Sacred Harp community, with
 roots in the American South and flourishing branches in the
 Midwest and on both coasts. Participants regularly travel
 hundreds of miles to attend certain annual singings, returning
 year after year. But why do they keep coming back? What binds
 Sacred Harp singers across the geographic, religious, political,
 and generational divides that they constantly invoke? This book
 is about the physical and metaphoric travels of Sacred Harp
 singers as they meet and sing around the country, creating and
 sustaining an ethos of mutual tolerance by lifting their voices
 together.
 Shape-Notes and Singing Schools
 Sacred Harp falls under the broad rubric of "shape-note" music,
 which takes its name from a late-eighteenth-century innovation in
 musical notation. Shape-note systems notate each pitch in a scale
 with a shaped note head that corresponds to a solfege syllable.
 In The Sacred Harp, for example, all the major-key tonic notes
 have triangular heads and are called "Fa." These systems were
 designed to promote music literacy, improve sight-singing skills,
 and sell tunebooks.3 Singers could use the shaped note heads and
 their corresponding solfege syllables to read through the music
 before contending with the words of the song.
 Scholars often credit the system used in The Sacred Harp to
 William Little and William Smith, but in fact these men adopted
 the notation from fellow Philadelphian John Connelly.4 Little and
 Smith's tunebook The Easy Instructor (1801) employed four shaped
 note heads to represent the four-syllable British solfege system,
 which designated the major scale with the syllables Fa-Sol-La-Fa-
 Sol-La-Mi-Fa.5 The Sacred Harp of 1844 was only one of many
 nineteenth-century song compilations to use this system, but over
 the course of a century it emerged as the main victor in a fierce
 competition among the adherents of different shape-note books
 (Bealle 1997: 5). The notation has played an integral part in
 Sacred Harp transmission and performance practice since the
 1840s. At a Sacred Harp singing, participants sing through each
 tune on "the notes"¿the solfege syllables represented by the
 shapes¿before proceeding with the verses chosen by the leader.
 (See Figure 3.)
 <Insert Figure 3 @ here>
 Shape-note singing has a rich and varied history, much of
 which has been documented by scholars of early American history
 and hymnody.6 The bare-bones version that experienced singers
 provide to newcomers usually focuses on New England origins,
 persecution by the nineteenth-century "better music movement,"
 and preservation and historical continuity in the South. The
 following excerpts from the brief history that Minnesota singer
 Keith Willard provides at the Sacred Harp website www.fasola.org
 can be considered representative of contemporary singers'
 accounts:
 
 In New England, the singing school institution flowered
 briefly in the period prior to the Revolutionary war but then
 faded. A post war influx of European style trained musicians,
 systematically campaigned for the removal of this "crude and
 lewd" music and its schools. Under the influence of Lowell Mason
 and like ilk, the teaching of singing moved from the informal
 process of community singing schools to the rigid (and regulated)
 control of the public schools. The "Better Music Movement" was
 largely successful in the cities of the North. . . .
 Books such as Kentucky Harmony, Missouri Harmony, Southern
 Harmony, and Sacred Harp were published in four-shape notation
 and used widely by a people isolated from the tyranny of citified
 "experts." It was in the south where the marriage of the New
 England singing school music forms to the oral Celtic folk tune
 heritage was completed, and the folk-hymn was born. It was here
 that the singing school found a permanent home in the rural areas
 of the Appalachians and the Piedmont. (Willard 2004)
 More detailed versions expand on two threads of this narrative:
 the spread of singing schools and the role of revival meetings
 tied to the Second Great Awakening. Shape-note singings have now
 diverged considerably from the revival tradition in form and
 content, but singing schools continue to take place.7 Sacred Harp
 conventions still use terminology derived from the singing school
 tradition: the assembled group of singers is called a "class,"
 and leading a song is "giving a lesson."
 The singing school movement began in the eighteenth century
 as a corrective for low levels of music literacy and the
 perceived chaos of lined-out psalm singing. Eventually the
 movement "succeeded in creating a large body of singers capable
 of handling a repertoire of increasing complexity and variety"
 (Bruce 2000: 136). In the early nineteenth century, outlying
 American settlements provided a market for the services of
 itinerant singing masters; their multi-week singing schools met a
 need for music education and provided a chaperoned social space
 for young people to mingle. As the singing masters made inroads
 further south and west, however, the style and the shape-note
 notation of the music they taught fell out of favor in
 northeastern cities. Reformers vilified them as unqualified
 tricksters who were cheating honest Americans out of a civilizing
 musical education. A Cincinnati music periodical reported in 1848
 that "Hundreds of country idlers, too lazy or too stupid for
 farmers or mechanics, ¿go to singing school for a spell,' get
 diplomas from others scarcely better qualified than themselves,
 and then with their brethren, the far famed ¿Yankee Peddlars,'
 itinerate to all parts of the land, to corrupt the taste and
 pervert the judgment of the unfortunate people who, for want of
 better, have to put up with them."8 John Bealle has described how
 the crusading New England music reformer Lowell Mason (1792-1872)
 and his colleagues placed editorials in such publications; they
 heaped ridicule on shape-notation and promoted a musical idiom
 and pedagogy based on contemporary Western European models in its
 stead (Bealle 1997).
