Category: Publications

by Mark Matthews

Mark Matthews writes and calls for dances in western Montana. This paper was gleaned from his book Cakewalking out of Slavery: A Study of Racism through Music and Dance, 1619-1910). It is part of the four-volume series called “Swinging through American History.” Other volumes include: Square Your Sets: The Birth of American Social Dance, (1651-1935); Promenading toward Democracy: The Great Square Dance Revival, (1935-2010); and Jitterbugging across the Colorline: Desegregating the Dance Floor, (1910-1980). For more information about these books, contact Mark.

For both black and white Americans, the dance known as the cakewalk—which reached a zenith in popularity from the 1870s to the turn-of-the-century—served as a cultural bridge from plantation/frontier society to the modern industrial age. It was the first African-American dance to achieve national exposure and to saturate white culture both onstage and in the parlor. The dance marked the commencement of the transformation of slave art into modern black American culture. It also paved the way for the acceptance of African-American dance and music in the United States—as well as around the world. The cakewalk was the first step, so to speak, that ultimately led to African traditions dominating American pop culture—which in turn helped to racially integrate this country.

By the 1890s, the manner in which people lived in both Europe and North America was radically changing and so was popular culture. “A society which was more and more ceasing to be society in the old sense could not be fed on stale, warmed-over delicacies from the princely kitchen,” observed Curt Sachs in 1937. Whites on the two continents were switching from merely admiring black dance, Sachs said, to adopting “with disquieting rapidity” (as he put it) a succession of slave dances. [Sachs, Curt. World History of the Dance. New York: W.W. Norton (1937), 444-5.]

The origins of the cakewalk are lost in history, but two apocryphal theories surfaced at the turn of the nineteenth century—with both focusing upon the matrimonial sacrament. One report theorized that the cakewalk started with the French blacks of Louisiana around 1700. Apparently, male slaves in New Orleans at that time entered a cakewalk to claim a mate. “In effect the cake walk was not different from the old Scotch marriage watch which required only public acknowledgment from the contracting parties,” reported a newspaper. The dance itself allegedly resembled several old French country dances. [The Washington Post, “Cake-Walk Strikes London, The.” 4 Apr. 1898: 6.]

Also in 1898, a black entertainer in New York City claimed to have heard a tale from an ex-slave that placed the origin of the cakewalk in early colonial Virginia, where a wealthy planter allegedly ordered a competition between two male house slaves who were wooing the same female slave. “Accordingly [the master] gave all hands a holiday, invited his friends as spectators, and prepared for a grand walking match for the hand of the dusky bride. In order to heighten the rivalry he ordered the cook to prepare a monster cake, which should be carried off as a trophy and foundation for the bridal feast of the successful competitor.” [The Washington Post, “Chat About Stage Folk.” 6 Feb 1898: 22.]

Around 1915, Ethel Urlin proposed this intriguing theory: “negroes borrowed the idea of it from the War Dances of the Seminoles, an almost extinct Indian tribe. The negroes were present as spectators at these dances, which consisted of wild and hilarious jumping and gyrating, alternating with slow processions in which the dancers walked solemnly in couples. The idea grew, and the style in walking came to be practiced among the negroes as an art.” However, Urlin offered no sources to support her theory. [Urlin, Ethel L. Dancing, Ancient and Modern. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent (circa 1915). Web. Open Library. Internet Archive. 29 May 2014: 13.]

With no substantiation, the above three theories cannot be taken too seriously. More modern historians believed that the slaves borrowed the structure of the cakewalk from the grand march—or promenade—with which white couples kicked off a ball by entering the hall in file with pomp and circumstance. In turn, the grand march likely evolved from the procession of the twelfth century, during which couples, or trios, walked in formation through a town or village to the accompaniment of strolling musicians. When royalty took part in a procession, Rules of Precedency evolved that determined the order in which the couples would line up—with the king and queen at the head, of course. By the mid-1800s, the elite class in the United States typically opened their balls with a grand march.

The idea of presenting a cake or other edible prize for a dancing or athletic match also had precedence. Aubanus, a writer of the sixteenth century, noted that “at the Easter season there were foot-courses in the meadows in which the victors carried off each a cake. . . .” A Puritan writer of the same era warned: “All games where there is any hazard of loss are strictly forbidden; not so much as a game of stool-ball for a tansy [herbal plant].” And in 1657, a poet alluded to cake, sugar, wine and a tansy as prizes for winning a round at “stool-ball.” [“Our One Hundred Questions.” Lippincott’s (Jan 1889): 137.] Moreover, as Jamison pointed out, winners of dance contests during the late seventeenth century in County Westmeath, Ireland, often won “cake and apples” for their efforts. [Jamison, Phil. Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance. Urbana, Ill.: U. Illinois P. (2015):123.]

During their version of this pageantry, slaves assumed the classic European dance carriage by keeping their torsos erect, lifting their feet from the ground (not shuffling) and moving vertically. However, of even more significance, they added an African flair by injecting a swing into their movements. Dressed in secondhand finery they performed a high-kicking, prancing and strutting walk-around to a musical accompaniment that gained more swing in rhythm as the decades passed.

During slavery times, to prepare for a walk at a Southern plantation blacks first cleared and swept the lawn in the center of their cabins or some other open area, and then marked out a circular track. Oftentimes, in the center of the loop a cake stood on a stand which might be “profusely decorated with greens and festoons of colored tissue-paper.” A white observer described one trophy cake as resembling “a cart-wheel in its dimensions.” The walkers often drew lots for partners. The judges could include either the plantation owner and his guests, or distinguished individuals from the slave community. A variety of instruments—depending on the availability of local musicians—provided the music. Often, the slaves’ own voices accompanied the musicians. Once the walk commenced, the participants pranced around the track until the judges “were weary” and signaled for a halt. The umpires then presented the cake to the winners, “who were then publicly acknowledged, by reason of their superior grace and taste, to have won or taken the cake.” [“Our One Hundred Questions.” Lippincott’s (Jan 1889).]

In some regions slaves participated in a cakewalk that followed a straight line marked by chalk. This likely occurred in confined indoor spaces. “There was no prancing, just a straight walk on a path made by turns and so forth, along which the dancers made their way with a pail of water on their heads. The couple that was the most erect and spilled the least or no water at all was the winner,” according to Lynn Fauley Emery. Slaves referred to this type of performance as the “chalk line walk.” [“Our One Hundred Questions.” Lippincott’s (Jan 1889): 92.]

Slaves in early cakewalks occasionally caricatured idiosyncrasies of movement and behavior of certain whites who they may have known. One former slave explained: “Us slaves watched white folks’ parties where the guests danced a minuet and then paraded in a grand march . . . Then we’d do it, too, but we used to mock ’em, every step. Sometimes the white folks noticed it, but they seemed to like it. I guess they thought we couldn’t dance any better.” [Stearns, Marshall and Jean. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. New York: Da Capo (1994): 22.] Consequently, slaves used the performance as a means to vent frustrations resulting from physical and psychological suppression—as well as to simply have fun. Whereas whites stereotyped blacks with the Jim Crow dance, blacks turned the tables when they mocked their white oppressors during the cakewalk.

Servants who worked in intimate contact with whites in the “big house” and who developed more refined manners themselves, likely introduced the cakewalk to the field hands. Consequently, participants in the dance avoided hip gyrations, torso twistings, slouched carriages, jig steps, and the general “wildness” of a typical slave dance. Years after the Civil War, a cakewalker explained: “Fancy steps don’t go with us. We have to walk straight, and the most dignified of the steps are the ones that catches the cake. They judges us by the collar and the pants and the most gracefulness in keeping time to the music.” [The Washington Post, “Here and There.” 2 Mar 1896: 3.]

Fancy steps may have been frowned upon, but individuals often developed their own “little tricks of grace.” For the women these might include subtle movements such as “turning [the] toes a trifle out and then giving them a sudden turn in”; or, lifting one foot, “like a young pullet about to steal upon a forbidden flower-bed where the seed has been newly sown,” and then following it cautiously with the other. Sometimes a female dancer “minced, like an old maid that is afraid of not being graceful” only to switch into a “long, swinging step that was the perfection of grace itself.” [Dromgoole, Will Allen. “Sweet ’Lasses.” Arena 17 1 (Dec. 1896-Jun. 1897: 151.] Another writer noted the fine points to be considered were “the bearing of the men, the precision with which they turned the corners, the grace of the women, and the ease with which they swung around the pivots.” [Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. (1912). Electronic text—no page numbers. Project Gutenberg. Web. 1 Apr 2015.]

Over time different cakewalk styles developed that would lead to various categories of walkers, including “straight,” “fancy,” “burlesque,” and “rag-time.” One writer also described cakewalkers who had “a jumping step in time to the music,” but did not identify their specific category. However, by the turn of the nineteenth century, the style had apparently changed drastically. Eventually, “fancy and original movements” most influenced the judges when picking the winners. [New York Times, “Harvard Can Play Football.” 8 May 1895: 6.] “Legs were kicked higher, steps became faster and more intricate and spectacular leaps and turns were introduced,” reported Todd Arthur in Dance magazine.

Black minstrel shows first spread the cakewalk culture about the country when they performed a “walk around” in front of audiences composed of whites and black freedmen. [Sherlock, Charles Reginald. “From Breakdown to Rag-time.” Cosmopolitan 31 6 (Oct. 1901): 631.] After the Civil War, the cakewalk took on a life of its own. The term itself eventually attained a generic quality, such as “hoedown,” and many people referred to a cakewalk as a gathering for a black frolic. In 1894 a reporter for the Louisville Commercial described a black dance party that featured an evening of quadrilles. At dawn the caller announced “the company assembled will walk for the cake and the two most graceful pedestrians will be awarded the pastry.” [The Washington Post, “Was a Swell Affair.” 5 Feb 1894: 7.]

Louisville claimed to be the birthing grounds of the commercial, or professional, cakewalk. One writer, when referring to the events, described the city as a place where enterprising theatrical managers catered “to the city’s appetite for the novel” (Peterson). References to the cakewalk as a commercial venture and public performance first appeared in the northern press in the early 1870s when the New York Times reprinted an article from the Pottsville Miner’s Journal in Pennsylvania that described a cakewalk that raised money for the local African Methodist Episcopal Church. The headline in the Times read: A Mystery Explained—with the “mystery” being the cakewalk itself. [New York Times, “Mystery Explained, A.” 13 Dec. 1874: 4.]

Over the years, the prize cake became a symbolic award as sponsors offered a variety of awards such as gold-headed canes, silver watches, silver cups, jewelry, and cash. An Atlantic City tavern came up with one of the more unique prizes: “First prize, one case of beer; second prize, one dozen beer; third prize, six bottles of beer; consolation prize, half-dozen of beer.” The winners were required to dispose of their winnings “before leaving the hall.” [New York Times, “Beer Prizes at a Cakewalk.” 12 Nov. 1897: 2.]

