Category: ·Recordings & Media
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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…
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Every so often a video comes along that manages to explain the history and culture of shape-note music in a way that is both accessible and historically grounded. A new video by Levi McClain does exactly that, exploring the long and fascinating struggle between shape-note notation and the now-dominant round-note system. The video tells the…
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There’s an exciting new radio special that celebrates the rich tradition of American shape-note singing—an hour-long journey into the sounds and stories of Sacred Harp and its related tunebooks. Shapes of America, produced by Louisville Public Media and the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, traces this distinctive style of communal, a cappella singing from its early…
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For those of us who are engaged with the Sacred Harp tradition, the hollow square is where the magic happens—voices raised in four-part harmony, loud and unamplified. But the endurance of these 19th-century shape-note tunes often means they travel far beyond the singing school, finding new life in unexpected places. One compelling recent interpretations comes…
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Step inside the world of The Sacred Harp—a 19th-century tunebook kept alive in communal gatherings of unaccompanied, full-voiced singing. Singing the Shapes invites viewers into this radically participatory tradition, where anyone who shows up can lead, and the boundary between singer and audience disappears. Filmed across the South, Midwest, and beyond, the documentary captures the…
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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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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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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…