The Pronunciation of The Note Names
When Sacred Harp singers sing a song, they first sing it through "from the shapes"--that is, they read the names of the notes from their shapes, rather than singing the words of the song (for details, see Shape note; Sacred Harp). The note names (which date to Elizabethan times) are: "fa", "sol", "la", and "mi".
In 18th and 19th century American sources, the syllables "fa" and "la" are often spelled "faw" and "law". This almost certainly means that when speakers of the time pronounced them, they used the vowel of American English that is spelled "aw". In most dialects that have this vowel, it is lower mid, back, and made with slight lip rounding. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is /ɔː/.
On the recordings mentioned above, traditional singers can be heard pronouncing "fa" and "la" in two different ways. Some of them use the rounded vowel just noted, while others use a pronunciation closer to the Italian spelling, with a low central unrounded vowel, /ɑː/.
A reasonable surmise for why "faw" and "law" were substituted for "fa" and "la" can be offered, based on the history of the English language. Until the twentieth century, English had no words ending in /ɑː/. Words ending in /ɔː/, however, have always been abundant (paw, caw, thaw, saw, Shaw, maw, law, raw, yaw, claw, draw, craw, McGraw, etc.). It is likely that speakers of pre-20th century English adapted the foreign syllables "fa" and "la" to match their native speech habits, substituting /ɔː/ for /ɑː/.
During the 20th century, various borrowed words with final /ɑː/ came into English: spa, bra, Shah, Zsa-Zsa, cha-cha. Perhaps these paved the way for the pronunciation of la and fa with /ɑː/. Another possibility is that increased foreign language instruction in schools made Americans more comfortable with final /ɑː/, enabling /fɑː/ and /lɑː/ alongside the new loan words.
The syllable spelled sol is normally pronounced so by all singers, as is implied by the colloquial designation of Sacred Harp music, "fasola".
Read more about this topic: Performance Practice Of Sacred Harp Music
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