Sacred Harp Singing


Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism. By Kiri
Miller. 2007. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 272 pages.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03214-1 (hard cover).

Reviewed by Duncan Vinson, Suffolk University and St. Anselm College

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, conventional wisdom
holds that the United States is deeply divided between "red states"
and "blue states," partly on the basis of religion: witness the map
that circulated during the 2004 presidential election in which the
South and Southwest are labeled "Jesusland," while the Northeast,
Midwest, and West Coast are labeled "United States of Canada." It is
fortuitous, then, that Kiri Miller has provided a timely ethnographic
account of a nationwide musical community, Sacred Harp singers, that
"live[s] against the grain of present-day American political life"
(44).


Superficially, the Sacred Harp phenomenon of the last thirty years
embodies a social divide similar to the red/blue state divide. One
hears talk of a musical style maintained by both "traditional"
singers (often a shorthand for "rural, Southern, Christian,
politically conservative") and "revivalists" ("urban, Northern,
secular, politically liberal"). The more one spends time among Sacred
Harp singers, however, the more this opposition becomes suspect.
Traveling Home (like John Bealle's excellent Public Worship, Private
Faith) delves below the surface and demonstrates that while the
cultural differences that underlie this opposition are real, the
practices of the Sacred Harp convention--singing in a hollow square
formation, singing the shapes (i.e., solfège syllable names, each
represented by a differently shaped notehead), the memorial lesson
for singers who have died, and networks of obligation with other
singing conventions in distant places--create a space where singers
transcend these cultural differences. For Miller, a "sincerity akin
to faith" (185) binds together singers of diverse backgrounds within
the hollow square; "the hollow square will reconfigure space into
place [and] the convention protocols will reconfigure strangers into
family" (202).

While Bealle's research focuses on "folksong" as the root concept for
interpreting Sacred Harp, Miller focuses on "diaspora." One of the
advantages of speaking of Sacred Harp singing as a diaspora is that
Miller can transcend well-worn notions of "tradition" and "revival."
While she recognizes that Sacred Harp singing is not like an ethnic
diaspora in every respect, she makes a convincing case that "diaspora
consciousness"--"being 'at home in transience'" (206)--describes the
combination of longing, travel, and pilgrimage found among Sacred
Harp singers. The hollow square becomes a "portable homeland" (47),
and The Sacred Harp tunebook, with each song linked in memory to
specific events and individuals, becomes a "portable graveyard" (98).

Traveling Home is based on ten years of fieldwork at an impressive
range of singing conventions in the Midwest, the South, and New
England. Miller draws on her experience of singing both in the
Midwest and in New England to argue that these regions of the
diaspora are as different from each other as they are from the South.
She tactfully discusses the different relationships diaspora singers
have toward the oral and written traditions that link new singers to
the past. Miller also demonstrates that singers in the South are
hardly monolithic. Traveling Home is the first major work to document
the impact that the Lee family of southeastern Georgia has had on
Sacred Harp practice since the late 1990s. Miller makes a provocative
observation: while the Lees' previous isolation from other Southern
singers has made them celebrities (as wellsprings of supposedly
unpolluted "tradition"), similarly isolated groups with idiosyncratic
traditions (particularly in New England) are criticized as lacking
respect of tradition. Miller's discussion of this irony sheds light
on the nature of authority within the Sacred Harp community.

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