 In rural frontier areas, however, shape-note singing still
 flourished as wholesome family entertainment. In the same
 regions, camp-meeting revivals transmitted religious songs among
 huge crowds, diverse in both race and theology. Shape-note
 tunebooks absorbed popular musical forms of the day, becoming
 "virtual catalogs of musical and religious dissent"; compilers
 and arrangers paired dance tunes with sacred texts by Isaac Watts
 and other popular Evangelical poets (Bealle 1997: 127). These
 texts were themselves "popular" in every sense of the word. Watts
 was "the most widely published and read writer in eighteenth-
 century America," as Marini has observed, and nineteenth-century
 revivalists adopted his work. Watts's verses created a Christian
 antitype for Old Testament psalms¿The Psalms of David Imitated in
 the Language of the New Testament and Applied to the Christian
 State and Worship, as Watts's 1719 psalter was titled.
 In the wake of the music reform campaigns in the northeast,
 and with the help of gathered and dispersed revivals in frontier
 regions, by the mid-nineteenth century the American South was the
 primary home of shape-note singing traditions. The tradition of
 unaccompanied hymn singing was maintained in that region partly
 because it was home to so many independent Baptist sects, some of
 which consider the use of musical instruments in church to be
 sacrilegious; elsewhere, four-part congregational singing
 declined in favor of prestigious organ music and formal choirs.9
 In addition, some communities maintained the four-shape system
 and its associated musical repertoire as a gesture of loyalty to
 antebellum rural Southern culture. Like other innovative
 technologies, shape-note notation carried "the burden, prestige,
 and controversy of being made to speak for specific ideological
 projects" (Ginsberg 2002: 20). Before the Civil War The Sacred
 Harp was still a fairly new compendium, adopted by only a few
 singing conventions. But as the book's popularity surged in the
 postwar decades, its four-shape notation came to signal an
 affinity with antebellum traditions (Campbell 1997).
 "Sacred Harp" and "shape-note" are often used
 interchangeably now. This practice obscures the existence of
 several ongoing, distinct shape-note singing traditions linked
 with other nineteenth-century tunebooks, such as the Mennonite
 Harmonia Sacra (1832),10 the Southern Harmony (1835), the Social
 Harp (1855), the Christian Harmony (1866), and the New Harp of
 Columbia (1867). These books include quite different repertoire
 than the Sacred Harp; some employ a seven-shape notation system
 that corresponds to moveable-tonic Do-Re-Mi solfege. There are
 also many flourishing Sacred Harp communities today who sing from
 "the Cooper book." In 1902 W. M. Cooper of Dothan, Alabama
 presided over a major revision of The Sacred Harp, bringing many
 "gospel" songs and hymns with more regularized harmonic
 arrangements into the book. A substantial portion of the Cooper
 repertoire presents textual and harmonic features typical of
 turn-of-the-century "new-book" or gospel singing, a style
 popularized by the urban revivalists Dwight L. Moody and Ira D.
 Sankey in the 1870s.
 In any given community the adoption of one tunebook and
 rejection of others was oriented around local politics, practical
 ease of access, and ideological positions on seven-shape gospel
 music. The cheap and frequently revised paperback seven-shape
 books that traveled South from the urban northeastern gospel
 movement were emblematic of "simplicity, speed, and efficiency,"
 the ideals of a postbellum progressive New South, but both the
 books and the ideology met with resistance in some
 quarters¿particularly when the New South's economic developments
 did not benefit all communities equally (Campbell 1997: 173).
 While Cooper's 1902 revision of The Sacred Harp retained the
 four-shape system, its gospel elements made it unpalatable to
 many singers.
 In 1911 Joe S. James produced a rival to Cooper's edition.
 He eliminated most gospel songs, restored material from B. F.
