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Jeremiah Ledbetter has made a three and a half hour long mix of selected recordings of the 100 least led songs in The Sacred Harp that have been carried forward to the 2025 edition. This was determined by taking the overall rankings from 2015-2024 minutes and excluding ones that were either removed in the new…
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Abbreviations and initialisms have long been used when writing about shape-note tunebooks—whether as convenient shorthand among singers (“See you at the NSVAD!”) or as concise references in scholarship and editorial work. My own system draws on several sources, but one of the most influential precedents comes from George Pullen Jackson, whose writings helped standardize how…
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Publisher of The Trumpet explores the life, theology, and poetry of a foundational hymnist. Will Fitzgerald—compiler of the serialized four-shape tunebooklet The Trumpet, writer at entish.org, and speaker at the recent “Revising The Sacred Harp” Symposium launching the 2025 Edition—has recently published a five-part series exploring the life, work, and theology of Isaac Watts. These…
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A short (1:59) film introducing Sacred Harp singing, produced by Two Egg TV, was recently uploaded to YouTube. The class sings verses one and three of 36b “Ninety-Fifth Psalm” from the “Cooper Book” edition of The Sacred Harp. Dothan is the historical home of the 1902 revision by W.M.Cooper, and the singing took place at…
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In the mid-nineteenth century, comic songs circulated alongside serious hymns, often poking fun at doctors, preachers, and other figures of daily life. One such piece is “The Botanic Doctor” by Edmund Dumas (1810–1882), printed in The Organ, a short-lived periodical edited by B. F. White, compiler of The Sacred Harp. The song lampoons the practice…
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We’ve placed this post in the theme of “preserving the cover”, really it is about how people are marking books to show they are loaners used at their regular singings. This design will not protect the most outer edges of the left and right side of the front cover design, but it does add very…
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During the very first introductory singing with the new Sacred Harp: 2025 Edition, many singers noticed that the gilt lettering and decorative elements on the front cover began wearing off—my own copy included. For a book that will see years of heavy use, this was surprising and disappointing. The cloth material chosen for the cover,…
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Ireland’s Fire Draw Near podcast’s latest episode, Episode LXIII: Shape Note Singing in the United States, offers a richly textured exploration of Sacred Harp and related traditions, grounded in two recent interviews with practitioners Howe Pearson and Sasha Hsuczyk. It traces the evolution of shape-note singing—its roots in 18th- and 19th-century America, its migration from…
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Below are YouTube streams for forthcoming United Sacred Harp events. As I will be at the events, if these links change, I may not be able to make adjustments. You can find current live stream links here: https://www.youtube.com/@sacredharpmuseum8890/streams Symposiums Friday 12th All-day symposium featuring presentations about the making of The Sacred Harp, 2025 Edition Singing…
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COMING SOON! “Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp,” directed by Matt & Erica Hinton, originally aired on PBS in 2008. Using the latest technology, the makers have remastered the film for a new release, featuring the following improvements: Completely remastered, Upconverted from SD to HD, Deinterlaced, Partially re-edited, New archival materials, Never…