Americans used to sing a lot; in fact, if you go back to Colonial times, singing in groups seems to have been one of the principal ways that ordinary people had fun. Nowadays, of course, we know better, and we let Britney Spears do our singing for us :=).
Shape note singing is one way to recapture the sense of happiness and participation that was common to all Americans long ago during the great age of participatory singing. I do a bit of this as a hobby, with my wife Pat Keating. We sing with our local Sacred Harp group , mostly out of the Denson book, a compendium of music centering on the period 1770-1860. The notes in this book come in shapes that are supposed to help you in sight-singing, and you usually "sing the shapes", with syllables like "fa", "so" and "la", before you sing the words.
Pat and I particularly like the old New England material (ca. 1770-1810), only a fraction of which appears in the official Sacred Harp books. These are PDF files of a few of these old songs, rendered into shape notes with Sibelius software. For software reasons (see below), these look a bit cheesy, but I think they are at least legible. Corrections welcome, send them to me at bhayes at humnet dot ucla dot edu.
by William Billings
- America
- Easter Anthem (expanded version of 1795)
- Framingham
- Lamentation over Boston ("By the rivers of Watertown")
- Sudbury (This is the 1794 "Sudbury"; there is also a different one from 1770. I plugged in some Christmas words, a good way to get shape note singers to try something new. Original words also included)
Anonymous, from the old book Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music. Actually, these were in shape notes even in Wyeth, but formatting and clef issues make it worth resetting them.
P.S. If you want to make any of these shape note PDF's yourself, I recommend you do it differently from me. The best music typesetting software for this purpose is Finale, and the best fonts are obtained from Shape Note expert Karen Willard.