 White's earlier editions, and called his book the Original Sacred
 Harp. James advertised the fact that the book's pagination was
 consistent with the 1869 White edition, an editorial decision
 that emphasized points of common repertoire and facilitated side-
 by-side use of the two books. But he also appealed to "the
 industrial New South's obsession with numbers, output, and
 quantification" by including features like statistics on the
 numbers of printed words, Scripture citations, and repeat signs
 in the book (Campbell 1997: 182). James's book found followers,
 and in 1936 Paine Denson led the publication of a new revision of
 the James edition. Subsequent "Denson revisions" took place in
 1960, 1967, 1971, 1987, and 1991; the editorial committees added
 older tunes from other shape-note sources as well as newly
 composed tunes considered to resonate with the musical styles
 prevalent in the earlier editions.
 The 1991 "Denson book" revision of The Sacred Harp¿produced
 by a committee led by the eminent Georgia singing school teacher
 Hugh McGraw¿currently enjoys the most widespread use of all the
 shape-note tunebooks. For practical purposes my observations
 should be considered limited to singings using the 1991 revision,
 although a number of my informants and the participants on the
 fasola.org Internet listservs take part in other shape-note
 traditions on a regular basis. Most Sacred Harp conventions
 operate in accordance with written bylaws that specify which
 revision of The Sacred Harp is to be used.
 The Legacy of "White Spirituals"
 The early-twentieth-century designation "white spirituals"
 continues to cling to Sacred Harp singing. In 1997 shape-note
 singing could still be glossed as "the quintessential expression
 of white, Anglo-Celtic ethnicity" in a multiculturalist American
 music textbook (Lornell and Rasmusses 1997: 209), a description
 that elides a long history of racially-charged controversy by
 implying that "Anglo-Celtic" whiteness is just one ethnicity
 among many. Sacred Harp first came to be associated with
 whiteness under very different political circumstances.
 In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century,
 anxieties about urban immigrants and the social mobility of
 African Americans fueled eugenicist ideologies all over the
 United States. At the same time, rapid changes to the Southern
 economy inspired antimodernist nostalgia, giving rise to the
 Southern Agrarian movement by the 1930s. In this context the
 whiteness of rural Southern Sacred Harp singers was construed as
 one aspect of their valuable preservation of distinctive local
 culture in the face of assimilationist rhetoric (cf. Lauter 2001:
 133).
 George Pullen Jackson (1874-1953) was a key figure in the
 development of this discourse. His book White Spirituals in the
 Southern Uplands famously described shape-note singers as a "lost
 tonal tribe," and he considered their singing traditions central
 to the "lyric-religious folk-ways" of the rural South (Jackson
 1933: 4, viii).11 Jackson's work argued that both black and white
 American spiritual song traditions were derived from Anglo-Celtic
 hymnody and folksong repertoires. While he acknowledged that the
 black spirituals of his own time displayed some African elements
 in the realm of rhythm, harmony, and performance practice, he
 considered these to be adaptations to a European-derived
 repertoire acquired by black singers at Southern Uplands camp
 meetings.
 Jackson's devotion to the idea that the flow of musical
 influence ran primarily from white to black singers¿and his
 emphasis on the authentic, historical value of white rural
 culture¿made his work appealing to the racist ideologues of his
 era (Bealle 1997: 119). His ideas proved useful to xenophobic
 contemporaries who lauded the racial purity of "mountain
 whites"¿"the Scotch-Irish type which . . . has been touched very
 little by the great stream of immigration which has flooded other
 parts of the country and has almost obliterated the racial
 characteristics of the founders of the nation" (Caldwell 1930,
 reprinted in McNeil 1995: 221). But Jackson's personal history
 suggests that his thesis about "white spirituals" had different
 ideological underpinnings.
 In the 1920s Jackson was an influential figure in Nashville
 public life and an ardent supporter of progressive institutions
 like Fisk University, Nashville's African American college. He
 was a constant advocate for the Fisk Jubilee Singers over the
 course of many years as the music reviewer for the Nashville
 Banner. Upon his retirement from this position in 1931 he
 received letters of thanks from both John W. Work Jr., director
 of the Fisk Singers, and Ray F. Brown, the University's director.
