Missouri Harmony - Compilation of The Songs

Compilation of The Songs

“Legacy” is one of only a few secular songs in the book. Most of the music comes from early New England religious composers such as Billings and southern folk hymn compilers who followed their lead. They wrote in a folk, or vernacular, tradition of arranging for three or four parts, giving each its own distinctive line. This music was, quite literally, written to be enjoyed by amateur singers, and it is in this tradition that Allen Carden compiled The Missouri Harmony in 1820.

In The Missouri Harmony, the parts freely cross one another—a bass, for example, might find himself singing a higher note than the tenors. In fact, the dispersed harmony determined the oblong shape of the tune books, with a staff for each part so that singers would always know exactly which notes they ought to be singing.

Carden not only copied the old New England compositions but also took folk melodies that were circulating in the oral tradition and wrote a high harmony part (treble) above and a low harmony part (bass) below the tenor’s melody, much as a bluegrass gospel band does today. The harmonies in their folk hymns and camp meeting songs stand alone as distinct and often very catchy melodies. As in New England, a good proportion of the songs were in a minor key that reflected the modal harmonies of the Anglo-Celtic oral tradition.

Carden’s borrowing from other sources was typical of all collections in the shape-note vernacular. The Sacred Harp, currently the most widely used four-shape book, included some sixty-five tunes from The Missouri Harmony in its debut edition of 1844. In 1944, shape-note authority George Pullen Jackson speculated on the influence of previous books on The Sacred Harp, “It is … quite likely that many copies of the old, frequently reprinted Missouri Harmony were still in use in the Sacred Harp territory during the 1840s and 1850s.” As Ernst C. Krohn noted in his 1949 article in the Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, “The 1936 edition of the Original Sacred Harp abounds in references to The Missouri Harmony that justify its position as one of the outstanding sacred collections of its period. Not only that, it is also one of the earliest documents in the musical life of the English-speaking elements in Missouri Territory.”

As he noted on the 1820 title page, Carden took special care to select tunes appropriate for “all Christian churches, singing schools, and private societies.” The Missouri Harmony was most commonly used in singing schools where the singing master used the different shaped note heads as a solfège system to help those unschooled in sight singing. Shape notes were known by other names as well. They were also called patent notes because they were registered with the U.S. Patent Office in the absence of effective copyright protection and buckwheat notes, for their perceived resemblance to the angular grain.

Following in the footsteps of The Easy Instructor, Carden’s tune book used note heads of four different shapes to denote the scale. As singing-school students recognized the shapes, they found it easier to sound the intervals. The importance of singing-school masters in the history of vocal music is summed up Edward Birge in History of Public School Music in the United States: “Collectively they did a useful and indispensable work; for they not only helped to bring order out of chaos in church singing, but they laid the first foundations of technical knowledge of music, they kindled the musical imagination of the people, and afforded glimpses of some of the artistic possibilities latent within themselves.”

Typical of 19th-century singing schools was one recalled by a local historian in White County, Illinois, in the southeastern corner of the state. “The old-time method of conducting singing school was . . . plodding and heavy, the attention being kept upon the simplest rudiments, as the names of the notes on the staff, and their pitch, and beating time, while comparatively little attention was given to expression and light, gleeful music.” But the youngsters loved it.

Along the Sangamon River in central Illinois, old settlers remembered a singing master who “taught vocal music by the ‘patent’ or ‘buckwheat’ notes, the old ‘Missouri Harmony’ being the work generally used.” Most of the tunes were “in the minor strain, and as the young folk flocked in for miles around, crowding the houses where they were held,” the singing was loud enough to “waken the echoes.”

Loud participatory singing was the order of the day in singing schools, worship services, and—perhaps most of all—outdoor camp meetings. The shape-note tune books were used primarily in singing schools (at least in what is now the Midwest), while a practice known as “lining out” prevailed almost exclusively in church and “call and response” at camp meetings.