About

Sacred Harp Minutes is curating an expanding collection of humanities research data from the proceedings of Sacred Harp singings in a queryable database, making it possible for scholars and singers to ask a range of new questions about how participants in this music tradition historically engage its repertoire across time and space. The database is a collaboration between Emory University, the University of West Georgia, the Sacred Harp Publishing Company (SHPC), and the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association (SHMHA), and is directed by Jesse P. Karlsberg, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) senior digital scholarship strategist and vice president of SHPC. The database will initially feature more than 15,000 singings from 1945–present, including data from fifty annual volumes recently digitized by Emory’s Digitization Program and more than twenty-five born digital volumes.

Access Sacred Harp minutes data from 1995–present.

The Minutes

A Sacred Harp singing in Ireland, 2011. Photograph by Jesse P. Karlsberg.
A Sacred Harp singing in Cork, Ireland, 2011. Photograph by Jesse P. Karlsberg.

Sacred Harp is a style of social hymn-singing in four-part a cappella harmony. A form of shape-note singing, the style adopts a music notation system that aids in sight-singing in which notes of different pitches feature different shapes corresponding with the syllables “fa,” “sol,” “la,” and “mi.” Singers use a tunebook titled The Sacred Harp at “singing conventions” where participants take turns leading the group in a song or two of their choice. Since the book’s first publication in 1844, secretaries have recorded and published “minutes,” listing the the names of leaders and page numbers of their chosen songs from The Sacred Harp at these singings. Published in an annual volume known colloquially as the “big minutes” since 1945, the minutes comprise a remarkably granular and comprehensive record of the decentralized lived experience of a music culture across its community of practice. Since 1995, this minutes book has been edited and published by SHMHA using a born-digital process.

Phase One: The “Big Minutes”

The first phase of Sacred Harp Minutes involves the digitization, optical character recognition, and manual correction of the complete fifty-volume print run of the “big minutes” prior to its shift to a born-digital production process (1945–1994), drawn from four sources:

  1. Thirty annual volumes in the Pitts Theology Library Theology Reference collection published by SHPC and a consortium of Alabama singing conventions. These volumes date from 1961 and 1966–1994.
  2. Annie Belle Weaver Special Collections of the Ingram Library of the University of West Georgia. These volumes date from 1952–55, 1957–60, 1962, and 1965.
  3. Four volumes held by the Sacred Harp Museum of the SHPC. These volumes date from 1947, 1950, and 1963–64.
  4. Six annual volumes in the private collection of Roma Rice and Margaret Keeton, Sacred Harp singers from West Alabama. These volumes date from 1945–1946, 1948–1949, 1951, and 1956.

Phase Two: Regional Minutes Pamphlets

The second phase of Sacred Harp Minutes will supplement the “big minutes” with records from dozens of smaller pamphlet-bound volumes produced by state, regional, and local Sacred Harp singing conventions and associations. Our team has already documented over 100 extant minutes pamphlets from more than twenty different singing bodies dating from 1913 to 2004 in the collection of the Sacred Harp Museum, in private collections, and at university and public libraries and archives.

Please let us know if you have copies of Sacred Harp minutes pamphlets you would be willing to loan for digitization!

Process

All volumes included in both phases of Sacred Harp Minutes are being digitized by the Emory Libraries Digitization Program. Volumes in the collections of the University of West Georgia, the Sacred Harp Museum, and private individuals are temporarily loaned to Emory for digitization. The volumes are digitized on a Kirtas book scanner and cropped, de-skewed, and binarized by LIMB Software. The resulting page images are checked for completeness by a crowd-sourced team of forty volunteers drawn from the contemporary Sacred Harp singing community. Page images for each volume are then uploaded to the Tranksribus platform for layout analysis and text recognition. Project volunteers then manually correct the optical character recognition (OCR) results seeking to achieve diplomatic transcript–quality accuracy. This textual data will be published as it becomes available.

If you are interested in volunteering to help correct minutes text, please get in touch!

In tandem, project team members will agree upon and transform the textual information into a unified data format for both historical minutes being digitized for this project and born-digital minutes. The database will share a data model with SHMHA’s minutes submission and editing process, enabling the ingest of minutes from future years. Volunteers will then process the data to match the agreed upon database format, publish the format to the web, and develop an API so that others can easily access the data.

Projects

FaSoLa Minutes App

The "FaSoLa Minutes" app offers new ways to view and search Sacred Harp minutes.
The “FaSoLa Minutes” app offers new ways to view and search Sacred Harp minutes.

“FaSoLa Minutes” is an app for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets that that offers new ways to view and search the minutes of Sacred Harp singings from The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition since 1995. Singers can use the app to identify the song that’s been stuck in your head all morning, to learn more about the favorite songs of your singing friends, to read up on a singing you hope to attend, decide on a song to lead when the one you were planning on singing has already been used, and much more. Scholars can use the “FaSoLa Minutes” app to identify shifts in the makeup of singings, popularity of songs, and participation of individuals in this music culture. The app is available in the App Store and on Google Play for $4.99 (proceeds benefit SHMHA). SHMHA hosts a more limited web-based interface for browsing Sacred Harp minutes data. Read a review of the “FaSoLa Minutes” app by Clarissa Fetrow and an explanation of its entropy number by David Brodeur and David Smead.