 (Work's warm, hand-written letter related that "whenever you
 attend a concert in which I am concerned I always feel that I
 have a ¿friend at court.'") Late in his life Jackson carefully
 pasted these letters into retrospective scrapbooks, along with
 many of his own articles praising performances by the Fisk
 Singers.12 On the last page of this scrapbook volume he
 juxtaposed two images of black religious practice: the early-
 nineteenth-century Pavel Petrovich Svinin watercolor titled
 "Negro Methodists in Old Philadelphia" and a photograph of
 himself engaged in extending the "hand of fellowship" among
 worshippers at an African American church service.13
 These biographical details (and Jackson's own writings)
 suggest that his shortchanging of African American originality
 and influence in spiritual traditions was rooted not in racial
 antipathy but in a defense of the impoverished rural white
 Southerners who were being cited as disgraceful examples of the
 need for progressive reform in the South. Jackson stressed the
 value of rural culture in the context of a derisive discourse
 that dismissed these people as "white trash" or, at best, as
 backward remnants of a past that must inevitably fade. As one
 reviewer wrote of White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands,
 "[O]ne is wrought upon to consider how quickly the ¿yokels' of
 only yesterday are being transformed into the conservators of the
 native arts that we did not know we had. The country folks have
 innocently kept alive the sacred fire that the prophets of the
 modern temper had all but extinguished with their tears."14
 In a 1932 article, Jackson laid blame at the feet of two
 groups of white Southerners for their failure to recognize the
 cultural value of "white spirituals": "the professional
 Southerners of big-plantation presumptions who would do anything
 to lower the stock of the poor white trash" and "the Southern
 urban church folk, who have always been eager to forget and
 disown the camp-meeting songs, the illegitimate children of their
 own early hymnody" (Jackson 1932: 246). Jackson championed white
 rural culture for its deep historical connections to English
 Protestantism, and he insisted that African American culture come
 along for the ride. Both black and white rural Southerners became
 the keepers of an indigenous American folk culture shaped by its
 natural environment.15
 Jackson's conviction that these rural tradition-bearers were
 fundamentally shaped by American history and the American
 landscape led him to project them into the past and discount
 their creative agency regardless of their race. For him, all
 contemporary composition in the genre was anachronistic and
 derivative. As he wrote of black composers in White and Negro
 Spirituals, "it should be said to the credit of the makers of
 such songs that their product seems to be about as `original' as
 is that of the more recent ¿fuguists' whose productions have
 found their way into the white Sacred Harp" (Jackson 1943: 274).
 Jackson's shape-note-singing octet, the Nashville "Old Harp
 Singers," costumed themselves in Colonial-era accessories.
 Official portraits in his scrapbooks show the group singing by
 candlelight while sporting bonnets, white wigs, and muttonchops.
 The legacy of Jackson's work lies not only in its
 association of Sacred Harp singing with white rural
 Southerners¿and of these citizens with early American history¿but
 in the establishment of the practice as indigenous American
 folksong. Under the auspices of progressive multiculturalism,
 these two associations have been deployed in tandem to clear
 Sacred Harp singing from charges of racial exclusivity. As the
 description from Musics of Multicultural America indicates, if
 Sacred Harp is "the quintessential expression" of an "ethnic"
 cultural practice then it is no more surprising for a long-
 established rural Southern convention to be all-white than for a
 New York sonidero baile to be all-Mexican (Lornell and Rasmussen
 1997: 209, see above; Rabland 2003).
 But the fact that recently-established urban and Northern
 conventions are not more racially diverse gives some singers
 pause. As the Southern historian and Sacred Harp singer David
 Carlton has noted, "To the intense regret of many Sacred Harpers,
 the most widespread stream of the tradition . . . remains
 virtually all white. . . . [T]he few African Americans appearing
 at most white 1991 Edition singings are typically middle-class
 northerners" (Carlton 2003: 60). This situation stems from
 historical competition among different shape-note tunebooks,
 racial segregation of Southern churches and social institutions,
 and the different nature of the relationship between shape-note
 singing and specific local church affiliations among black and
 white Southerners.
 Community-based African American Sacred Harp singing has
 existed since the nineteenth century. The vast majority of black
 singing communities adopted the Cooper revision of The Sacred
 Harp in the early twentieth century, as did white singers in the
 same regions: southern Georgia and Alabama, northern Florida and
 Texas. The "Wiregrass" singers in southeast Alabama remain the
 best-known community of black singers, owing to the composition,
 publishing, and recording work of Judge Jackson (compiler of The
 Colored Sacred Harp, 1934; no relation to G. P. Jackson). After
 Jackson's death, his friend Dewey Williams facilitated the
 Wiregrass singers' participation alongside white Sacred Harp
 singers at the 1970 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife and
 at the Montreal "Man and His World" exposition the following
 year. A few Wiregrass singers made regular appearances at the
 (largely white) National Sacred Harp Convention in Alabama during
 my fieldwork years, with strong encouragement from the
 convention's organizers. However, the number of black singers in
 the Wiregrass region and elsewhere has diminished greatly over
 the past several generations.16
 In the 1970s, the folklorist Joe Dan Boyd sought out but was
 unable to uncover links among different regional communities of
 black Sacred Harp singers. He concluded that the importance of
 local church bonds resulted in a singing tradition where "blacks
 appear to have less enthusiasm than do whites for a widely
 scattered ¿brotherhood of Harpers' throughout the country bound
 together symbolically by a common denominator: the book itself"
 (Boyd 1971: 77). One should also bear in mind that long-distance
 travel was more limited for black singers¿owing to their
 systematically restricted economic and social circumstances and
 the risk of encountering racial violence on long journeys¿and
 that huge nondenominational gatherings of black singers on the
 scale of contemporary white conventions might have attracted
 hostile attention. For all these reasons, African American Sacred
 Harp conventions have never formed long-distance travel networks
 like those that are my subject here.
