Shape-Note Tune Books and Primitive Hymns

Abstract

appeared since 1800 and the hymnody of the rural South that survives in the oral tradition is a difficult one to analyze, and is at this late date probably lost forever to complete understanding. However, careful study of current singing traditions in light of the published sacred music that has accumulated over the years affords a useful perspective on this relationship. I recently had the opportunity to conduct a field study of Primitive Baptist hymn singing, including both black and white churches, in the Blue Ridge region of Virginia and North Carolina, and found it to be pertinent to this issue in several ways.1 First, these Primitive Baptists are committed to a uniquely conservative philosophy that extends to their way of singing, which is one of the oldest surviving sacred song traditions in America. Second, although the black and white branches of the church are now independent, like many Southern denominations, they were united until the post-bellum divisions of the 1870s and 1880s, and can thus be viewed as two diverging exponents of a single singing tradition, subtraditions that are the products of contrasting cultural preferences. The complicating factor is that both branches possess a tune repertory that may have been strongly influenced by published tune sources. My purpose in this essay is to summarize the findings of my fieldwork and, drawing on some of the historical evidence, to try to clarify some features of the fuzzy relationship between the oral tradition and published tune books. On the face of it, the Primitive Baptists possess an old-fashioned hymnody of remarkable strength and vitality. Largely responsible is the church's nonconformist predestinarian theology and its distrust of innovation. Just as most conservative Primitive Baptists reject Sunday schools, seminaries, foreign missions, and most other proselytizing institutions, they continue to repudiate modernizations in hymn singing that have been taken up over the years by more progressive denominations, including the use of harmony, written music, musical instruments, soloists, and performing choirs. Their position is not rooted simply in a stubborn rejection of new ideas in general or musical progress in particular,