Project team

Minutes and Directory

Front cover of the 1976 minutes of the Sacred Harp minutes and directory.
Front cover of the 2013 Sacred Harp minutes and directory.

Every year, SHMHA publishes the Minutes and Directory of Sacred Harp Singings, a print volume compiling the proceedings at all Sacred Harp singings held during the previous year and submitted to the minutes book’s editors, along with a directory of coming singings and other information. Minutes are submitted by secretaries of singings and compiled by the editorial committee. The cost of the book is largely funded by a small fee collected from the donations of singers on the day of each singing. Each singing then receives ten books per singing day in return, which are distributed free of charge to thousands of Sacred Harp singers across the United States and beyond. The minutes book includes:

  • Directory of all scheduled singings for the coming year, including detailed driving directions
  • Directory of all known local singing groups in the United States and abroad
  • Minutes of all singings from the previous year
  • Singers who have died in the previous two years
  • Instructions for submitting minutes

The Sacred Harp Minutes project will enable more streamlined production of future annual volumes of Minutes and Directory and will also renovate the minutes submission process, creating a mobile-friendly web-based submission process that ingests data from secretaries to feed both the print minutes book and the database featured on this site.

Project team

  • Judy Caudle, editor
  • David Ivey, associate editor
  • Chris Thorman, lead production associate
  • Carolyn Deacy, production associate

Mapping Sacred Harp’s Shifting Landscape

Sacred Harp singings in the United States as recorded in Sacred Harp Minutes, 2013. Image courtesy of Nathan Rees.
Sacred Harp singings in the United States as recorded in Sacred Harp Minutes, 2013. Image courtesy of Nathan Rees.

For its first hundred and twenty years, Sacred Harp singing was confined almost exclusively to six states in the southeastern United States: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. Beginning in the 1960s, with the support of southern singers, folk music enthusiasts in other parts of the country began forming their own conventions, modeled closely on the long-established format of historical singings. Growth in Sacred Harp outside the South since that time has been continually accelerating. Nathan Rees is using data from Sacred Harp Minutes including singing location names and corresponding GPS coordinates to map Sacred Harp singing’s recent spread.

For most of the twentieth century, minutes were published almost exclusively for singings in the six states named above; the 1985 Minutes Book documented singings in just two additional states: Kentucky and Connecticut. By 1995, there were entries for 175 singings, thirty of which took place in eighteen states outside the original six. The minutes for 2015 include a total of 289 singings. Alabama still holds the most, with ninety-two, but ninety-five singings took place in twenty-seven US states outside Sacred Harp’s pre-1970s territory. In addition, the 2015 minutes include thirty-three singings held across seven countries outside the United States.

Project team

  • Nathan Rees, lead researcher
  • Rob Dunn, GPS specialist

Elective Tempo in Decentralized Music Cultures

Autocorrelation tempogram indicating "tempo onsets" for a recording of "Where Ceaseless Ages Roll," a song in The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition. Image courtesy of Jesse P. Karlsberg and Mark T. Godfrey.
Visualization indicating potential tempos over time for a recording of “Where Ceaseless Ages Roll,” a song in The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition. Image courtesy of Jesse P. Karlsberg and Mark T. Godfrey.

Using Sacred Harp Minutes data to systematically identify songs from The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition represented in a corpus of recordings featuring 3,890 songs at Sacred Harp singings, this project uses a custom-designed beat tracking system to analyze how tempos selected by practitioners of this decentralized music culture correspond to historical prescriptive instructions for appropriate tempos. Singers at Sacred Harp singings take turns leading songs and have discretion over tempo. The 1844 Sacred Harp prescribed tempos in seconds per measure for each of the book’s seven “moods of time,” though as Allen Britton noted, “whether or not the exact tempos ascribed to the various signs was strictly observed in practice we cannot tell” (1949: 239). A 1911 revision to the book’s introduction removed these instructions. This project assess conventional wisdom among singers, which holds that tempos have increased during the twentieth century, determining that tempos for some moods of time have indeed increased, but that observed tempos for a majority are remarkably close to original prescriptions. The project suggests new approaches to extracting tempo information from beat onset data and structuring corpora used to evaluate beat tracking systems.

Project team

  • Jesse P. Karlsberg, lead researcher
  • Mark T. Godfrey, lead developer

Amateur Recording Identifier

Open-reel tapes of Sacred Harp singings in the collection of the Sacred Harp Museum. Photograph by Joy Graves.
Open-reel tapes of Sacred Harp singings in the collection of the Sacred Harp Museum. Photograph by Joy Graves.