 Nevertheless, race and ethnicity remain important issues for
 today's national singing community. As I will discuss in Chapter
 6, the guilt some singers feel about Sacred Harp's racial
 homogeneity encourages them to find and emphasize other proofs of
 diversity. The difference between Northern and Southern singers
 is often treated like an ethnic distinction¿one that can
 deceptively subsume other distinctions, such as traditional
 versus newcomer and urban versus rural. The affiliations among
 singers and singing families are modeled like ethnic
 affiliations. And perhaps the most powerful legacy of the
 ethnicization of traditional singers is the double bind in which
 they may find themselves now, when their rural Southern
 background can stigmatize them as uneducated, backward, or racist
 "white trash" while also serving as the mark of their musical
 authenticity.17 The creative co-option of these stereotypes by
 both Southern and Northern singers has important musical and
 social results in the singing community today.
 A Middle Ages for America: Sacred Harp's Double History
 From the late nineteenth century on, the practitioners of shape-
 note singing traditions were repeatedly "discovered" by
 journalists, historians, folksong enthusiasts, and musicologists
 who sent word of "the fasola folk," "white spirituals," and "our
 living musical ancestors" out to the urbane reading public.18
 Such discoveries reproduced central elements of European
 historical narratives within highly condensed evolutionary
 accounts of American history (Batteau 1990, Miller 2003).
 Contextualized in this way, the brisk pace of that history became
 an asset rather than a liability¿it mirrored the speed of
 American industrialization. American progress was so rapid that
 American "ancestors" were still alive and well when the nation as
 a whole reached civilized maturity. Instead of centuries-old
 documents, America had human beings from another time available
 for scrutiny, interrogation, and eventual assimilation into
 modern life¿a progressive humanitarian goal to be achieved
 through the efforts of genteel female schoolteachers and
 Protestant missionaries (Batteau 1990, Whisnant 1983). These
 homegrown primitives were conceived as both familiar and alien,
 with the ambivalence characteristic of all stereotypes. The
 Southern uplands region and its citizens were not only
 quintessentially American but also "a strange land and a peculiar
 people" (Harney 1873), "an anachronism" requiring objective
 scientific investigation by moderns (Frost 1899, reprinted in
 McNeil 1995: 92).19
 Rural Southerners were conceived as specifically our living
 ancestors, where "we" denoted white middle-class American
 Protestants. This quality divided them from other kinds of
 contemporary primitives¿including distant exotic peoples and
 Native Americans¿who were made to represent humanity's more
 general and ancient origins (Miller 2003). In their presumed
 racial purity and proximity to modern culture, the Southern
 mountaineers could be invoked as a parallel to the medieval
 ancestors of Europeans. Like medieval society, rural Southern
 society was glossed as "old-fashioned, primitive, irrational,
 superstitious, cruel" (Treitler 2003: 104). The invention of the
 rural South recapitulated the nineteenth-century invention of the
 Middle Ages as a means for self-definition through rich cultural
 heritage, self-congratulation through distance from the primitive
 past, and self-escape into an ancient, romantic wilderness (Stock
 1974: 543).20
 Like much rural Southern music, Sacred Harp singing has long
 been marked as explicitly and indigenously American¿not only for
 its Southernness but for its earlier connections to colonial New
 England. Flyers promoting singing conventions or folk festival
 workshops often describe Sacred Harp as "America's oldest choral
 art" or "a quintessential expression of American democracy."
