"This is not listener's music. It is singer's music." Thus Dr. George Pullen Jackson explained not only the perplexity experienced by the urban listener when first exposed to Sacred Harpers' "dispersed harmony," but also the fervor of the traditional singer--whose feeling for this old-timey, unaccompanied singing is a form of non-denomination "old-time religion."

Also known as shape-note, four-note, and fasola music, Sacred Harp singing (a term derived from the song book used) stands alone as the survival of a tradition which saturated the South after first being disseminated through similar books by "Yankee singing school masters" of the ...