Short video of a cakewalk from 1903, from the Library of Congress.

By the late 1870s, Billy and Cordelia McClain, two black entertainers who had migrated north, introduced the cakewalk to Gotham City. “Mr. McClain and I led one on the stage in the South,” said Cordelia McClain. “Well, we were considered a very graceful couple, and were asked to give the walk in the North. We did, and thus started the regular cakewalk.” [New York Times, “Fun for the Darkies.” 2 Jun. 1895: 16.] At the beginning of the craze during the late 1870s, promoters in New York City sponsored extravagant affairs during the Christmas holiday season, at first affixing the cakewalk onto other established forms of entertainment—such as the Great London Circus that appeared at New York’s Hippodrome on December 23, 1877. That evening, the master-of-ceremonies announced that the judges would look for “the greatest elasticity of limb, combined with the greatest ease of motion” from the ten couples. [New York Times, “Walking for the Cake.” 23 Dec. 1877: 2.]

Unlike their coverage of white cultural events, reporters at cakewalks often described in detail many of the personal physical attributes of the participants—especially the shade of their skin color. The journalist at the Hippodrome that evening reported the couples as “all rather brown as to complexion.” In later articles, other writers would provide even more nuanced descriptions, such as “light colored,” “very black,” “four shades lighter,” “yellow,” “peachblow,” “saffron hued,” “kinky headed,” “wooly head,” “brunnettish, but not decided enough for a type,” “a light mulatto couple with scarcely more than a healthily sunburned complexion,” “as black as the silk in which she was clad, both partners matching well in complexion,” and “a charcoal Chesterfield”—the last likely being a reference to Lord Chesterfield who, in the eighteenth century, wrote letters to his son propounding the manners and styles of proper society. No whites were allowed to compete in the competitions.

All reporters, just as they did when covering elegant white social events, also described in detail the style of clothing worn by the “fashion plates on parade.” At the event at the Hippodrome, a reporter described the dress of Miss Gray as: “white satin, with flowers festooned around the skirt. The trail was anywhere from a yard and a half to . . . two yards and a half long, and a large bouquet of white roses ornamented the space between the shoulders, on the front of the dress. Spotless white kids concealed the fairy fingers, and in the left hand was another large bouquet.” [New York Times, “Walking for the Cake.” 23 Dec. 1877: 2.] The men, many of whom worked as waiters, also dressed formally. Their attire frequently consisted of “swallow tail, white necktie, and snowy shirt front.” [New York Times, “Miscellaneous City News.” 30 Dec. 1877: 7.]

In 1878, the walks occurred more frequently at more venues. With the intensifying competition the walkers started to improvise in order to distinguish themselves. One couple “made an innovation by uncoupling their arms, and walking separately,” a Times reporter said. “By this means the grace and freedom of their carriage were much increased.” [New York Times, “Miscellaneous City News.” 30 Dec. 1877: 7.] Another couple “brought down the house by their backward walking . . . .” [New York Times, “Walking for the Cake.” 23 Dec. 1877: 2.] Sixteen years later, so many cakewalks had been reported in newspapers and magazines that one commentator suggested that they had “been described so often that a description of this one would not be of especial interest.” [The Washington Post, “Was a Swell Affair.” 5 Feb 1894: 7.]

A fair number of blacks apparently became professional cakewalkers. In 1886, Moses Green and Miss Heron were declared “the champion cakewalkers of New-Jersey.” By February that year, Miss Martha Garrison of New York had already won three cakes. New York writers dubbed Ben Butler “one of the most redoubtable cakewalkers in the city.” [New York Times, “Intruding at a Cakewalk.” 26 Feb. 1886: 2.] Dandy Jim was “the champion of Boston and Baltimore,” [New York Times, “Theatrical Gossip.” 26 Apr. 1892: 8.] while Luke Blackburn earned the title of “the present world’s champion.” [New York Times, “‘Polo Jim’s’ Cakewalk.” 15 Oct. 1893: 16.] However, he had some competition from Professor Snow, who was known as “the champion cakewalker of every continent.” [New York Times, “City and Suburban News.” 15 Mar. 1891: 3.] In 1896, promoters staged a cakewalk at the Odd Fellows’ Hall in Washington D.C. in order to determine once and for all “who is the best colored cake-walker.” The nominees included Charley Hodge, Howard Skelton, and Tommie Hawkins. [New York Times, “Raided a Camp of Hobos.” 5 Dec. 1896: 8.] Producers, who charged patrons at least twenty cents at the door, soon began paying couples “two dollars a night” or more to participate. [New York Times, “Miscellaneous City News.” 30 Dec. 1877: 7.]

The larger events often drew thousands of avid fans. The crowds not only included white laborers, office workers and merchants—but also members of the rich sporting crowd. Hecklers often insulted and jeered the performers. At one performance at the Hippodrome, after the stage manager had invited one couple back for an encore, “some laughter was mingled with the cheers, a few evil-minded persons believed the couple were called back to be laughed at.” [New York Times, “Miscellaneous City News.” 30 Dec. 1877: 7.] The volume of verbal abuse seemingly increased along with the popularity of the cakewalk—especially when the events moved into more intimate venues and attracted legions of white “butchers, bakers and produce men.” [New York Times, “Intruding at a Cakewalk.” 26 Feb. 1886: 2.] The aggressive harassment prompted a Times writer to berate the “proud Caucasian” who would “sneer at the institution of the cakewalk.” The writer compared the cakewalker not to an artist, but to “a work of art,” and felt dismayed that members of “a superior race” did not “cheer him on in this effort.” [New York Times, “The Cakewalk.” 18 Feb. 1892: 4.]

The commercialization of the cakewalk didn’t keep ordinary black citizens from participating in the jollity at their own gatherings. In 1896, The Washington Post noted that “every other week cakewalks are held in a hall on Sixth Street northwest, and many of the walkers can give the Primrose & West [Minstrel Show] people all the trumps and then beat them out.” [The Washington Post, “Here and There.” 2 Mar 1896: 3.] Blacks living in Culpeper, Virginia, often assembled to cakewalk at a resort called Cedar Hill Park just outside city limits. [The Washington Post, “Four Shot at Cakewalk.” 6 Sep. 1899: 4.] The cakewalk also joined fairs, festivals and “pound parties” as one of the main fund raisers for black churches. [New York Times, “Discord at a Cakewalk.” 18 Apr. 1896: 3.] One such event at Harlem’s Mount Horeb African Methodist Episcopal Church drew “as many white persons as colored ones,” including New York Governor Samuel H. Crook. [New York Times, “Walking for a Cake.” 23 Jul. 1886: 2.]

Private individuals also organized neighborhood cakewalks. At Fishkill Landing, a village on the Hudson River, local resident George Washington sponsored a cakewalk in honor of his good fortune when his wife gave birth to triplets. [New York Times, “George Washington’s Children.” 2 Jan. 1882: 2.] On April 16, 1898, Washington D.C.’s “colored 400” gathered at Columbia Riding Academy for their annual cakewalk. “Not a lady but was arrayed in an abundance of jewelry, and not a ‘gent’ but wore a sparkler in his immaculate shirt bosom,” said a newspaper report. [The Washington Post, “High Stepping for $25 Cake.” 16 Apr. 1898: 9.]

By the mid-1880s the term cakewalk had become part of American-English vernacular. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely utilized the expression “take the cake” to mean winning a prize; or for being the most outrageous or disappointing. Reporters of horse races by the end of the 1880s regularly used the term as a connotation for an easy victory, while boxing reporters picked up the term to describe a fight without much action. Not long after, political pundits started using “cakewalk” to express an easy victory by a politician or to denote a general election that included a number of candidates.

Some whites, especially university men and their female companions, applied burnt cork to their faces before attending local community cakewalks. Whites apparently enjoyed assuming a black persona in this way. In 1895, members of the Monte Relief Society presented a cakewalk and at Terrace Garden in New York where friends of the society “had hands and faces blackened, and were dressed in gorgeous raiment, befitting the characters that they assumed.” [New York Times, “Grand Cakewalk for Charity.” 29 Mar 1895: 3] In Washington D.C., where the Terpsichorean Club presented their annual masquerade ball in 1899, a group of “gaily attired negro imitators” participated in the “prize cakewalk.” [The Washington Post, “Danced for a Prize.” 17 Dec. 1899: 15.] Black face also penetrated the state of Maine, where the Cony High Minstrel Club of Augusta performed a cakewalk in 1899. [“County News.” Maine Farmer 68 7 (Dec. 1899): 4.]

When rich white families abandoned the cities for summer resort towns, many blacks followed in their wake to serve as waiters, porters and dishwashers. Frequently, the blacks staged cakewalks to entertain the white tourists. At Saratoga, New York, for instance, the waiters at the States Hotel presented their cakewalk at the town hall. The New York Times reported that “several parties of fashionables have been made up to look in upon it.” [New York Times, “Society at Saratoga.” 29 Aug. 1889: 4.] The same events also frequently occurred at the Hotel Shrewsbury at Seabright, New Jersey. [New York Times, “Doings at Seabright.” 25 Aug. 1889: 13.] By the end of the century, professional black minstrels also took their traveling shows directly to resorts such as Newport, R.I., where they presented the cakewalk as the pinnacle of an evening’s entertainment. [New York Times, “What is Doing in Society.” 17 Aug. 1899: 7.]

View a “Comedy” Cakewalk filmed in 1903, from the Library of Congress.

Over time, though, many resorts bypassed their African-American employees to invite their white guests to participate directly in the cakewalks. At Daggers’ Sulphur Springs outside Washington D.C., six white couples competed for the “large and tempting cake.” [The Washington Post, “Society Cakewalk at Daggers’ Springs.” 28 Aug. 1892: 13.] Meanwhile, at Bar Harbor, Maine, the Rockefeller crowd put on a “Deisarie” [sic: term unknown] cakewalk during which participants walked down a track as long as a football field and back. [New York Times, “Society at Bar Harbor.” 4 Sep. 1892: 4.] Not to be outdone, the Tatassit C.C. First Annual Regatta at Lake Quinsigamond in western Massachusetts held a cakewalk in 1892 during a clam bake. [“Tatassit C. C., First Annual Regatta.” Forest and Stream 39 13 (Sep. 29, 1892): 277.]

Cakewalks also routinely cropped up during the winter social season at private residences and public parties. At Kenwood, New York, Erastus Corning and his wife served oysters before a cakewalk at their home, for which they hired a black man as judge. [New York Times, “Gayety at the State Capital.” 10 Feb. 1895: 9.] In Baltimore, Mrs. John Moncure Robinson invited a “party of fashionables” to the Globe Brewery in a remote section of the city for some “bohemian” entertainment, which included a cakewalk. [New York Times, “Cakewalk for Baltimore Society, A.” 26 Nov. 1898: 2.] About four hundred guests attended a cakewalk presented by the Sherwoods of Glenbourne, Virginia, in honor of their son’s birthday. [The Washington Post, “Cakewalk at Glenbourne.” 31 Jul. 1899: 10.] Cakewalks became so common in high society that one Philadelphian pundit quipped that “New York’s Four Hundred have taken up the cakewalk as a refined and delightful social amusement, and the colored brother smiles with unalloyed gratification.” [The Washington Post, “Four Hundred in the Cakewalk, The.” 17 Jan. 1898: 6.]