 Music historians and contemporary singers alike frequently link
 Sacred Harp to the composer William Billings and other "New
 England tunesmiths." The "independence" attributed to Colonial-
 era musical style has become closely associated with a later
 generation's resistance to the "better music movement." For
 example, in 1940 Charles Seeger identified Billings as "our first
 musical rebel"; on the same page he described shape-notes as "an
 effort to free the ordinary man from bondage to the high priests
 of the musical profession and their difficult notation" (Seeger
 1940: 492). This association is so strong that many singers are
 surprised to learn that Billings himself did not publish music in
 shape-notes. (Little and Smith's Easy Instructor was published a
 year after his death.) The relationship between Billings, Sacred
 Harp singing, and independent-minded dissent holds a prominent
 place in the "Rudiments of Music" printed at the front of The
 Sacred Harp: "Sacred Harp harmony does not follow the rules of
 conventional harmony [bold in original], which were well
 established by the late 18th century. Billings fiercely declared
 his independence (¿I don't think myself confined to any rules of
 composition laid down by any who went before me') and he
 practiced what he preached" (Garst 1991: 21). The Billings
 quotation is from the passage in The New-England Psalm-Singer
 (1770) that continues with the famous assertion that "every
 Composer should be his own Carver," a turn of phrase that has
 been cited countless times as evidence of his American
 individualism.
 Stephen Marini notes that Billings "created a vocational
 model for other tunesmiths," many who chose to compose, publish,
 and teach from their own settings of the massively popular texts
 of Isaac Watts (Marini 2003: 79). Richard Crawford has traced the
 shifting reputation of Billings as another sort of model: in the
 twentieth century the composer and his cohort began to be
 considered "the first creators of an unmistakably American music"
 (Crawford 1990: 225). Early-nineteenth-century critics located
 American qualities in what they viewed as technical crudity and
 impiety. But twentieth-century scholars began to celebrate the
 same repertoire as projecting qualities of independence,
 individualism, egalitarianism, and primitive power. In 1940,
 Seeger referred to "a rigorous, spare, disciplined beauty in the
 choral writing that is all the more to be prized for having been
 conceived in the ¿backwoods' for which many professional
 musicians have such scorn, and in the face of the determined
 opposition of sophisticated zealots in no small number, from
 Lowell Mason down to those of this very day" (Seeger 1940: 488).
 At the turn of the millennium, Neely Bruce suggested that Mason
 had "replaced something vital and indigenous with something
 derivative and imported" (Bruce 2000: 139).
 Both singers and scholars have invoked independence,
 egalitarianism, and resistance to mainstream convention as key
 characteristics of Sacred Harp practitioners and the styles
 represented in their tunebook. Like independent-minded
 frontiersmen, the story goes, this democratic and physically
 engaging singing moved from stodgy New England to a rougher but
 more liberated landscape. The history of shape-note singing
 reproduces a recurring narrative theme of American history, the
 westward push in search of freedom. It also articulates a central
 drama of American historiography: the productive tension of
 egalitarianism and rugged individualism.21 Both singing practices
 and songs are made to play out this drama, often in the same
 breath. Consider Ron Pen's assessment: "This new singing school
 music clearly reflected the important question that was at the
 heart of America's experiment in participatory democracy¿how was
 this country going to reconcile the tension between individual
 freedom and the constraints of social order. Each vocal line was
 fiercely independent in following its own path" (Pen 1997: 214).
 The continuous transmission of Sacred Harp singing in the
 South has often been linked to the presumed natural musicality
 and stubborn backwardness of rural Southerners. They are imagined
 as old-fashioned conservators of any and all traditions, far
 removed from the vigorous, innovative independence of a figure
 like Billings. Crawford implies as much in assessing B. F. White,
 one of the compilers of the 1844 Sacred Harp: "[T]he lesson
 taught by White's life was that to achieve eminence in the
 culture where The Sacred Harp flourished was to be remembered as
 a typical figure, not an innovative one" (Crawford 2001: 166).
 But it was the establishment of Sacred Harp conventions, not the
 essentialized conservative qualities of Southern singers, that
 carried the tradition into the present.
 The term "convention" refers both to an association of
 singers¿with membership sometimes recorded in writing¿and to the
 annual multiday singing events hosted by such associations. At
 nineteenth-century singing conventions, which were typically
 governed by written constitutions, delegates from different
 regional singing associations gathered to sing, socialize, share
 meals, campaign for political office, court future spouses, and
 keep parliamentary-style order during the singing sessions.
 Constitution writers consciously adopted the language of American
 political institutions. An 1866 constitution begins, "We, the
 vocalists of the Chattahoochee Musical Convention feeling it to
 be the duty of the present generation to make an effort, in
 common with the interest of the subject, to renovate, improve &
 systematize our Southern Music, do therefore, form an association
 for that purpose, that by our united aid and influence, we may
 assist in advancing this cause, do adopt the following
 Constitution for our government" (Miller 2002: 154).
