| Includes audio CD!
William Walker’s Southern Harmony, first published in 1835, was
the most popular tune book of the nineteenth century, containing 335 sacred
songs, dominated by the folk hymns of oral tradition and written in the old
four-shape notation that was for generations the foundation of musical teaching
in rural America. Born in 1809 in South Carolina, William Walker grew up near
Spartanburg and early became devoted to the Welsh Baptist Church of his
ancestors and to the musical heritage that church had brought to early America.
Walker became a singing master, and Southern Harmony was compiled for
his students in hundreds of singing schools all over North and South Carolina
and Georgia and in eastern Tennessee. Southern Harmony reached Kentucky
in the company of music-loving pioneers, and today an annual singing in Benton,
Kentucky, remains the only such occasion on which Southern Harmony is
consistently the source of the music.
The CD included with the book contains 29 tunes, hymns, psalms, odes, and
anthems, including "New Britain" (Amazing Grace), "Happy Land," "O Come, Come
Away," "Wondrous Love," and many, many more.
Glenn C. Wilcox, a musicologist who specializes in nineteenth-century
American music, is a native of Paducah, Kentucky.
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