By the 1890s, up to four thousand spectators routinely crowded into New York’s Madison Square Garden to watch “championship” cakewalks. The playbills for the evening’s entertainment also often featured opera singing, buck dancing, jig dancing, and skirt dancing. Chorales of jubilee singers, numbering one hundred voices by 1895, began the proceedings by delivering an hour of “plantation songs.” Smaller singing groups such as the Alabama Quartet, Morning Star (a double quartet), and Little Pickanniny Quartet also performed. Exotic acts included such performers as Mocking Bird Rube, the “Whistling Coon” and ten banjo players. These acts warmed up the crowd for the grand cakewalk which typically began at eleven o’clock sharp. [New York Times, “Missed a Man and Hit a Boy.” 17 Apr. 1892: 9.] [New York Times, “Wheelmen.” 2 Feb. 1895: 6.] Organizers promoted the first extravagant cakewalks held at the Garden as the The Grand Negro Jubilee. [New York Times, “Theatrical Gossip.” 26 Apr. 1892: 8.]

With its competitive nature, cheering crowds, referees, judges and athletic strutters, the cakewalk had always resembled a sports event. By the mid-1890s, the Ethiopian Amusement Company, which had ties to professional sports teams, promoted many cakewalk spectacles at Madison Square Garden. Pat Powers, who headed the enterprise, also presided over the Eastern Baseball League. Powers soon hired well-known boxing referees and baseball managers to “undertake the arduous and ungrateful task of picking a winning couple out of fifty at the big cakewalk in Madison Square,” the New York Times reported. [New York Times, “Cobwebs Beaten by Newburg Shooters.” 22 Feb. 1895: 6.] In addition, that newspaper began listing cakewalk competitions in its Calendar of Sports. Just like baseball teams, the New York cakewalkers traveled to competitions in many cities and states. [New York Times, “Challenge to a Cakewalk.” 13 Jan. 1898: 1.]

The cakewalk also infiltrated so many operettas and plays that Joseph Grant Ewing, in a satirical article for Puck, proposed to write a “unique” play for the stage in which “there will be no . . . cake-walks . . . ” [Ewing, Joseph Grant. “Modern Fairy Tales.” Puck 45 1149 (15 Mar. 1899): 11.]

The cakewalk stimulated so much curiosity among whites about black culture in general that they thronged to productions of black “spectacles.” In 1894, a full cast of “Ethiopian” entertainers appeared for the first time in a theater on Broadway when the Bijou Theatre staged The South before the War. The scenes were set on a cotton plantation, reported one critic, “and there is no drama to speak of, but, for people who like genuine darkey songs and dances and part singing, the performance will doubtless have some attractiveness.” The evening’s entertainment concluded with a prize cakewalk. [New York Times, “Colored Folks at the Bijou.” 20 Nov. 1894: 5.] The seeds for black theater during the Harlem Renaissance that would flourish from 1918 to the mid-1930s had been planted. The following year, black entertainers set up a living history spectacle called Black America at Ambrose Park in South Brooklyn that depicted life on a Southern plantation. The cast included five hundred people who lived in cabins on the premises. A cakewalk occurred every evening. [New York Times, “Fun for the Darkies.” 2 Jun. 1895: 16.]

The cakewalk also influenced European culture, both as stage entertainment and as a participatory dance. In January of 1898, the Pall Mall Gazette reported that “the interest excited by the novelty of the thing is giving place to an enthusiastic appreciation of the grace and charm of the performance.” [The Washington Post, “Cake-Walk Strikes London, The.” 4 Apr. 1898: 6.] In 1899, the Washington Post confirmed reports that the cakewalk was “tickling London mightily in farces, extravagances, and vaudeville.” [The Washington Post, “Theatrical Notes.” 8 Jan. 1899: 24.] And, in 1912, some Parisian critics referred to the dance as the “acme of poetic motion.” [Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. (1912). Electronic text—no page numbers. Project Gutenberg. Web. 1 Apr 2015.]

Black invention was also heavily influencing popular musical tastes during the later part of the nineteenth century, when genres such as classic blues, jazz, boogie-woogie and urban blues first took root. However, two other musical genres fully blossomed at the turn of the century. The first, the “coon song,” was short-lived, but the other, ragtime, remained a musical force into the next century. By 1900, rag-time “professors” often warmed up the crowds at cakewalks by participating in piano contests. [New York Times, “Grand Central Palace Cakewalk.” 25 Jan. 1900: 10.] Individual singers also crooned ragtime at the competitive cakewalks, quartets harmonized it, and one hundred member-strong jubilee chorales shouted it. At Washington’s Convention Hall in 1900, six hundred spectators watched eighteen couples vie for the cake as the United States Marine Band struck up a rag-time selection. [The Washington Post, “Convention Hall Cakewalk.” 20 Feb. 1903: 8.]

However, by that time, the popular reign of the cakewalk was about to end. Only three years later, another cakewalk at Convention Hall drew only “a small crowd” that made the hall look “deserted.” [The Washington Post, “Convention Hall Cakewalk.” 20 Feb. 1903: 8.] However, by then blacks had moved on to a different form of dancing that was even more grounded in their own heritage—the one-steps, or zoo and barnyard dances, that included the grizzly bear, bunny hop, turkey trot and Texas tommy. And, there was much, much more to come.

The tide had turned. Whites were dancing like blacks. In time, they would share the dance floor with blacks. And finally, members of the two races would even dance together. Racial integration in America began to seem feasible.

The Cakewalk (with sound) from the late 1930s.

by Douglas Allchin

Douglas Allchin has been a morris dancer since 1984. He has danced with 9 different teams, and adapted and written many morris dances. He was a founding member of the longsword team Guyz with Tiez in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2008.

Traditional longsword dances from northern England might easily be susceptible to the unflattering (but not uncommon) stereotype of being overly tedious and stale. Six dancers, linked in a ring holding stylized “swords,” tread ceremoniously, while lowering or raising particular swords, stepping over or passing under them, repeating each move six times (once for each dancer’s sword), maintaining an unrelenting steady pace to a rhythmic but sometimes repetitive tune. However, a few longsword teams have ventured into creative approaches [Barrand, Anthony. 2006. Dancing with swords in the DVRA, Part 1: Longsword. American Morris Newsletter, 26(2).] . Here, in the spirit of further reinvigorating the tradition, I report on another new longsword dance, consisting mostly of original figures and including a series of new locks: those self-supporting arrangements of interwoven swords presented aloft to the audience.

The dance is called “Lock and Dam.” The title refers to an engineering feature of the Mississippi River. Several dams punctuate the river channel, and boats navigate the change in levels through a series of locks. Lock and Dam #1 is situated in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the dance originated. The imagery of the dance evokes the river, with various spinning gestures and undulating waves reminiscent of the twirling turbulence and flow of the river’s water. The second reference is more familiar to sword dancers, and refers to the use of seven different sword locks displayed in the course of the dance.

The dance is unique in being based on a 12-count phrase, rather than an 8- or 16-count phrase. The appropriate music is a 3/2 hornpipe, such as “Three Rusty Swords,” “The Dusty Miller,” or “The Presbyterian” (sample one). To provide for a more dance-like quality, in contrast to mere walking, the 12th beat of the phrase features a modest back step, as a gentle form of kinetic punctuation.

The dance figures in detail are as follows. The opening begins with a simple unlinked ring, with swords resting on the shoulder. At the end of the phrase, the dancers swirl tightly out to the right, and on the 12th beat, step back into two facing lines. The lines cross through, passing right shoulders and clashing swords, then circle clockwise. At the end of the next phrase, the tight twirl out goes to the left and the Cross-and-Clash is repeated, passing left shoulders and turning into a counterclockwise circle. All dancers then make another tight twirl to the right and lower swords to form the sword ring. The first Chorus follows.

The Chorus is a simple ring movement with a flourish of the swords that reverses the direction of the dancers. Swords are generally held with the tip in the center of the circle, forming spokes of a wheel rather than a peripheral ring. The tips are then raised, and in a circular motion, lowered again, followed by the raising of the hilts, which then fold into the center of the set (as the tips move out) and the dancers all pivot (on the 12th-beat back step) and continue stepping briskly in the opposite direction. The gesture is essentially repeated again to resume the original direction. This figure was named Flexagon (referring to the similar folding action of a paper polygon puzzle made popular by Martin Gardner).

The dancers use the 12th-beat back step to reverse direction. Another modified Flexagon is performed. In one fluid motion the hilts (now on the inside) are lifted into a central column, then lowered, slid out, raised, guided in and down (one large circle with the right arm). Meanwhile, the tips (in the left hand) are slid to the center, then swept out, up, in, down, and out again. In all, the arms have made two grand opposing circles. Grips are now overhand. At the beginning of the next phrase, all dancers, still circling clockwise, raise swords, pivot clockwise (turning over right shoulder) and face in. This allows them to form a standard (6-pointed) lock.

The lock is displayed as the dancers open into two facing lines on the 12th-beat back step (as in the Opening). The lines cross, passing right shoulders, then turn right and circle. On the next back step, the lines reform, and cross passing left shoulders. The lock is lowered, swords are drawn through and grabbed by the left hands. The Flexagon Chorus follows.

The first figure is a variant of double-under. The variation is to continue the figure, revolving several times, allowing the revolving horizontal swords to take opposing poles: Paddlewheel.

On a subsequent pass, dancers #3-#6 consolidate in a square. #1 and #2 (holding #1’s sword), rather than leading through the bridge under #4’s sword, pass under all 4 dancers as they jump: a figure called Four-Up. Just for dramatic effect, #1 and #2 carry the sword over the dancers’ heads again and swoop down to pass under the four jumping dancers a second time.

As #1 and #2 return the sword over the other dancers’ heads again, they bring the swords on the inside of the set, collapsing the six swords into three anti-parallel pairs. With modest passing of hilts and tips, the dancers are now divided into three pairs. The dancers separate and begin an Over-Under Hey.

After 2 full passes, the pairs switch, using the 12th-beat back step as a lead-in, into a Horizontal Hey. The 12-beat music allows all six dancers to align on the back step, a small visual punctuation.

  [Allsop, Ivor & Barrand, Anthony (Eds.). 1996. Longsword Dances from Traditional and Manuscript Sources. Brattleboro, VT: Northern Harmony.] . Odds are now on the left of each pair. All raise their right hand (hilt). As the set collapses, Odds will meet a new Even on their left. Odd right hand goes over Even right hand, Odd left hand over Even left hand. The lock virtually forms itself as the swords move in, with a final weaving of the tips on the outside corners by the left hands. On this particular occasion, the dance uses a slight variant of the Kirkby Lock. #1 passes the #1 hilt over the #2 sword to the left hand, while the #2 tip is transferred to the right. The paired (anti-parallel) swords enter the lock as an “X”. The hilts of those 2 swords are now slid further into the lock: the Star Trek Delta Lock (Figure 2). This lock variant was first conceptualized by Andy Kedl, of Guyz with Tiez.