 The stated mission here has both progressive and
 conservative aspects. It is rooted in the ideals and potential of
 "the present generation," those who faced the duty of restoring
 regional culture after the depredations of the Civil War. The
 preamble implicitly celebrates antebellum Southern cultural
 heritage, but it also emphasizes a forward-looking agenda¿not
 simply to restore old practices but "to renovate, improve, &
 systematize." Yet within the lifespan of some of the first
 Chattahoochee Convention singers, Sacred Harp singing became
 associated with cultural conservatism, rural isolation, "natural"
 musicianship, and "our musical ancestors" (see Chapter5). Sacred
 Harp acquired a double history, reliant on contrasting visions of
 Revolution-era New England independence and nineteenth-century
 Southern conservatism.
 In the twentieth century the advent of portable recording
 technology¿coupled with a new interest in specifically and
 authentically American cultural traditions¿brought descriptions
 and recordings of shape-note singing to an ever-widening
 audience. Recordings made by academic folk-music collectors and
 by singers themselves in the 1920s and 1930s became influential
 during the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. The revival
 substantially expanded the market for Sacred Harp recordings,
 including decades-old tracks that resurfaced in Americana
 compilations like the Smithsonian Folkways Anthology of American
 Folk Music (Smith 1997 [1952]). Some new recordings were made at
 Southern singing conventions, the classic example being Alan
 Lomax's 1959 Alabama recording All Day Singing from "The Sacred
 Harp" (Lomax 1960)¿which was actually a recording of songs
 requested by Lomax during a break in the convention proceedings
 (Bealle 1997: 253). Recordings produced by the Sacred Harp
 Publishing Company were played on the radio in many Southern
 communities, often on call-in shows that allowed listeners to
 request particular songs. Some radio shows had live singers who
 would perform requested songs on the spot.
 Other recordings were produced by folk revival or early
 music ensembles without ties to Southern singing communities. It
 wasn't difficult to learn and circulate songs from the shape-note
 repertoire, since they were available in printed notation. These
 singers were attracted to the American antiquity of the music and
 to its open, "medieval-sounding" harmonies. Some members of these
 ensembles became interested in traditional Southern practice and
 gradually deepened their relationships to particular singing
 communities. They helped organize new conventions and became
 regular travelers in the national convention network.
 Gradually, Sacred Harp singing became part of the American
 folksong canon: a ubiquitous presence at folk festivals large and
 small, a frequent subject of short features on TV news programs
 and National Public Radio, and a natural part of the lineup in
 documentaries like the tremendously popular Amazing Grace with
 Bill Moyers (1990). More and more people began seeking out local
 singing groups or founding their own. This task was facilitated
 by the development of the Internet and eventually by
 www.fasola.org, a clearinghouse for Sacred Harp information of
 all kinds.
 In the years since the folk revival, several factors have
 contributed to the formation of a self-identifying national
 community of Sacred Harp singers: the growing popularity of
 shape-note singing in the Midwest, New England, and in urban
 areas on both coasts; reduced numbers of lifelong singers in the
 South, as fewer young singers have stepped into the places of the
 elderly and deceased; and dramatic changes in transportation and
 communication technology. My work focuses on the state of Sacred
 Harp practice in the wake of these changes, but the historical
 events and recurrent themes I have sketched here will reappear
 and gain detail and color as they inform singers' narratives and
 my own analysis.
 Singers and scholars perpetually consult and reshuffle the
 available repertoire of facts about tunebook compilers, shape-
 note composers, revisions, musical and textual influences, and
 convention history. My own approach to Sacred Harp history
 explores how people use such data to meet their own needs as they
 take stands on the overlapping musical, historical, and
 ideological controversies that engage the singing community.
 Sacred Harp culture is saturated with layers of meaning drawn
 from personal experience and received history, meaning that is
 ever-present, ever-emergent, and continually transformed by and
 transforming of individual experience within the tradition. Each
 singer's experience is necessarily distinct, but over years of
 such experiences certain commonalities gradually appear, like
 paths worn across an open field.22 These paths form a record of
 ambivalence and choice: with all their intersections, soft
 borders, and parallel routes to different destinations, they map
 the history at the core of my work.
 The Politics of Nostalgia: A Guiding Principle and a Look
 Ahead
 The physical, intellectual, and spiritual travels that Sacred
 Harp singers undertake in search of tradition are often fueled by
 nostalgia. I have come to conceive of that nostalgia as political
 and even activist in character. But how can nostalgia be
 political? Several singers asked me this question after I used
 the phrase in a posting to the Sacred Harp listservs. One woman
 remarked on the negative connotations of "politics"¿which she
 glossed as "conniving, brown-nosing, cliquish and exclusive
 behavior and maneuvering to get what you want at the expense of
 someone else"¿and contrasted them with the positive, "sad but
 sweet" connotations of nostalgia. My response relied partly on
 pointing out the less-charged definition of "politics" as a term
 that describes how people negotiate life in a social community.