The digitized minutes also make it possible to associate dozens of previously inaccessible private collections of home-made Sacred Harp singing recordings with time and place by computationally listening to songs and matching them to minutes. Numerous Sacred Harp singers from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Texas have collections recordings they or their singing friends and relatives made at Sacred Harp singings since the 1950s on transcription discs, open-reel tapes, audiocassette tapes, or in born-digital formats. Few of these recordings have been digitized and many lack identifying information. The Sacred Harp Museum of SHPC has partnered with Osiris Studio in Atlanta and a team of scholars to offer at-cost digitization and archiving of these recordings with the goal of preserving them and increasing the breadth and accessibility of a corpus of known Sacred Harp recordings for additional research. Using a custom-designed computational listening program designed by a music information retrieval expert, the team matches sequences of songs identified in the recordings with information from the Sacred Harp Minutes database to determine likely matches for these unidentified recordings.

Project team

  • Mark T. Godfrey, lead developer
  • Jesse P. Karlsberg, lead researcher
  • Michael Graves, audio digitization specialist
  • Nathan Rees, outreach coordinator
  • Jonathon M. Smith, outreach coordinator

Articles and Presentations

Articles

Presentations

  • Karlsberg, Jesse P. and Mark T. Godfrey. “Greatest and Ungreatest Hits.” Presentation presented at the Camp Fasola Singing School, Double Springs, AL, and Anniston, AL, 2019.
  • Karlsberg, Jesse P., Nathan K. Rees, Mark T. Godfrey, and Robert A. W. Dunn. “‘In Sweetest Union Join’: Recovering, Identifying, and Sharing Historical Sacred Harp Recordings in Private Collections.” Panel presentation at the Association of Recorded Sound Collections Conference, San Antonio, TX, 2017.
  • Quinn, Ian. “Mapping Musical Taste in the Sacred Harp Community.” Presentation presented at the Analytical Approaches to World Music Conference, New York, NY, 2016.
  • Karlsberg, Jesse P., and Mark T. Godfrey. “Assessing Tempo in Practice: Analyzing the Correspondence of Sacred Harp Tempos to Historical Guidelines Using a Tempo Estimator.” Presentation presented at the Analytical Approaches to World Music Conference, New York, NY, 2016.
  • Karlsberg, Jesse P. “Querying the Sonic Past: Digitization, Data Design, and the Minutes of Sacred Harp Singings.” Presentation presented at the Inertia: Momentum Conference, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 2016.
  • Karlsberg, Jesse P., Mark T. Godfrey, and Nathan Rees. “True Stories from the Sacred Harp Minutes.” Presentation presented at the Camp Fasola Singing School, Double Springs, AL, and Anniston, AL, 2013.

Team

Sponsoring Organizations

This project’s hosting and some other infrastructural costs are funded by two non-profit organizations, SHPC and SHMHA. The University of West Georgia’s Annie Belle Weaver Special Collections at the Ingram Library and the Sacred Harp Museum at SHPC loaned volumes from their collections to Emory for digitization. Emory University’s Pitts Theology Library, ECDS and Emory Libraries contributed technical expertise, digitized pre-1995 minutes volumes, and supported the project’s file-sharing infrastructure.

Project Staff

Advisory Board

Volunteers

Laura Akerman, Melanie Albrecht, Mairye Bates, Cathryn Bearov, Kevin Beirne, Donna Bell, John Berendzen, Adam Berey, Stacey Berkheimer, Justin Bowen, Marie Brandis, Morgan Bunch, Steve Cackley, Leigh Cooper, Kate Coxon, Emily Crespo, Michele Cull, Thom Fahrbach, Bentley C. Fallis, Clarissa Fetrow, Ann Riley Gray, Merv Horst, Sarah Huckaby, Stephen Hutcheson, Robert Kelley, Jordan Lewis, Juergen Lohnert, Porter Lontz-Underhill, Nancy Brooke Mandel, Dorothea Maynard, Judy Mincey, Marian Mitchell, Angela Myers, Linda G. Ring, Michael Ruhl, Dawn Stanford, Melissa Stephenson, Mary Amelia Taylor, Tivey, Judy Van Duzer, and Micah John Walter.

Acknowledgments

  • Allen Tullos, Wayne Morse Jr., Michael Page, Stephanie Bryan (ECDS)
  • Lars Meyer, Kyle Fenton, Bonnie Woolger (Emory Libraries Digitization Program)
  • M. Patrick Graham (retired), Richard “Bo” Manly Adams Jr., Brandon Wason (Pitts Theology Library)
  • Shanee’ Murrain and Blynne Olivieri (Annie Belle Weaver Special Collections, University of West Georgia)
  • Myrna Layton (Brigham Young University Library)
  • Jason Yang (Emory, Computer Science)
  • Sara Brumfield, Ben Brumfield (Brumfield Labs)
  • Hannah Alpert-Abrams (National Endowment for the Humanities)
  • Joel Chan (Weee!)
  • David Ivey, Judy Caudle, Angela Myers (SHMHA)
  • Karen Rollins, John Plunkett, Michael Hinton (SHPC)
  • Roma Rice, Margaret Keeton, Judy Greene, Jeannette DePoy, Warren Steel