The lock is displayed as the dancers form the two lines which pass through and circle twice. Flexagon Chorus.

The next figure is a variant of the traditional single guard. #1 raises swords and turns back and circles the set: the familiar single guard. Then #1 turns again followed by #6, who raises the trailing sword: “double guard.” On the third phrase, #1 is followed by #6 and also #5: “triple guard”. On the fourth phrase, all the dancers follow, inverting the set: a figure collectively known as Progressive Guard.

The next lock is an adaptation of one that we trace to Rick Mohr. While walking clockwise (inverted), Odds progress one position (past Evens). All turn over their left shoulder to face in. Odds form an interior triangle with their 3 swords. The remaining 3 swords are woven in, forming an exterior triangle rotated 60 degrees to the interior one: the Rick-Mohr Lock. (Forming the lock from an inverted set was my own innovation.)

The lock is shown. Dancers do their standard pass through and rounds, but on this occasion undoing the lock requires a special sequence. Dancers pass through only once, passing left shoulders and then circle counterclockwise. #1 lowers the lock upside-down (accommodating the earlier set inversion). Dancers re-grab and as the phrase ends, Odds step in and allow the Evens to pass outside them, returning to their original position as the lock opens. Flexagon chorus.

The next figure starts as the Odds bring their hilts high and fold their swords inward, stepping in to the center. There are now 3 spokes of paired swords. The wheel rotates, Evens on the outside. On the next phrase, the spokes are inverted: namely, the Odd hilts and Even tips arch up and outward, as the Odds step out. The Evens step in, sweeping under with their own hilts and Odd tips, raising them in the center before settling them again at waist level. This alternation repeats several times: a figure called Odds and Evens.

On the third cycle (say), the Odds pass their tips back and accept the new tips. The set is now separated again into three pairs of anti-parallel swords. As the new phrase begins, each spoke-pair spins as a pair to the outside (clockwise). They spin 360 degrees and reform the spoked wheel. The wheel rotates again. On the new phrase, each pair spins again, but a forceful 540 degrees, reforming the spoked wheel that now rotates in the reverse (clockwise) direction: the figure called Propellor (yet another visual allusion to the turbulent water theme)

As the music begins a new phrase, the pairs spin again to the outside (this time, counterclockwise), spinning 270 degrees to face into the set. Odds cross hilts over to their left hand, tips under to the right hand. The lock is formed using the standard Kirkby Malzeard method (described above): the Bill Morelock (named after a local classical radio personality).

A pass-through, circle and Flexagon Chorus leads to the next figure. #1 begins the basic movements of a single guard (turning out over the right shoulder). However, the other dancers now remain still. At the same time, #4 begins a “reverse” single guard, turning out over the left shoulder rather than the right. #1 and #4 soon meet, #1 passes on the outside, swords high. On the opposite side of the set, #4 passes on the outside. The other dancers adjust their hand heights to accommodate the sword movements. #1 and #4 return to place. The figure is repeated with #2 and #5, and then with #3 and #6: the figure called Helicopter.

As a lead-in to the next lock, Helicopter is performed once again (#4 lead, #1 anti-pole). As they return to position, the set opens, #1 and #4 pass through the set, passing left shoulders and gypsying 180 degrees. All now face in, circling counterclockwise. #1 and #4 form a central diamond with their swords. Without any release, the remaining two swords are woven along the side. Step back and show: the Argyle Lock (Figure 4). I envisioned this new lock myself, and then worked out the mechanism for forming it without breaking the ring.

Again, two pass-throughs, with circling. The lock is undone by reversing the motions, #1 and #4 crossing through, passing right shoulders. Flexagon Chorus.

The next figure draws on familiar elements in a special combination. The sequence is prepped by doing Single Under with #5 starting under #6’s sword, then #6 under #1’s sword. #1 follows the sequence, passing under #2’s sword, turning left. But on this third occasion, each dancer turns to an alternate side (Evens to the right, Odds to the left), lifting their sword and adding it to the raised ensemble. Each set of 3 dancers rotates, and the assemblage of six swords rolls above: Bridge (also called Meat Grinder by others).

The key variation is on exiting the figure. #1 crosses the gap and begins circling on the other side. Other Odds follow, lowering their swords and taking their respective positions in the ring. The set is now inverted: prime position for a lock. However, during the transition, #1 has surreptitiously removed his sword from the ring, bringing the tip of #6’s sword to the left hand of #2.

The five remaining dancers form the standard 5-sword star lock. #4 shows the lock, #1 the sole stray sword: the 5 + 1 “Lock”. All dancers take note of the mistake: “Damn!” The lock is lowered, the point closest to #1 is opened, and the wayward sword woven in and the new lock shown again: the Bridge Lock (Figure 5). The new lock pattern and the mechanism for forming it were also worked out by me.

Pass-through sequence and Flexagon Chorus.

The final figure sequence again begins with a familiar figure. #6 and #1 pair behind #6’s sword for Double Under (under #3’s sword). The figure progresses by position, next under #1’s sword, then #2’s. Here, there is a reprise of Paddlewheel, with the #2 and #5 swords at opposite sides of the circular sweep.

The transition to the next figure is tricky, but the ultimate effect is quite dramatic: the swords switch from revolving cylindrically around a horizontal axis, to spinning on two vertical axes. After passing under the #5 sword, #4 crosses in front of #3, under #3’s sword (passing by the left shoulders) turns inwards, and brings the #3 sword down next to his own sword. #4-3 pass under the #2 and #5 swords, now joined together, and being rotating right with #5 as a threesome. Symmetrically, #1 passes under his own sword, turning right shoulder, brings it down next to the #6 sword. #1-2 go under #5-#2 swords, turn left with #6. Each line turns twice: the figure called Eggbeater.

The final lock flows naturally from this sequence. From Eggbeater, after passing around #5, #3 and 4 pass around each other (gypsy) an extra 360 degrees, while #1-2 pass around #6. All face in, now in a circle. Circling continues counterclockwise while the lock is formed. The swords align in a simple square checkerboard weave, the infamous Portcullis Lock, as shown Figure 6. Note that here, it is easier for #1 to weave his hilt under the tip of #3’s sword, re-grabbing to pull and extend it fully: a small “cheat” that converts an authentic-but-awkward position into a smooth and convenient move. We have not found documentation for making this well-known lock without breaking the ring, or through a mechanism that is as easy as we have discovered.Show the lock and complete the standard cross-through sequence. The elegant challenge of the Portcullis Lock is to also undo this lock smoothly. #1 undoes the final weave-under and re-grabs. Now all the swords slide outward. #1 and #2 gypsy around each other, while #3 and #4 do the same. The circle is restored.

In our closing, the “Cross-and-Clash” sequence of the opening is reprised. The circle breaks and #1 leads the unraveling line to face the audience.

These are the basic notes. As in any dance, dancers need to negotiate and accustom themselves to the nuances of motion and transition at each particular position. Practiced efficiency on the locks is essential if the pace of the dance is not to be compromised. Careful planning and adjustment can also align the end of figures and choruses with the end of long phrases of the music, convenient for changing tunes.

The complete sequence is summarized briefly below. Like the Mississippi River itself, whose eddying water movements provided inspiration, the dance is long—in the range of 10½ minutes. We often perform only one-half at a time, using the opening and closing sequence and three of the figure-lock combinations.

Lock and Dam Sequence of Figures

• Cross & Clash (Processional)
• Chorus

• Hexaflexagon
• Standard Lock / Chorus

• Paddle-Wheel
• 4-Up (Ankle-Biter)
• Vertical and Horizontal Heys
• Star Trek Delta Lock / Chorus

• Progressive Guard
• Rick Mohr-Lock / Chorus

• Odds & Evens
• Propellor
• Bill MoreLock / Chorus

• Helicopter
• Argyle Lock / Chorus

• Single-Under into Bridge
• 5+1 Lock
• Bridge Lock / Chorus

• Double-Under into Paddle-Wheel
• Eggbeater
• Portcullis Lock / Chorus

• Cross & Clash (Recessional)

A final note on the locks. The Standard Lock, Kirkby Malzeard Lock, and Portcullis Lock are all well known [Allsop, Ivor & Barrand, Anthony (Eds.). 1996. Longsword Dances from Traditional and Manuscript Sources. Brattleboro, VT: Northern Harmony.] . The Bill Morelock and Star Trek Delta Lock are adaptations of the Kirkby Lock, but we have not encountered other teams using or recording them, or forming them with such efficient mechanisms. We are indebted to Rick Mohr for his lock, which we note is a radially symmetrical lock that goes beyond those in Krause’s 1990 review [Krause, Rhett. 1990. Review of rapper and longsword locks. Country Dance and Song, 20: 34-39.] . The Argyle Lock and Bridge Lock are symmetrical also—although bilaterally along a mirror-image line, not radially around a central point. These last two locks have not yet been documented, so far as we know, and seem to open the way to developing other such unfamiliar locks. Presenting them all in this dance, along with the other new figures and adaptations, is an implicit invitation for others to innovate further in the longsword tradition.

Acknowledgments

All the figures and locks, as well as the sequence, are my own choreography except where noted. The dance was developed as a team effort with Guyz with Tiez, who helped sample, test, explore, tinker, and develop each move leading to its performance.

by Jesse P. Karlsberg, Emory University

Jesse P. Karlsberg is senior digital scholarship strategist at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) at Emory University. Jesse’s research analyzes connections between race, place, folklorization, and American music, focusing on the editions of The Sacred Harp and their attendant music culture. Jesse is editor-in-chief of of Sounding Spirit, a National Endowment for the Humanities–funded collection of digital and print editions of vernacular sacred American music co-published by ECDS and the University of North Carolina Press. An active Sacred Harp singer, teacher, composer, and organizer, Jesse is the vice president of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company, the non-profit organization that publishes The Sacred Harp, editor of Shape Notes: Journal of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company, and research director of the Sacred Harp Museum.

Introduction

The state of Sacred Harp in 2018 would have been scarcely imaginable to those like folklorist George Pullen Jackson and singer and English scholar Buell Cobb, who questioned in the 1940s and 1970s, respectively, whether the style would survive past the year 2000. Both scholars pointed to its aging participants and a musical style seemingly irreparably out of fashion. [George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands: The Story of the Fasola Folk, Their Songs, Singings, and “Buckwheat Notes” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933); George Pullen Jackson, The Story of The Sacred Harp, 1844–1944: A Book of Religious Folk Song as an American Institution (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1944); Buell E. Cobb, The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989).] Even advocates like Georgia singer and clothing plant manager Hugh McGraw, who ceaselessly promoted Sacred Harp singing to new audiences, set their sights on less ambitious targets than Sacred Harp’s current geography, envisioning a national Sacred Harp community stretching across the United States that has since materialized and been exceeded. As recently as 2008, the style was confined to the United States and pockets of England, Australia, and Canada. Today, Sacred Harp is sung on four continents in twenty-five countries. By the time you read this essay, the landscape may have shifted yet again.

