Sacred Harp Singing Tuesday July 9, 2002 Hills Chapel, Northampton, MA HD 720p

It was a good one- the fourth consecutive day (officially) of singing shape-note music together with local friends and visitors from Texas, New Mexico, Oregon, Minnesota, California and around the northeast. It's been a great long weekend of singing for about twenty years now, and a lot of us missed it sorely last summer. Saturday before the first Sunday in July is the Pioneer Valley all day singing in Sunderland, followed by a mixed book singing in Amherst on Sunday, Harp of Ages Monday night in Leyden and finally the weekly Sacred Harp singing in Northampton. Of course there was lots of additional singing here and there, some of which I also found on some old tapes and intend to edit and post at some point. I decided to just post this one unedited to give a better sense of things.


There's a lot of backstory, which I'll mostly leave off for now, but the Tuesday singing at Helen Hills Chapel has become something of an institution that's central to shape-note singing in the region and has helped set the stage for other weekly singings around the country and beyond. I'll defer to Allison Steel for details on its origin, but I remember her starting to show up at the Amherst singing hosted by Ruth and Richard Hooke around 1997 or 98. In the land before internet, one of the main ways a lot of people found out about it was through my band Cordelia's Dad, whose shows typically devolved from torrential feedback into post-gig shape note singing. Allison and her friends Jess and Mary Ellen started the Hills Chapel singing around then, in 1998.


It's always been about as informal as you can see here. For bigger, all day sings we've always used the standard practice among most Sacred Harp singers for such events- an arranging committee calling leaders they either know or who have signed on to lead a lesson. At smaller gatherings comprised mostly of people who know each other, we've generally gone around the square which is nice because it gives everyone a chance to call a song or pass the hat to the next person in line. That doesn't work, though, when you have as many as 100 people over the course of an evening, with different schedules, coming and going, switching parts and maybe only able to be there for a half hour but possibly looking forward to leading a song all week.


I hadn't heard the phrase "open call" until ten or fifteen years ago- I'm not sure if that's because it's a neologism or, like most things, I just didn't know about it. In any case, it describes how the Tuesday singing has mostly worked- people calling a song when they like, trying not to hog the center, letting everyone know that they can do that (whether or not they want to lead) and trying to encourage people individually who might be shy or visiting or new to the whole thing. For a year or two before the shutdown, however, we were following our friend Becky Wright's suggestion and going around during the third, typically smaller, session. It's a work in progress.


If you've gotten this far, you might suspect that I'm writing about minutiae because it's easier than reckoning with all that's going on in this video. Some of it should be clear even to a casual viewer, but much of it will not be. There's just a lot. But there's also a lot of beauty here that doesn't require you to know much of anything about the minutiae, the people, history, theology, music. I hope you enjoy the video and that, when it becomes possible, you might come sing on a Tuesday. You're always welcome.