Imagined space in Sacred Harp singing

This study explores the meaning of space in Sacred Harp singing. A shape-note singing practice with roots in the nineteenth-century American Southeast, Sacred Harp has expanded across the US and into Western Europe and Australia over the last several decades. Space has meaning beyond geography for Sacred Harp, however. Observers, scholars, and participants have intercepted Sacred Harp’s relationship to places through “imaginaries”—culturally determined conceptions that give meaning to places, communities, and histories even if they are not accurate representations. I focus on two overlapping imaginaries that have had an enormous impact on Sacred Harp: the southern imaginary and the Celtic imaginary. Both rely on essentializing and exoticizing caricatures in order to define a regional character and impart specific values to the places they describe. I reveal how literary and historical tropes of “southernness” have informed interpretations of Sacred Harp beginning in the early twentieth century. I follow this narrative through the twentieth century and up to the present, investigating how perceptions of what makes Sacred Harp “authentic” or “traditional” are determined in part by southern imaginaries. In addition, I trace the simultaneous impact of Celtic imaginaries through the assertion that shape-note singing in the American Southeast was maintained by “Anglo-Celtic” singers whose ancestral music found expression in the musical forms of Sacred Harp. Beyond simply revealing the inaccuracies and limitations of these imagined narratives, I am interested in the work that they do to interpret, represent, and even construct Sacred Harp’s musical and social practices. I show how the construction of an imagined “upland South” populated by people with Celtic ancestry whitewashed the complicated racial histories of the southeast US that gave form to The Sacred Harp and the communities that sing from it. I explore how imagined ties to the Celtic world have formed actual social connections among Sacred Harp communities on either side of the Atlantic. I reveal how contemporary singers have queered the spaces of Sacred Harp singing—not only by creating spaces within the singing community for expressions of sexual diversity, but by reorienting numerous aspects of Sacred Harp practice to better accommodate a diverse range of contemporary participants, including in new virtual spaces. Through this study, I demonstrate that imaginaries are more than just superficial historical narratives, but active concepts laden with cultural meaning that help define, represent and construct Sacred Harp singing.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Musicology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Smith, Jonathon M

Contributors dc:contributor

• Solis, Gabriel
• Buchanan, Donna A
• Magee, Gayle
• Silvers, Michael

• Sacred Harp
• shape-note singing
• Imaginaries
• Southern Studies
• Celtic Studies

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Jonathon Smith

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116053

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F116053