Sacred Harp in Europe, Oceania, East Asia, and the Middle East is both a global and local phenomenon. Though vastly expanded in geography and demographic variety, the style is still a “subcultural sound,” a “micromusic,” convening small groups of people with strong community bonds often beneath the level of broad cultural attention [Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Wesleyan University Press, 1993).] even as it regularly achieves local and even national press coverage. Despite its increasing reach, the new span of Sacred Harp singing is nonetheless limited in certain respects: First, the style has spread only to developed countries where US popular culture and media have a large imprint and garner a comparatively favorable reception. The style continues to attract an overwhelmingly white group of participants, with the exception of singings in East Asia, which have drawn Asian and white American expatriate participants. In each country, for the members of a local singing “class,” Sacred Harp’s reception follows and reacts to a history of economic and cultural relationships with America, and with the southern United States. The outsize presences of these cultural and economic forces far exceed that of Sacred Harp, and differently condition what participation in Sacred Harp means to new singers. Second, participation carries longstanding associations with deep roots in the “revival” of Sacred Harp in the United States. The style spreads abroad through transnational networks emulating practices associated with folk cultures of the southern United States. It also travels along art music and academic networks engaged in the cultivated celebration, performance of, and adaptation of material associated with these folk practices.

Even as economic and cultural relationships with the United States and an association with southern folk culture direct Sacred Harp’s spread, other factors facilitate the style’s international transmission. Features of Sacred Harp music and associated cultural practice have transcultural appeal. Aspects of Sacred Harp singing’s music culture engage participants in a full voiced, participation oriented, deeply spiritual, and accessible yet musically engaging practice and repertoire. Ethnomusicologist Ellen Lueck convincingly describes how the support of US-based Sacred Harp organizations, international singing groups’ “charismatic and enabled leadership,” and the affordances of the contemporary social media landscape have helped bolster Sacred Harp singing abroad. [Ellen Lueck, “Sacred Harp Singing in Europe: Its Pathways, Spaces, and Meanings” (Ph.D. dissertation, Wesleyan University, 2016), vii.]

This essay documents the present scope of Sacred Harp singing outside the United States and examines the eighty-five-year-old folklore genealogies that factor into the style’s recent spread. Although I focus on how what I call folklore’s filter made the expansion of Sacred Harp to new people and places possible, [Jesse P. Karlsberg, “Folklore’s Filter: Race, Place, and Sacred Harp Singing” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 2015).] I touch briefly on other factors in the dissemination of Sacred Harp beyond North America: the unique musical features and practices that support Sacred Harp’s adoption and the similarities and differences in the histories of transnational political, economic, and cultural exchange affecting the form of participation for many. These factors are critical to an understanding of Sacred Harp singing’s new international reach. First, however, I’ll briefly recount the history and practice of Sacred Harp singing itself.

Sacred Harp Singing

Sacred Harp is a practice of sacred community singing from the tunebook The Sacred Harp. First compiled in 1844 by West Georgians Benjamin Franklin White and Elisha James King, The Sacred Harp has been revised every generation or so by southern singer-teacher-composers. The book articulates a pedagogical system and adopts a bibliographic form, both of which have roots in eighteenth-century New England singing schools, and adopts a shape-note system of music notation dating to an 1801 Philadelphia tunebook called The Easy Instructor. The book features songs in three- and four-part harmony, mostly by American composers, in a variety of styles collectively described as dispersed harmony. The songs are settings of metrical poetry largely drawn from a corpus of English Protestant hymnody also widely incorporated into denominational hymnals.

Since its publication, The Sacred Harp has been connected to group singing institutions called conventions, which spread across the South in the decades after the 1845 establishment of the Southern Musical Convention in West Georgia. Conventions feature voluntary associations of singers seated by voice part in an inward-facing hollow square, at the center of which stand a succession of song leaders directing the group in one or more songs of their choice from the tunebook. The proceedings frequently last from morning to mid-afternoon, punctuated by short breaks for refreshments, announcements, and a sumptuous mid-day “dinner on the grounds.” The book’s compilers envisioned its sacred songs as suitable for worship by any Christian denomination, and its singers spanned the nineteenth century’s rural southern denominational landscape, encompassing men and women, and including black and white southerners. Yet race and gender affected the form of participation. Women rarely led songs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and black singers were relegated to church balconies during slavery; singings became largely segregated after Reconstruction. The Sacred Harp’s connection to the music culture of singing conventions and its wide array of stakeholders committed to its success—thanks to their conscription in contributing to or revising the book—helping The Sacred Harp achieve wide adoption in a competitive landscape. The Sacred Harp outlasted an array of nineteenth-century competitors, surviving into the twentieth century as other books fell out of print and were supplanted by Sabbath School and gospel singing. By the early twentieth century, newer musical forms far exceeded Sacred Harp singing in popularity. To some, the style seemed outmoded and in need of modernization. Three competing groups revised the book in the wake of the original compilers’ deaths. These revisers adopted different approaches to making The Sacred Harp new while retaining its distinctive qualities that had long endeared the book to devoted followers. In balancing old and new, these editors attempted to redefine participation in a historical tradition as a modern. Embracing the conservative core of the style’s music, the most successful reviser modernized aspects of the book’s design and presentation, charting a path forward while setting the terms of what has remained an ongoing struggle for participants. [Jesse P. Karlsberg, “Joseph Stephen James’s Original Sacred Harp: Introduction to the Centennial Edition,” in Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition, ed. Joseph Stephen James and Jesse P. Karlsberg, Emory Texts and Studies in Ecclesial Life 8 (Atlanta, GA: Pitts Theology Library, 2015), v–xvi; Karlsberg, “Folklore’s Filter,” 25–74.] Like Sacred Harp’s early twentieth-century tunebook editors, singers today regard participation in the style as an ongoing, evolving practice, rather than the revival of something from the past, and sometimes struggle to articulate their relationship to this long and complicated history.

Folklore’s Filter

In the early twentieth century, participation in Sacred Harp singing was connected to a sense of local and personal belonging. The style’s depiction as a form of folksong beginning in the 1930s, which also involved the selection of particular local Sacred Harp groups as representative of traditional practice—what I call the style’s passage through folklore’s filter—provided an avenue for people with no personal connection to Sacred Harp’s original settings to imagine their active participation. To understand how Sacred Harp singing became folk music in the twentieth century, it is important to recognize that cultural phenomena do not objectively exist as folk practices. Instead a practice must be characterized as folk, usually by ideologically motivated cultural interveners. To describe a practice as folk entails detaching something occurring in the present and a casting it into what folklorist Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett describes as folklore’s “peculiar temporality.” [Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Folklore’s Crisis,” The Journal of American Folklore 111, no. 441 (July 1, 1998): 281–327, doi:10.2307/541312.] This process is selective, a form of adaptation and rearrangement rather than a neutral transplantation. [David E. Whisnant, “Turning Inward and Outward: Retrospective and Prospective Considerations in the Recording of Vernacular Music in the South,” in Sounds of the South, ed. Daniel W. Patterson (Chapel Hill: Southern Folklife Collection, Manuscripts Department, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, 1991), 165–81.] Relocating present practices in the past also imbues music cultures with a new set of values associated with the folk label, such as oral transmission, cultural isolation, and key aesthetic concerns. [Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Folklore’s Crisis”; David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).]

George Pullen Jackson, a professor of German at Vanderbilt University, first described Sacred Harp singing as a folk culture. Jackson’s scholarly interest in German Romanticism’s elevation of all things Volk led him to wonder why Americans didn’t care about their own folk culture. Despite vast historical and demographic differences between the United States and European nations, Jackson nonetheless “cast about” for a domestic Anglo-Celtic folk culture that might similarly serve as foundation for American national “poetic and musical art-developments.” [George Pullen Jackson, “Some Enemies of Folk-Music in America,” in Papers Read at the International Congress of Musicology Held at New York, September 11th to 16th, 1939 (New York: American Musicological Society, 1939), 77–83.] After stumbling upon Sacred Harp singing in 1926, [George Pullen Jackson, “The Fa-Sol-La Folk,” Musical Courier 93, no. 11 (September 9, 1926): 6–7, 10.] Jackson immediately interpreted the style as a folk culture in need of promotion: under threat by modernity, on the verge of inevitable transformation, and in need of protection and publicity to affect the form of its transformation. Jackson made saving Sacred Harp singing through trumpeting its history to the world his mission. Jackson also apprehended Sacred Harp music as a reservoir of primordial cultural matter of diverse but largely European and Anglo-Celtic origins transplanted and cultivated on American soil. This music, he believed, had matured in the imagined isolated cultural removes of the southern upcountry, and now sat ready for plucking and assimilating into a new national culture rooted in native American (but not Native American or African American) folksong. [On Jackson’s designation of Sacred Harp as an American folk music, see also John Bealle, Public Worship, Private Faith: Sacred Harp and American Folksong (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Karlsberg, “Folklore’s Filter.”]

Jackson’s project galls today, and even in its time it was controversial. Inspired by the attention he believed northern philanthropists and a range of commenters on national American culture lavished on black spirituals, Jackson named Sacred Harp and related shape-note music “white spirituals.” Jackson argued that these songs were the source of black spirituals on the mistaken premise that first publication implies prior composition, [George Pullen Jackson, “The Genesis of the Negro Spiritual,” American Mercury 26 (June 1932): 243–55; Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands; George Pullen Jackson, White and Negro Spirituals: Their Life Span and Kinship, Tracing 200 Years of Untrammeled Song Making and Singing among Our Country Folk, with 116 Songs As Sung by Both Races (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1943).] a position long since discredited. [William H. Tallmadge, “The Black in Jackson’s White Spirituals,” The Black Perspective in Music 9, no. 2 (October 1, 1981): 139–60, doi:10.2307/1214194; Dena J. Epstein, “A White Origin for the Black Spiritual? An Invalid Theory and How It Grew,” American Music 1, no. 2 (July 1, 1983): 53–59, doi:10.2307/3051499.] He further suggested that these songs should thus be given pride of place over black spirituals in the American cultural and musical landscape. This position aligned Jackson with racial nativists, such as Richard Wallaschek, who drew on claims of originary and derivative styles to depict African and other musics as the product of inferior races of savage capacities. [Jackson himself did not hold such beliefs, and indeed argued that black imitation of white practices was evidence of African Americans’ equal abilities.] Jackson’s positions also placed him in tension with scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who championed black spirituals as important expressions of the trauma of slavery and the middle passage. [W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), chap. 14.] Despite his bitterness at the lack of attention his “white spirituals” received, Jackson was an advocate for black cultural life in his hometown of Nashville, supporting the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Jackson also championed the art music of the city’s white elite (such as the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, which he founded).