 But in fact my "politics of nostalgia" also relates to that
 loaded, sharper-edged, painful kind of politics, the polarizing
 politics that has been the subject of so much anxiety and anger
 in the early years of the American twenty-first century.
 Nostalgia in the Sacred Harp community has to do with
 establishing a shared terrain that cuts across that kind of
 politics, as well as with eminently political conflicts over who
 has the right to feel nostalgic at all.
 Making a nostalgic claim about Sacred Harp singing
 constitutes a statement of affiliation, affinity, and at least
 partial authority. In a tradition where authenticity of feeling
 is a paramount emblem of valid participation, nostalgia is a
 feeling that stakes claims and creates relationships among
 singers. Nostalgia is built into the rhetoric of vanishing
 traditions and cultural crisis; it promises "compensation for the
 forgetfulness, homelessness and alienation of [modernity's]
 guilt-ridden conscience" (Steinwand 1997: 10).23 As such,
 nostalgic practices and discourses offer the Sacred Harp
 community a realm of powerful sentiment that lifelong and new
 singers can share.
 But while the politics of nostalgia deeply informs singers'
 ideologies and practices, there is more to this community than a
 collective rejection of or by modern society. As Christopher
 Waterman has written, any kind of modernity has to "focus
 retrospectively, fix ideologically, and contour aesthetically a
 master tradition in terms of which its own pragmatic and up-to-
 date identity makes sense and appears inevitable" (Waterman 1990:
 377). I practice and write about Sacred Harp singing because so
 many Americans are bringing such diverse beliefs and powers to
 bear in this process of making sense of tradition and modernity.
 
 The following chapters are first and foremost an ethnography of a
 musical community, but they also speak to themes that are of
 burning importance in both American cultural studies and on-the-
 ground American politics: tolerance, voluntary association,
 diaspora, pluralism, authenticity, stereotype, and nostalgia.
 Chapter 1 describes my ethnographic "venture to the field" and
 the dispersed, diverse community of committed singers that I
 encountered there¿all of them travelers in their own right.
 Chapter 2 explores the nature of "traditional singing" through
 description of a typical Sacred Harp convention, including the
 travels of its participants from far-flung geographical and
 cultural points of origin to "the center of the square," a
 physical and metaphorical location at the core of Sacred Harp
 practice and transmission. In Chapter 3, I approach the musical
 and social markers of traditional singing from another angle: how
 is competence acquired and recognized in different contexts? Here
 I discuss the Sacred Harp repertoire, elements of performance
 practice, and matrices of transmission, including the productive
 tension between oral and written traditions.
 Chapters 4 and 5 analyze more deliberate representations of
 Sacred Harp, explicit efforts to account for the tradition's
 importance in personal or national narratives. Chapter 4 assesses
 the recurring themes found in Sacred Harp texts and in singers'
 interpretations of them, especially texts about travel, family,
 death, and homecoming. I demonstrate how songs acquire layers of
 meaning that are specific to individual singers but are also
 deployed to account for shared values. Chapter 5 turns to media
 representations of Sacred Harp produced within and outside the
 singing community, beginning with the early twentieth-century
 local-color journalism that essentialized rural Southerners in
 general and Sacred Harp singers in particular by projecting them
 into a romanticized past. I discuss the affinities of this
 material with post-folk-revival representations of Sacred Harp,
 including newspaper journalism and recordings by early-music and
 folk-revival ensembles. After identifying some longstanding
 themes of outsider representations, I show how Sacred Harp
 singers have reproduced or subverted them in their own use of
 media technology.
 InChapter 6, I address Sacred Harp as traveling culture,
 containing aspects of both diaspora and pilgrimage, characterized
 by core values of sincerity, authenticity, and tolerance. I
 discuss singers' use of humor and irony in the service of their
 ideals, analyze their debates about the nature of authentic
 Sacred Harp experience, and show how they stake ownership claims
 by addressing the tradition variously as ethnic music, sacred
 music, historical music, and American music. This chapter
 illuminates the nature of "the politics of nostalgia" and the
 role Sacred Harp has played in broader American cultural
 narratives. I conclude by suggesting how the specifically musical
 and American nature of this tradition shapes its capacity to
 inform ethical, religious, and political modes of engagement with
 American society.