Sacred Harp and the Storehouse of Song
This past weekend marked the publication of the "The Sacred Harp: 2025 Edition," and the tunebook's launch produced the largest Sacred Harp singing in recorded history.
A Sound That Moves the Spirit
A hollow square. Four groups of voices facing each other. No instruments, no microphones — just raw, human sound shaking the rafters of a wooden building. Each voice carries not for an audience but for one another, bound by the ancient syllables fa, sol, la, and mi. This is Sacred Harp singing: communal, ecstatic, unpolished, and alive.
In the October 2025 issue of Mojo, journalist Keith Cameron traces Robert Plant’s long musical path — from his beginnings in England’s West Midlands, through his time with Led Zeppelin, to collaborations with Alison Krauss and Patty Griffin, and finally to his latest project, Saving Grace, which reunites him with musicians from his home region.
The central interview took place in July, on the eve of Black Sabbath’s farewell concert, “Back to the Beginning,” at Villa Park — an event that became Ozzy Osbourne’s last public performance. Just hours before sitting down with Mojo, Plant received a call from Black Sabbath’s guitarist Tony Iommi inviting him to the show. Plant politely declined: “I said, Tony, I’d love to come, but I can’t… I don’t know anything about what’s going on in that world now, at all. I don’t decry it, I’ve got nothing against it. It’s just I found these other places that are so rich.”
One of those “other places” was highlighted in a sidebar to the article, aptly titled “Plant Food.” The article insert listed the music that has nourished Plant’s current work with Saving Grace. First on the list was Goodbye, Babylon, Dust-to-Digital’s inaugural release: a 160-track anthology of early American religious music. “It starts with Reverend T.T. Rose and Singers,” Plant explained. “Recorded in Grafton, Wisconsin, one of the main stop-off points for those mobile recording dates. The Sacred Harp singing is the place to go: a huge group of people, no instruments, no organized harmonies. It is almost insane.”
Sacred Harp Singing
In 1934, Vanderbilt professor Donald Davidson contributed an essay entitled “The Sacred Harp in the Land of Eden” to the Virginia Quarterly Review. He described a visit to a Sacred Harp singing in rural Middle Georgia during the early 20th century. According to Davidson, these singings, held in small country churches, “keep alive the ‘shape-note’ singing tradition” — a style of communal, four-part, a cappella music with deep roots in Elizabethan and early American culture.
Davidson writes about families arriving in wagons, carts, and old cars, dressed in their Sunday best. He describes the atmosphere as both reverent and festive, with men, women, and children joining in. The leader of the singing, Brother Oakes, welcomes visitors warmly and explains “the old songs are best. They fetch you here (pointing to his heart).”
Inside the church, wooden benches were pulled into a hollow square, one side for each part of the harmony. Standing at the front, Oakes announced, “The lesson will begin with Number Fifty-Nine.” (Davidson notes that the language of “lesson” and “class” echoes the singing schools of the 18th century.) Oakes hummed softly to find the pitch, leaned toward the others so they could try it with him, then raised his hand to set the tune.
With a sweep of the hand to the right, the center, and the left, each group proclaimed the pitch. Then, with a downward stroke of his arm, the full square launched into song, calling out fa, sol, la and giving voice to the ancient shapes — triangle, circle, square — that guide their tune.
In Davidson’s opinion, Brother Oakes was a good song leader. He tolerated no dragging. He swept all along with the strong trumpet of his voice and a commanding arm which “waved us into the deep rhythm of the antique spiritual music.”
Davidson described the music as powerful, raw, and deeply moving. Unlike refined choral singing, he wrote that it was about feeling and conviction, not polish. Participants sang for themselves and for God, not for an audience. The effect was emotional and communal — combining poetry, religion, and tradition.
Sacred Harp on 78-RPM Records
I first encountered Sacred Harp music in 1997, while listening to the Anthology of American Folk Music. The two performances of the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers that compiler Harry Smith included on the anthology stayed with me. A year later, while ordering cassette tapes from record collector Joe Bussard, I was pleased to hear more examples of Sacred Harp from 78s — including the Daniels-Deason Sacred Harp Singers’ recording of Primrose Hill, cut in Atlanta on October 24, 1928:
By then, I was beginning to assemble tracks for what would become the Goodbye, Babylon box set. To present the music well, I needed to understand it more deeply. At the Georgia State University library, I discovered Buell E. Cobb Jr.’s The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (1978). The book was a revelation. After finishing it, I found Buell’s email address online and reached out. We began corresponding, and he pointed me toward later recordings — ones made on-location that recorded the full force of an entire church in song, not just the four-singer ensembles that recording companies in the 1920s used to simulate the sound.