Jackson did not achieve his ambitious goal of spawning a national culture rooted in Anglo-Celtic folk music. He did, however, publish widely on Sacred Harp, raising awareness of the style and carving paths along which future generations of scholars, festival promoters, and singers encountered the music, filtered through his folk characterizations. Jackson also presented Sacred Harp programs at numerous folk festivals and scholarly conferences, exposing the style to academics and folk music fans and locating it among other musics labeled as folk traditions. In addition, Jackson corresponded with leading composers such as Virgil Thompson, suggesting tunes to arrange, thereby contributing to the style’s incorporation into other music genres. In so doing, Jackson laid the groundwork for successive generations of musicologists and listeners to encounter the style through art music inspired by the style’s folk melodies.

Jackson’s representation of Sacred Harp as “white spirituals” contrasts with the scholarship of John W. Work III, a black professor of music at Fisk University, who also studied Sacred Harp in the 1930s. Although Work, like Jackson, described Sacred Harp as folksong, he instead wrote about the style as a form of black cultural expression. Work faced racial discrimination and professional pressures that limited his capacity to fund and conduct research on Sacred Harp singing. [John W. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University–Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941–1942, ed. Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 1–26; Nathan Frazier et al., John Work III: Recording Black Culture, compact disc (Woodbury, TN: Spring Fed Records, 2008); Karlsberg, “Folklore’s Filter,” 127–80.] His lone publication on Sacred Harp, an article on a southeastern Alabama black community of singers, [John W. Work, “Plantation Meistersinger,” The Musical Quarterly 27, no. 1 (January 1, 1941): 97–106.] failed to dislodge Jackson’s misleading depiction of Sacred Harp as white with exceptional black practitioners. Nonetheless, Work’s scholarship did lodge a representation of black Sacred Harp in the scholarly record, which would lead successive generations of folk music scholars and folk festival promoters to the singers he documented.

Folk Festivals, New Audiences

Folk festival promoters ventured through the channels that Jackson and Work carved to conduct fieldwork among black and white Sacred Harp singers during the folk revival of the 1960s and 1970s. These efforts led to a new spate of scholarship, as well as opportunities for black and white singers to perform at folk festivals across the United States. Sacred Harp singers made memorable appearances in Newport in 1964, and at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife in 1970 and 1976. Festival promoters like Ralph Rinzler and George Wein were invested in the civil rights movement and regarded integrated programming as a way folk music could help further racial harmony. [Murray Lerner, Festival! (New York: Eagle Rock Entertainment, 2005); George Wein and Nate Chinen, Myself Among Others: A Life in Music (Da Capo Press, 2009).] In this context, far removed from the still-segregated spaces where Sacred Harp singers gathered in the southern United States, liberal and largely white festival audiences could associate Sacred Harp singing with idealized race relations and more easily identify with its white practitioners. [Karlsberg, “Folklore’s Filter,” 181–264.] Hugh McGraw, leader of the white group at many of these festivals, drew on his considerable business savvy to reach out to audiences with the hope of attracting new participants to the tradition.

McGraw’s outreach and the recontextualization of Sacred Harp at folk festivals led to increased interest and participation. Many new singers encountered Sacred Harp through folk music, at both large festivals and smaller gatherings. John Feddersen, a fifty-year veteran of Sacred Harp singing in North Carolina, first encountered Sacred Harp at the 1970 Festival of American Folklife. [Dan Kane, “Archaic Sounds of Shape-Note Singing Resound in Raleigh,” News Observer, March 22, 2015.] Others first heard Sacred Harp in participatory folk song circles, such as those held at upstate New York’s Fox Hollow folk festival. The classical contexts in which Sacred Harp melodies could be heard, thanks to Jackson’s earlier efforts, also drew newcomers into the style. Washington, DC, singer Steven Sabol, for example, first heard Sacred Harp melodies at a concert featuring an arrangement of a Sacred Harp tune by Samuel Barber, and later found his way to Sacred Harp singing by perusing scores, recordings, and reissued tunebooks at university libraries.

These choral, academic, and folk festival manifestations of Sacred Harp’s rite of passage through folklore’s filter contributed to the earliest institutionalization of Sacred Harp singing outside the southern United States. By the time Alabama and Georgia singers performed at the 1970 Festival of American Folklife, folk music enthusiasts had already begun singing Sacred Harp at the Folklore Society of Greater Washington, leading Rinzler to promote the group’s meetings to attendees from the festival stage. [Sacred Harp Singers, Festival Recordings, 1970: Wade and Fields Ward with Kahle Brewer; Sacred Harp Singers, CD transfer, 1970, fp-1970-rr-0039, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.] Singings began at the Ark Coffeehouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan, before 1973. There, folk music enthusiasts and academics sang together, embracing the longstanding history of University of Michigan musicology scholarship on American musics related to Sacred Harp. The group instituted an annual all-day singing after later Sacred Harp revision consultant David Warren Steel arrived in 1973 as a musicology graduate student. [David Warren Steel, “Ann Arbor singings, was, Minutes and Question,” Fasola Singings list, April 1, 2015.] These academic, choral, and folk genealogies collided at Wesleyan University in 1976, where a planned concert by Vermont folkie and choral conductor Larry Gordon’s Word of Mouth Chorus became the first annual New England Sacred Harp Convention, with McGraw as chairman and Wesleyan composer and music professor Neely Bruce as vice chairman. At this first Sacred Harp singing convention outside the South these paths, the inheritance of Jackson’s scholarship, converged.

The spread of Sacred Harp singing in the United States intensified through the 1980s and 1990s as southern singers supported new participants in founding singing after singing across the country. [On the geographical contours of this spread, see Jesse P. Karlsberg and Robert A. W. Dunn, “Mapping the ‘Big Minutes’: Visualizing Sacred Harp’s Geographic Coalescence and Expansion, 1995–2014,” Southern Spaces Blog, January 23, 2018.] Southern support for these fledgling conventions frequently arrived in the form of a bus full of singers, chartered by Jacksonville, Alabama, singer and retired schoolteacher Ruth Brown. Ruth Brown’s bus helped forge networks of reciprocal travel that sustained these new singings by connecting singers, old and new. Many members of these burgeoning populations imagined their singings as outposts of a style with a homeland centered in the southern communities that George Pullen Jackson’s scholarship had enduringly marked as “traditional.”

Like the folk festival audiences that heard black and white renditions of what Jackson called “white spirituals,” the late twentieth-century spread of Sacred Harp singing was largely white. However, thanks to folklore’s, classical music’s, and the academy’s secularizing tendencies, Sacred Harp began to include participants of a much wider array of political and religious backgrounds. New participants were also increasingly economically and educationally diverse, but skewed toward higher class and education levels than southern singers thanks to this new population’s overlap with the academy.

Transportable Features

Sacred Harp’s growth in the 1980s and 1990s, and its subsequent international expansion, have been facilitated by the set of practices that have developed around singing from the tunebook. These practices are emotionally and spiritually powerful, conducive to community formation, and particularly transportable. Ethnomusicologist Kiri Miller has argued that the iconicity of Sacred Harp’s hollow square seating formation, the emotional associations singers build around the configuration, and the ease with which it can be set up renders it a kind of “portable homeland.” [Kiri Miller, Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).] Lueck articulates how a Sacred Harp singing convention “is a space that provides a familiar structure and social order across geographic and cultural distance” with a “shared event choreography which is legitimized through performative keys which rely on that choreography for interpretation, and social codes which police the space” while also affording a context “in which singers can express their belonging to the community-at-large.” [Lueck, “Sacred Harp Singing in Europe,” 46.] Sacred Harp’s participatory orientation, which includes not only the hollow square formation (in which singers sit facing each other rather than an audience) but the rotation of leaders at singings and an openness to all who would wish to sing regardless of identity and singing ability, lends the style to community formation through music making. [Robert T. Kelley, “Harmonious Union: How Sacred Harp Brings People Together,” The Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 2, no. 1 (March 14, 2013).] Finally, for many participants in a variety of political contexts, Sacred Harp’s full-voiced singing and status as a regular opportunity to gather with friends mean it can serve as a powerful source of emotional and spiritual renewal, and as an antidote for perceived lacks in contemporary society.

The result as Sacred Harp continues to spread, Lueck argues, is a transnational community, [Ellen Lueck, “The Old World Seeks the Old Paths: Observing Our Transnationally Expanding Singing Community,” Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 3, no. 2 (November 12, 2014).] in which singers frequently articulate the style’s capacity to bridge “vast differences” rendering singers akin to “family.” [These tropes, of seemingly unbridgeable differences and of the Sacred Harp network’s status as a “family,” implying greater closeness even than “community,” frequently emerge in memorial lessons, in officers’ remarks at the end of a day of singing, and in private conversations on car rides to and from singings and at social gatherings among singers.] The transcultural appeal of these aspects of Sacred Harp’s music culture are often what singers themselves offer in explaining their participation.

Spread to Europe

The first flowerings of Sacred Harp in Europe grew directly out of the style’s folk-inflected genealogies and histories, in particular the mix of folk music and its performance by choral ensembles, and were fed by the style’s transportable features. Sacred Harp’s “portable homeland” initially arrived beyond North America in the wake of workshops and performances held in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s and led by Northern Harmony, a touring ensemble based in Vermont and directed by Larry Gordon. [Several English performing ensembles had recorded Sacred Harp songs prior to the Northern Harmony tour. Gordon’s presence brought together several English singers interested in Sacred Harp thanks to these earlier performances and introduced additional key early organizers of English Sacred Harp singing to the style. Steve Fletcher, “Two Decades of Shape-Note Singing in the UK: A Personal Perspective” (Presentation, Sing Oxted, Oxted, United Kingdom, November 15, 2014). On Gordon’s particularly influential 1994 tour of the United Kingdom, see also Lueck, “Sacred Harp Singing in Europe,” 95–97.] In the United Kingdom, English revivalists of the nineteenth-century congregational hymn singing practice known as “West Gallery music” learned and taught each other to sing shape-notes, purchasing copies of The Northern Harmony (a shape-note tunebook Gordon had co-edited in which New England and English tunes feature prominently), as well as The Sacred Harp. In 1995, Neely Bruce led a quartet of young singers from Connecticut and Massachusetts on a United Kingdom tour. Like Gordon, Bruce mixed concerts with workshops during his English tour, and encountered singers who recognized Sacred Harp singing as related to a shared legacy of nineteenth-century religious folk song. Those who attended Bruce’s and Gordon’s concerts came together with singers who encountered Sacred Harp in scholarly writing or available recordings to stage the first of what they styled a “singing day” in 1995. The following year, with the participation of New England Sacred Harp singers, English singers organized the first United Kingdom Shape-Note Convention, using The Northern Harmony and The Sacred Harp as tune books. [Fletcher, “Two Decades of Shape-Note Singing in the UK.”] Sacred Harp singing grew steadily in England in subsequent years, largely among a population equally enthusiastic about folksong and folk dancing. Individual singers’ pathways into Sacred Harp in England were diverse from the start, and in the late 1990s and into the 2000s the backgrounds of new English participants grew increasingly varied. But Sacred Harp singing’s twentieth-century passage through folklore’s filter made its journey across the Atlantic possible. Jackson’s early associations between Sacred Harp and Anglo-Celtic folksong, as well as his promotion of the style as material for high status art music performed by classical and elite choral ensembles, made possible the connections that first carried Sacred Harp to England and later fueled its subsequent growth. By 2018, English singers could attend twenty-five annual singings from The Sacred Harp, as well as an expanding list of monthly and weekly gatherings in cities across the country. [“Calendar 2018,” United Kingdom Sacred Harp & Shapenote Singing, accessed February 1, 2018.]

