Mapping Sacred Harp’s Shifting Landscape

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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.

  • Nathan Rees, lead researcher
  • Robert A. W. Dunn, GPS specialist