There were seven recordings of Sacred Harp singing included on the final tracklist for Goodbye, Babylon. I asked Buell about including a primer in the accompanying book, and he suggested I contact Warren Steel, professor at the University of Mississippi. Warren embraced the idea and contributed both a concise introduction and detailed annotations for each Sacred Harp track. I still love Warren’s primer, but seven years after Goodbye, Babylon was released, he wrote a book called The Makers of the Sacred Harp. The shorter introduction he published there, I believe, serves as an even better entry point for this article:
“Sacred Harp singing is a community musical and social event, emphasizing participation, not performance, where people sing songs from a tunebook called The Sacred Harp, printed in music notation using four shaped notes. It is the pre-eminent living reflection of the music of early American psalmody. While not identical to the congregational singing of eighteenth-century New England, it preserves several fundamental characteristics of that era, including a complex of musical skills learned in singing schools and an eclectic repertory of religious part-songs by European and American composers, printed in an oblong book. Since the nineteenth century, Sacred Harp singings have employed a distinctive ‘hollow square’ seating arrangement and rotation of leaders; they begin each song with solmization followed by one or more verses of sung text. Despite its reliance on printed materials, Sacred Harp singing is a form of traditional music that stands on the persistent collaboration of generations of composers, songbook compilers, editors, and revisers, singing teachers, song leaders, and singers of all ages who identify with its sincerity, enthusiasm, devotional strength, and deep historical roots.” — David Warren Steel from his 2010 book, The Makers of the Sacred Harp.
Camp Fasola and the 1991 Sacred Harp Tunebook
In 2003, as I was immersing myself in Sacred Harp singing, a group of enthusiasts launched a summer camp designed to teach newcomers the tradition and how to shape-note sing. Friends in the Sacred Harp community encouraged April and me to attend.
That summer we signed up for Camp Fasola, held at Camp Lee in Anniston, Alabama. For a week we were campers — learning the rudiments, sitting in our vocal sections around the hollow square, and taking part in singing after singing. We communed with campers from across the U.S. and England, all drawn by the same pull of this music.
The tunebook in our hands was The Sacred Harp, 1991 Edition. First compiled in 1844 by Benjamin Franklin White of Hamilton, Georgia, the book had been revised only a few times: 1869, 1911, 1936, and the 1991 version, which we used at camp.
The 1991 revision was guided by Hugh McGraw, chairman of its Music Committee. I came to know Hugh when I began doing research at the Sacred Harp Museum in Carrollton, Georgia. After I checked out several items, he started phoning me — curious about what I was working on and eager to discuss how he could help. Hugh was a great ambassador for Sacred Harp. Beyond the singings themselves, he worked to bring folklorists like Alan Lomax and Art Rosenbaum into the community, ensuring the music would be recorded, documented, and carried forward to wider audiences.
The Sacred Harp: 2025 Edition
This past weekend in Atlanta marked the first public unveiling of the fifth revision to The Sacred Harp. With Hugh McGraw’s passing in 2017, leadership of the Revision-Music Committee passed to David Ivey of Huntsville, Alabama. Last Friday, he led an all-day symposium in Decatur, and April and I were in attendance. Here is April’s write-up of that day’s events:
The symposium brought singers from across the U.S. and abroad to Holy Trinity Parish in Decatur, just outside Atlanta, for “Revising the Sacred Harp,” a day-long gathering marking the launch of The Sacred Harp: 2025 Edition. It featured presentations by members of the revision committee, scholars, and composers, and concluded with a singing from the new book. It was also the very first opportunity to buy a copy before the weekend’s United Sacred Harp Musical Association convention.
The morning opened with remarks from David Ivey, chairman of the revision committee, who traced the long history of committee-led revisions and emphasized the trust and participation of the worldwide Sacred Harp community. Over six years, the committee reviewed 1,155 submissions, held test singings across North America and the UK, and engaged in an exhaustive process of proofreading, design, and research. The result: 113 new songs, revised rudiments and indexes, restored traditions, and a book that reflects both historical continuity and contemporary vitality.
After Ivey’s plenary, the symposium carried on across a full day. Sessions ranged from teaching rudiments and editing texts to panels on scripture citations, attributions, and book design. The two tracks ran in parallel, offering both technical insight into the making of the book and a living glimpse of its new music. The day closed with a singing from the new edition, bringing participants back together in a shared act of music.
“This songbook is the central character that binds this amazing worldwide community of singers. May God bless us as we continue our journey of song and worship and fellowship together.” — David Ivey
The following day, April and I attended what may well have been the largest Sacred Harp singing ever held. It had been years since either of us had been to a singing, and I might not have made it to this one if it had not been for Matt Hinton telling Joe Boyd and me after our conversation about Joe’s back in March how special this event would be.