The academic and performing legacy of Sacred Harp’s folklorization also contributed to the establishment of Sacred Harp singing in Ireland, where the rapid growth of a young and enthusiastic population of singers in Cork precipitated increased transatlantic and intra-European travel to singings. As I recounted in 2011, “Sacred Harp singing was introduced to Ireland in 2009 with the founding of a music ensemble at University College Cork (UCC) led by ethnomusicologist Juniper Hill,” a former student of Neely Bruce. “Hill’s students soon established a singing at a community art space in downtown Cork,” and interest in participating quickly outstripped the classroom where Hill had established the singing. [Jesse P. Karlsberg, “Ireland’s First Sacred Harp Convention: ‘To Meet To Part No More,’” Southern Spaces, November 30, 2011. On the establishment of Sacred Harp in Ireland and the first Ireland Convention, see also Robert Wedgbury, “Exploring Voice, Fellowship, and Tradition: The Institutionalised Development of American Sacred Harp Singing in Cork, Ireland and the Emergence of a Grassroots Singing Community” (M.A. thesis, University College Cork, 2011); Alice Maggio, “Regional Report: First Ireland Sacred Harp Convention,” The Trumpet 1, no. 2 (2011): vi; Lueck, “Sacred Harp Singing in Europe,” 119–29.] The first Ireland Sacred Harp Convention, held in March 2011, attracted unusually large contingents of American singers, as did subsequent annual sessions. Ethnomusicologist Jonathon Smith argues that these singers were drawn to Ireland in part because of a perception, more imagined than real, of Sacred Harp’s (and of Sacred Harp singers’) Celtic roots. [Jonathon Smith, “Celtic Imaginaries: The Sacred Harp, Ireland, and the American South” (paper presentation, International Council for Traditional Music, Limerick Ireland, July 17 2017).] Dating to George Pullen Jackson’s articulation of Sacred Harp’s “far southern fasola belt” populated by “Scotch-Irish and German, with a small ingredient of English,” [Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, 158–59. Jackson drew both population data about and support for his veneration of the group he identified as whites of the southern uplands from John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921).] Sacred Harp singing’s Celtic connection both detracts from equally significant historical influences at odds with Jackson’s political project and lays groundwork for the style’s valorization as tied to the music of the British Isles. Most Irish singers recognized Sacred Harp singing’s capacity for community formation, rather than its imagined Irish roots, as key to its success locally. Yet this geographical dimension of Jackson’s characterization of the style as folksong contributed to the international appeal of early Ireland Sacred Harp conventions, in Ireland and beyond. [Karlsberg, “Ireland’s First Sacred Harp Convention;” Smith, “Celtic Imaginaries.”]

Video recording of the first Ireland Sacred Harp Convention, March 2011. Courtesy of Cork Sacred Harp.

Sacred Harp singing similarly reached Germany via the Northern Harmony tour that introduced Sacred Harp to England. Jutta Pflugmacher, a folk music enthusiast from Bündingen, Germany, had attended one of these early concerts, singing briefly with English Sacred Harp singers. Back in Germany, she organized a stop on the 2010 Northern Harmony tour in her home town. Motivated to bring Sacred Harp singing to Germany, Plugmacher reached out to Keith MacDonald, an English expatriate and Sacred Harp singer. She also arranged for Aldo Ceresa, a New York–based singing school teacher, to present two workshops in her region, accompanied by a traveling group of English singers. [Jesse P. Karlsberg, “New Writing on Sacred Harp in Europe,” JPKarlsberg.com, (March 14, 2013); Michael Walker, “German Singing Schools: Sacred Harp Comes to the Land of J. S. Bach,” The Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 1, no. 1 (March 28, 2012).] A fledgling group from Bremen who had discovered Sacred Harp through the Internet traveled to attend these workshops. [Harald Grundner, “Wie Alles Begann,” Sacred Harp Bremen, accessed August 24, 2015.] Young Sacred Harp singers from England and Ireland living temporarily in Germany added to these emergent groups. These singers hosted their first all-day singing in January 2012, followed by Germany’s first convention in June 2014. Echoing Jackson, English singer Michael Walker noted in a report on the early German singing schools that Germany lacks the “natural points of connection with the British/Celtic origins of many of the tunes and with the religious poetry of The Sacred Harp.” [Walker, “German Singing Schools.”] The relatively few American visitors to the first German singings rarely describe their trips using the language of “returning home” that characterize some singers’ motivations for visiting singings in Ireland. No Sacred Harp tour of Germany has materialized to match the 2007 tour of England that included visits to the gravesites of prominent hymn writers whose poetry is included in The Sacred Harp. As singing in Germany has spread to new cities since 2014, the network has become an increasingly self-sufficient regional core accelerating central Europe’s Sacred Harp growth. [Jesse P. Karlsberg, “Regional Roots: Growing Sacred Harp in the Netherlands, Alaska, and British Columbia,” Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 4, no. 2 (December 31, 2015).] Yet the beginnings of Sacred Harp in Germany nonetheless evince connections to the same folksong-inspired performing ensembles that facilitated the spread of Sacred Harp to England and Ireland.

Video recording of the first Germany Sacred Harp Convention, May 2014. Courtesy of Sacred Harp Bremen.

Poland, like Germany, “is a country with its own rich indigenous linguistic, cultural, musical, and religious heritage.” [Walker, “German Singing Schools.”] Many of Poland’s first Sacred Harp singers encountered the style at events organized by individuals with connections to the spread of Sacred Harp in other parts of Europe, and with roots in the academic study of Sacred Harp and related styles. Sacred Harp singing spread to Poland after a weeklong singing school at the Jarosław Early Music Festival taught by musician and ethnomusicologist Tim Eriksen. (I served as Eriksen’s assistant.) [Eriksen’s Polish wife and manager Magdalena Zapendowska-Eriksen arranged for the workshop. Then an English professor, Zapendowska-Eriksen had learned of Sacred Harp singing in 2003 through studying English hymnist Isaac Watts and first attended singings when visiting Western Massachusetts in the United States to conduct research on Emily Dickinson in 2005. She began hosting a regular gathering to practice Sacred Harp songs at her home in 2006. A video recording of the singing that marked the conclusion of the singing school is at Timothy Eriksen, Sacred Harp Singing in Jaroslaw, Poland, e video (Jarosław, Poland, 2008).] An eclectic musician with roots in punk, grunge, folk, and world music, Eriksen first encountered Sacred Harp singing through the field recordings of folklorist Alan Lomax. [Lomax first encountered Sacred Harp singers during a 1942 recording session in Birmingham, Alabama, in collaboration with George Pullen Jackson.] Eriksen, a former member of the quartet Bruce brought to England in 1995, later entered a doctoral program in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University. Participants in the 2008 Jarosław singing school returned home to establish weekly Sacred Harp singings in Warsaw and Poznan. This growing group of singers collaborated with Alabama Sacred Harp singer and Camp Fasola co-founder David Ivey to arrange for a northern Poland location for a 2012 session of the annual singing school. Ivey organized first session of the then nine-year-old singing school held outside Alabama in response to the growing interest in the style across the continent. [Jesse P. Karlsberg, “‘Come Sound His Praise Abroad’: Sacred Harp Singing across Europe,” Country Dance and Song Society News, Winter 2012, 9–12; Jesse P. Karlsberg, “Sacred Harp, ‘Poland Style,’” blog, Southern Spaces Blog (February 27, 2013); Gosia Perycz, “A Hollow Square in My Homeland: Bringing Camp Fasola to Poland,” Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 2, no. 1 (March 14, 2013); Fynn Titford-Mock, “Celebrating Sacred Harp in Europe, September, 2012,” Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 2, no. 1 (March 14, 2013). On Sacred Harp’s arrival in Poland, see also Lueck, “Sacred Harp Singing in Europe,” 108–19.]

Two video recordings of the Sacred Harp singing held to mark the conclusion of Tim Eriksen’s weeklong singing school at the Jarosław Early Music Festival, September 2008.

Sacred Harp singing first reached Poland as “Early Music” rather than “folk music.” Yet the possibility of this characterization also owes a great deal to the framing George Pullen Jackson introduced. Depicting Sacred Harp as “America’s earliest music” was key to Jackson’s hopes for inspiring a new national culture rooted in American Anglo-Celtic folk tradition. Singers and folklorists alike have championed Sacred Harp’s antiquity in describing and promoting the style across the twentieth century. The rationale for including a contemporary music culture practiced across the United States and England in the Jarosław Early Music Festival, an event primarily featuring the music of seventeenth-century and earlier European music, relies on the folklorization of the style. [Jesse P. Karlsberg, “Resonance and Reinvention: Sounding Historical Practice in Sacred Harp’s Global Twenty-First Century” (paper presentation, Stichting voor Muziekhistorische Uitvoeringspraktijk [Foundation for Historical Musical Performance Practice], Utrecht, Netherlands, August 29, 2015).]

Just as European and American singers helped establish Sacred Harp singings in England, Ireland, Germany, and Poland, traveling singers have contributed to the expansion of Sacred Harp singing across Europe and beyond since 2008. An Alabamian stationed in South Korea and a Cork singer there teaching English established shortly lived singings in South Korea in 2012. Sacred Harp’s roots in Australia extend to two Australians’— Shawn Whelan and Natalie Sims—encounter with the style while Sims was completing a postdoctoral fellowship at a New England educational institution in 1998. Plans to hold an all-day singing came together in 2012, after Belfast singer Eimear Craddock, who first sang Sacred Harp in Cork, moved to Sydney. [Steven Levine, “Sacred Harp Down-Under: The First Australian All-Day Singing,” Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 2, no. 1 (March 14, 2013).] Sacred Harp singing briefly flourished in Hong Kong after American singer, Aaron Kahn, who had begun singing Sacred Harp stateside and briefly ran a singing in Paris, moved to the area. Tim Cook, long-active in Sacred Harp and Christian Harmony singing in Alabama, established the first singing in Japan in 2015 with Peter Evan shortly after moving to the country. Israel’s Sacred Harp singing was founded by Israeli musician, Ophir Ilzewski, who came across the style by chance in Norwich, England, and honed his skills at the fall 2014 second European session of Camp Fasola. As English, Irish, Polish, and American singers moved internationally, they crossed paths with individuals and small groups who first experienced Sacred Harp independently, connecting these singers to an emerging international network of singers, and urging the adoption of practices associated with folksong, its revival, and the filters of its scholarly genealogies.

