Steven Sabol has announces a MAJOR update to his encyclopedic website of Shape-Note resources! What follows is his announcement:
I have updated all chapters of my online resource guide to Sacred Harp and related shape-note music. The last update was in December 2024, although I updated the tunebook chapter last August before the Sacred Harp: 2025 Edition debuted. The guide is located on Warren Steel’s webspace at https://home.olemiss.edu/~mudws/resource/. I obtain most of my information about resources from this FB group, so they are known to many of you, but the guide is intended for a broader audience ranging from newbies to “lifers” and even musicologists. It is not intended to be a curated selection of the most worthy resources but instead a list of every resource that I know about that is at least somewhat worthy to the shape-note singing community. A few of the new items are as follows:
A note on the semantics of “tunebooks,” “songbooks,” and “hymnals.” (No, they are not hymnals.)
Items related to the new Sacred Harp: 2025 Edition: Concordance, indices, recordings of newly added songs, videos of the Symposium, Fasola Minutes app for iOS, Bremen’s singing robots, etc.
Valley Pocket Harmonist database.
Southern and Western Pocket Harmonist, facsimile reprint produced by Kevin Isaac.
Midwest Supplement (published by Chicago singers) digital download and songs sung by Judy Hauff.
Print publication of the first half of George Pullen Jackson’s book White and Negro Spirituals, produced by Kevin I. Slaughter.
SingLoud.org website of Kevin Isaac.
Hollow Square Books, where one can buy several books as well as T-shirts and bumper stickers.
Vital Sparks, thoughtful essays on tunebook texts by Will Fitzgerald.
YouTube videos of songs from The Georgian Harmony.
Terry Wootten’s recordings of the Wootten family singings.
Other old recordings (mostly LPs) uploaded to YouTube by Jeremiah Ledbetter.
A few new websites and Facebook pages of local singing groups around the world. There are now around 178 Facebook pages/groups listed in the resource guide. However, many seem to be inactive with no postings in years. I have retained them since the singing groups that they describe may not be moribund. (I keep wondering whether in Busan (S. Korea) they sing Sacred Harp every Friday in Millak Subway Station between exits 3 and 4, as their FB page (2014) states.)
I am sure that some of the resources (such as convention CDs) listed in this guide are no longer available even though they are listed as such on the web, but I lack the time to proactively check their availability. If listed items you have produced are no longer available, I am willing to delete them. Of course, I want to know about any errors and resources that I should list but have not.
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