That morning at the venue, I spoke with Jesse P. Karlsberg — scholar, historian, and member of the Revision-Music Committee for the 2025 Edition — about the significance of the gathering. He informed me that more than 700 singers had assembled for the singing convention, the largest number on record. With documentation only going back to World War II, he speculated that it was quite possibly the greatest assembly of Sacred Harp singers under one roof in the tradition’s history.
And the sound was tremendous. One by one, composers stepped to the center of the hollow square to lead their newly-added songs, each voice lifted by the power of hundreds behind it, filling the room with sound. Here is Andy Ditzler leading his composition, “Granada:”
In his 1978 book The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music, Buell Cobb reflected on the necessity of songbook revisions:
Throughout the history of the Sacred Harp, the urge to improve or renew the storehouse of songs has been vital. And where this urge is lacking or where it remains unfulfilled the song tradition dies. — Buell E. Cobb, Jr.
The idea of a “storehouse of songs” brought me back to Keith Cameron’s Mojo article on Robert Plant. Throughout the interview, Plant referenced many artists and songs that have shaped his musical journey:
“Diggin’ My Potatoes” – Lonnie Donegan
“When the Levee Breaks” – Kansas Joe & Memphis Minnie
“Time Will Show the Wiser” – Fairport Convention
“Your Long Journey” – Doc Watson
“Season of the Witch” – Donovan
“Hey Ya!” – Outkast (performed by Suzi Dian’s band)
“Wedding Dress” – traditional, arranged by Nora Brown
“Chevrolet” – Memphis Minnie & Kansas Joe McCoy
“Sweet Home Chicago” – Kokomo Arnold
“Abraham, Martin and John” – Dion
Not to mention all of the albums and anthologies like Goodbye, Babylon that he speaks about in the Plant Food article insert.
Thinking back to Plant’s phone call with Tommy Iommi where he stated that he has “found these other places that are so rich,” it sounds like he is describing his own library of sound — the same kind of storehouse of songs that sustains the Sacred Harp community.
A couple of weeks ago, April and I attended an event at Emory University that featured John Fenn from the Library of Congress interviewing David Harrington from the Kronos Quartet. During the conversation, David spoke about how we all are weaving a Personal Library of Sound as we go through life. Harrington described how certain sounds — from a chord, a single note, or a voice — can anchor deeply within, enriching and guiding our musical life. Each note becomes a vessel for memory, emotion, technique, and identity — a personal “library” that we carry and draw upon in all of our artistic journeys.
The recent article in Mojo is not the first time that Plant has promoted our company’s efforts. In the early 2000s, not long after the release of Goodbye, Babylon, he said this to a group of engineers while receiving an award:
“Somebody mentioned the Fillmore in 1968. There were no monitors, no plugins, none of this s**t. I don’t know how you can justify being here. You have no right! What happened to the human voice? Go out and get yourself a box set on Dust-to-Digital. Check it out.”
To answer Robert’s rhetorical question about “what happened to the human voice,” — I believe that it lives on in communities like that of Sacred Harp singers, and it continues to live within each one of us, renewed by artists who remind us to always listen for it.
Additional Notes and Links
Thank you for reading this article! We will be sending a longer cut of the audio from the Sacred Harp singing this past weekend to Paid Subscribers very soon. Also, as I mentioned, Goodbye, Babylon includes seven Sacred Harp recordings. Additionally, in 2006 we co-produced an album of Sacred Harp entitled I Belong to This Band: 85 Years of Sacred Harp Recordings with Erica and Matt Hinton, producers of the beautiful documentary Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp. The photo of Rev. T.T. Rose that was included in the Plant Food insert in Mojo and is shown above came from writer, musicologist, and producer Jerry Zolten who connected with Rose’s daughter several years after the release of Goodbye, Babylon. Thanks to Jerry for letting Mojo and us use the photo! And thanks to Jesse P. Karlsberg for his help with this article! Finally, we recently launched our new website: www.dust-digital.com. Please check it out if you have not already, and be on the lookout for an upcoming social media post highlighting the Human Voice. As always, we appreciate your support!
Nice article! Thank you. It was a remarkable event.
One note: Donald Davidson's essay was titled "The Sacred Harp in the Land of Eden"
Plant had the right idea about sound and the absence of what feels like the human voice, but he completely missed the point of why it's like it is. It's not a question of plug-ins this or that but of the way people are recorded away from real acoustical spaces, in isolation and in recording studios where all the acoustics are created through processing. I say this from experience as a jazz musician who only records acoustically and live, all musicians in the same space, with some digital assist but always retaining the clash of acoustical intervals and harmonics. So it can still be done and it is done not just among the Sacred Heart people. There are still those of us out here who value, even with electronic music, the need to live and make sound in the air.