This authoritative reference work investigates the roots of the Sacred Harp, the central collection of the deeply influential and long-lived southern tradition of shape-note singing. Where other studies of the Sacred Harp have focused on the sociology of present-day singers and their activities, David Warren Steel and Richard H. Hulan concentrate on the regional culture that produced the Sacred Harp in the nineteenth century and delve deeply into history of its authors and composers. They trace the...

Daniel Belknap was a farmer, mechanic, and singing-master in Framingham, Massachusetts, who compiled four sacred and one secular tunebooks. These featured his own sacred compositions as well as those by other New England composers. While Belknap was not as flamboyant, prolific, nor as innovative as his contemporaries, he nevertheless provided fitting and eloquent religious and social music for his own and neighboring communities.

A prolific exponent of the American musical idiom developed by Daniel Read and other Connecticut composers in the 1780s and 1790s, Jenks contributed 127 pieces to the 10 collections of psalmody he issued from 1799 to 1818. His "Mount Vernon" (1700) is the best known of the many pieces mourning George Washington; "Sorrow's Tear" (1804) may be the earliest American setting of a poem by Thomas Moore. Compositions by Jenks were reprinted by other compilers throughout the nineteenth century, and songs...