Nationalisms

The places that encompass the contemporary landscape of Sacred Harp singing feature dramatically different social and political contexts, but all are political allies of the United States where American popular culture has a large imprint. Sacred Harp singing operates subculturally, affecting the lives of small numbers of singers in each city or region. The massive commercial enterprises and political and economic ties that encourage adoption of American culture thus have little direct impact on Sacred Harp singing. [An important exception is the 2003 Hollywood film Cold Mountain, which featured two Sacred Harp songs. The film generated considerable publicity for Sacred Harp singing and attracted many new singers to the style. See Jesse P. Karlsberg, Mark T. Godfrey, and Nathan Rees, “The Cold Mountain Bump: Hollywood’s Effect on Sacred Harp Songs and Singers,” Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 2, no. 3 (December 31, 2013). In my fieldwork in Europe I have encountered several singers who trace their introduction to Sacred Harp singing to the film.] Despite its absence from popular awareness in the countries where singings are held, Sacred Harp’s international reception refracts political and cultural relationships with the United States and its folksong. Each country’s political allegiance with the United States makes possible the reciprocal travel that strengthens emerging singings, and the largely favorable conceptions of American culture form a background context in which Sacred Harp’s “Americanness” does not seriously detract from and may even contribute to the singing’s attraction and positive reception.

In England, perceived historical ties between Sacred Harp and English West Gallery singing intrigue a number of singers, particularly those from England and New England who were active during the period when Sacred Harp singings were initially established in the United Kingdom. Some English Sacred Harp singers are deeply involved in an English revival of West Gallery music. The Northern Harmony tunebook adopted alongside The Sacred Harp at early English singings gained popularity in part because it features arrangements of West Gallery tunes, signifying to some a connection between the English and American genres. Relatedly, several early English Sacred Harp singers preferred New England fuging tunes to other songs in The Sacred Harp, drawing on the genre’s historical relationship to the West Gallery repertoire. One English singer, Chris Brown, has examined music manuscripts to trace the migration of tunes from the United States to the United Kingdom around 1800, shedding light on a historical transatlantic exchange that parallels Sacred Harp’s spread to the United Kingdom in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. [Chris Brown, “American Tunes in West Gallery Sources,” Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 3, no. 2 (November 12, 2014).] He has also presented on the English roots of Sacred Harp singing, focusing not on the book’s predominantly American tune writers, but on its hymn writers, who are predominantly English. [Chris Brown has taught classes on English hymn writers at sessions of Camp Fasola held in Poland and in Alabama in the United States.]

In Poland, a post–Cold War embrace of American and European cultural, economic, and political models [See Derek E. Mix, “Poland and Its Relations with the United States: In Brief” (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, November 17, 2015). ] introduces a narrative in which Sacred Harp’s presence represents values identified with the United States, such as freedom of expression, as well as the allegiance between the two countries. The location of the first two European sessions of Camp Fasola in Kashubia, a region in the country’s north that is now expressing renewed celebration and revival of local cultural practices as well as ethnic folk traditions, facilitates a logic of cultural exchange with the West as a context for engaging with the presence of Sacred Harp singing in the area. In fall of 2014, with Russia newly embroiled in conflict with Ukraine, tour guides for an American group visiting to participate in Sacred Harp singing placed the current conflict along the Russia-Ukraine border in the context of a centuries-long history of military and political domination of Poland by German and Russian forces. Their geopolitical narrative implicitly conscripted American tourists as Polish allies. [I traveled as a member of the American tour group thanks to support from the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association and Emory University’s Laney Graduate School’s professional development support funds. On the September 2014 American Sacred Harp trip to Europe, see also Kathy Williams, “A Long Time Traveling: A Sacred Harp Tour to the UK Convention, Camp Fasola Europe, and the Poland Convention,” Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 4, no. 1 (May 28, 2015).] David Ivey, the camp director, articulated a similar cultural allegiance at the first Camp Fasola Europe in 2012. During a performance by a Kashubian folk music and dance troupe that emphasized the group’s ability to celebrate Kashubian cultural heritage thanks to the absence of Soviet domination, Ivey stated that he never could have imagined Sacred Harp in Poland before the fall of the Iron Curtain. [Karlsberg, “Sacred Harp Singing across Europe.”] Both Polish and American participants in the evening’s cultural exchange pointed to its ability to celebrate and reiterate political ties between the two countries.

I offer these two examples of Sacred Harp’s embeddedness in national political and cultural relationships with the United States to suggest that understanding folklorization’s impact on the style’s internationalization requires negotiating America’s outsize presence and the effects of that presence on subcultural sound. Different national contexts, as well as the varied positions individual singers and their identity categories occupy with respect to these contexts, affect what Sacred Harp singing means to participants. [Lueck notes that although singers celebrate the national diversity of major singings “as a sign of community growth and cooperation,” actually expressing national identity can garner a mixed reception, as when singers “explicitly reference historical anti-British sentiments” through leading one of the handful of American patriotic songs in The Sacred Harp. See Lueck, “Sacred Harp Singing in Europe,” 188, 190–91.] Understandings of Sacred Harp singing’s practices as democratic and pluralistic also reveal the embeddedness of folksong-inspired rhetoric in geopolitically bounded Western political and cultural values. As Lueck notes, even the transportability of Sacred Harp’s features “relies on the freedom of participants to create their own spaces of identity, and the freedom to pursue their affinity.” [Lueck, “Sacred Harp Singing in Europe,” 278.] Further research might shed light on the ramifications of America’s geopolitical alliances and cultural exports on musical subcultures abroad.

Conclusion

As Sacred Harp singing continues to spread across the globe, the style can seem increasingly unmoored from the nostalgic, elegiac discourse that painted Sacred Harp singing as the dying art of an isolated “lost tonal tribe.” But the roots of this current transformation extend back to the style’s passage through folklore’s filter and to the networks of scholars and singers that flourished in its wake. Folklorization made the style’s expansion beyond its southern and national boundaries possible, and indelibly affected the form and direction of its growth.

Much work—ethnographic, theoretical, and archival—remains to be done to describe the social contexts in which Sacred Harp singing’s ongoing geographical and demographic shifts are taking place. It is important to think about how scholars’ characterization of the style as a folk music and some singers’ depiction of it as a venerable practice rooted in the antebellum southern United States may continue to affect the contours of its spread. It is equally necessary to ask how the style’s association with America affects its reception in countries with varied political and cultural relationships with the United States. Even as many new singers emphasize the transcultural ability of Sacred Harp singings to serve as meaningful cathartic gatherings conducive to community formation, more research might shed light on how singers with different backgrounds in different parts of the globe respond to the style’s practices. As Sacred Harp, now ascendant, travels to new corners of the globe, it is important to be mindful of who and where it does reach, and who and where it does not.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Meredith Doster, Alan Pike, Allison Thompson, and an anonymous reader for CD+SO for their suggestions on how to improve earlier drafts of this essay. Thanks to Ellen Lueck, fellow researcher of Sacred Harp singing’s international expansion, for her generosity in sharing ideas and fieldwork. Thanks to the archivists at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Wesleyan University Archives and Special Collections, and the Library of Congress and to individual singers in the United States and Europe for their efforts documenting, preserving, and making accessible images and video recordings documenting Sacred Harp’s history and present expansion. Thanks to my wife, Lauren Bock, for supporting and sometimes accompanying me on my fieldwork trips in Europe and the United States. Thanks, finally, to the Sacred Harp singers who welcomed me into their homes and helped me formulate the ideas in this article over many delightful hours of conversation.

Works Cited

Spring is sprung, and our “old” traditions are looking pretty fresh and verdant! Once again Country Dance + Song Online presents articles that explore how Anglo-American dance and song traditions continue to reinvent and refresh themselves in the age of the internet and the cell phone.

In The Dolphin Hey: The Evolution and Transmission of a Dance Figure, former CDSS President David Millstone and I trace the history and travels of this popular English (and Scottish and contra) dance figure. In sailing out to catch a glimpse of these dolphins we traveled (figuratively only, alas!) from the Shetland Islands of the 1880s to England, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States today. Our collaboration also had us reach out to dance choreographers and leaders from these countries who gave us their insights and knowledge of the transmission of the dolphin hey, and who reminded us that our joy in the traditional arts is shared around the world. This article also includes “A Pod of Dolphin Dances”—not a compendium of all known dances with dolphin heys in them, but a collection of the transformational ones (to date) mentioned in the context of the article. A bonus feature is a link to footage of the key dolphins themselves: Pelorus Jack and Opo.

Sacred Harp singing, so firmly associated in many people’s minds with the folk cultures of the southern United States, is now, as Jesse P. Karlsburg discusses, both a global and local phenomenon. Sacred Harp singing has spread to Europe, Oceania, East Asia, and the Middle East. Jesse observes that, though vastly expanded in geography and demographic variety, the style is still a “subcultural sound,” a “micromusic” that convenes small groups of people with strong community bonds. These groups may live beneath the level of broad cultural attention even while the musical form itself regularly achieves local and even national press coverage. In The Folk Scholarship Roots and Geopolitical Boundaries of Sacred Harp’s Global Twenty-first Century, Jesse explores the unique musical features and practices that support Sacred harp’s adoption and the similarities and differences in the histories of transnational political, economic, and cultural exchange affecting the form of participation for many singers. The numerous audio/video clips included will heighten your understanding of this musical form.

Tradition never stands (pun intended) still—in Lock and Dam: A Longsword Dance for the 21st Century, Douglas Allchin describes an innovative new longsword dance from Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the Mississippi River. The imagery of the dance evokes the river, with various spinning gestures and undulating waves reminiscent of the twirling turbulence and flow of the river’s water, while figures and sword locks are named after various riparian features such as “Paddle-Wheel” or “Bridge Lock,” or local Minneapolis celebrities. The dance is based on a 12-count phrase to hornpipes in 3/2, giving it a pulse not felt in a duple meter, and Douglas provides directions for creating the complicated new sword locks that are a feature of this new dance. Video included!

African-American dance continues to influence popular dance traditions today. In Walking for the Cake, Mark Matthews explores how the cakewalk—popular (in varying ways) in both black and white cultures—served as a cultural bridge from 19th century plantation/frontier society to the modern industrial age. Mark notes that the dance marked the beginning of the acceptance of African-American dance and music in the United States—as well as around the world. The cakewalk was the first step, so to speak, that led to African traditions dominating American pop culture. And, yes, video included!

Happy singing and dancing to all!

Allison Thompson
General Editor
Country Dance + Song Online