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Big news for the Sacred Harp community: Singing the Shapes: Songs of the Enduring Sacred Harp, Timothy Morton’s long-awaited feature documentary, will have its world premiere at the 2026 New Orleans Film Festival this October. More than seven years in the making, Singing the Shapes approaches Sacred Harp from inside the tradition. Morton—a filmmaker, gardener,…
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One hardly expects a midcentury children’s Western to pause for a detailed lesson in shape-note singing, yet that is precisely what happens in Idena McFadin Clark’s Little Dude, a 1952 novel about young Jim MacFarlane and life on a Texas ranch in 1872. Amid the book’s frontier adventures, Clark depicts a community singing with remarkable…
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Jeff Kellem’s ATypI Stanford 2026 presentation, “Music to Their Eyes: A New Shape-Note Typeface for Sacred Harp Singers,” is now available on YouTube. The talk was given for an international audience of type designers and tells the story of the new shape-note music typeface commissioned for the 2025 Edition of The Sacred Harp. Jeff discusses…
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This past weekend, John delRe and his family—including an all-grown-up Leyland—led thier annual Northern Shenandoah Valley Double-All-Day Singing. The article below, published in January 1995, carries photographs and interviews from the very first of those gatherings, back when the class sang from The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition and the tradition was still finding its footing…
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The Silent Harp is a SingLoud.org project tracing tunes that appeared and later disappeared from the Denson-book line of The Sacred Harp. The 1869 edition introduced many new songs, some short-lived, others sung for more than a century. These tunes remind us that The Sacred Harp has never been completed fixed in time or place,…
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The online calendar and directory at ShapeNoteSingings.com has received a substantial upgrade, adding a number of long-requested features that make it far more useful both for regular singers and for local organizers trying to keep information current. This project has been one of the most practical and robust resources on the web and this upgrade…
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I have often remarked “for a style of music noted for its loudness, it sure is funny how often people whisper and mumble out their song number!” Just recently I quipped it again, and someone said “I have written on just that very topic.” They have graciously sent me their thoughts, and I concur. Calling…
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A growing collection of videos documenting singings from Raymond C. Hamrick’s Georgian Harmony is now available online: https://www.youtube.com/@georgianharmony/videos The material falls broadly into two categories: multi-hour singings and recordings of individual tunes. Both are valuable. The former preserves the lived context of the music, while the latter allows closer engagement with specific compositions. Hamrick (1915–2014)…
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The podcast How Can I Keep From Singing?, hosted by educator and community-singing advocate Stuart Stotts, explores the enduring role of participatory singing across a wide range of traditions. Through interviews with practitioners, scholars, and organizers, the series consistently highlights singing not as performance, but as a lived, communal practice embedded in culture and everyday…
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This short video documents the process of screen-printing custom T-shirts for a Berlin all-day shape-note singing. It shows the preparation of the screens, applying ink to the shirts, and the hands-on printing process used to produce the event shirts. The project highlights the small-scale, DIY spirit often found in shape-note communities, where singers create their…