OR over twenty years now, the books of the late George Pullen Jackson have drawn attention to the wealth of significant and sometimes beautiful material in the Old Harp hymnals. Many of these tunes show the influence of secular balladry, and a large percentage of the hymns were written by rural musicians with no more musical training than that received in the singing schools. For these reasons, Jackson believed the music of the Sacred Harps to be true folk music and coined the term white spiritual to apply to a hymn of this type. The present article is concerned with a consideration of these hymns as true composed music, albeit composed music on a somewhat primitive level. At first thought the distinction would seem to be a somewhat academic one, since the folksong background of the tunes and the lack of formal training on the part of the composers is admitted. Nevertheless, Jackson's interest lay only in the melodies of the hymns, which he traced and classified. A folksong melody, or a melody showing folksong characteristics, however, does not mean that the composition using it automatically becomes folk music. We do not, for example, consider the Brahms Hungarian Dances as such. In both cases other elements need to be taken into consideration. Few scholars have bothered to examine the harmonic element in the music of the Old Harps. Charles Seeger has called attention to a similarity in the contrapuntal practices in some of the three-part shape note hymns and European music of the medieval period.' This is a field yet to be explored in detail. The present writer is interested in the evidences of a still earlier type of harmony, a type of harmony whose European occurence is a matter of inference since it would have been in use before a reliable method of notation was formulated. A year before Jackson's first book, the famous White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, Joseph Yasser published A Theory of Evolving Tonality. This is a long and scholarly work, and it is only the first section (which deals with infra-diatonic harmony) that is pertinent to this discussion. Suffice it to say that two big conclusions were drawn: first, that all music at a certain stage of development tends to be based on the pentatonic scale; and second, that the instinctive and accoustically correct harmony for this scale is quartal rather than tertian. Yasser supports these theories with examples of Chinese music. Six years later he attempted to show that the Gregorian chant was originally pentatonic in character and that his theories of infra-diatonic harmony could be applied to it as well.3 Now it happens that a large number of the shape note hymns are also pentatonic, and it seems obvious that they would be fine material to prove or disprove the Yasser theories. Hence the present study was undertaken.