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Singing School (1832)
Based on the traditional Scottish song "The Blue Bells of Scotland," Singing School is found in the tunebook The Social Harp (1855) and the appendix to The Sacred Harp (1850 edition). It is a celebration of the tradition of shape-note singing and its singing masters. Daniel W. Patterson:
"In the 19th-century rural South the 'singing master' was an important figure. He taught thousands of country people to sight-read choral music printed in simplified 'shape-note' notation. The singing master was also the first to collect Southern folk songs. His shape-note songsters [books of songs] hold three- and four-part settings of many hundreds of traditional melodies.
"One of the most interesting of these singing masters was John Gordon McCurry, author of The Social Harp (1855). Half of the 222 pieces in the book were written by this young farmer and his friends in upper Georgia. Two things distinguish their compositions from those in the other 'Harp' and 'Harmony' songsters. First, McCurry aimed his book more at the singing school than at the church and printed the original secular texts of some of the songs. Second, he and his friends drew heavily on early campmeeting and revival songs, the most folky of the white spirituals."
Text for Singing School:
O, tell me young friends,
While the morning's fair and cool,
O, where, tell me, where
Shall I find your singing school.
You'll find it under the tall oak, where the leaves do shake and blow,
You'll find a half hundred a-singing faw, sol, [law].
J. H. Moss lived in Hall County, Georgia and was a singing master in Hall, Milton, and neighboring counties, as well as a travelling salesman for The Social Harp (1855). Moss moved to Sand Mountain, Alabama around the beginning of the Civil War, and died there around 1865.
The Southern Traditional Singers was a group of leading Sacred Harp singers from Georgia and Alabama assembled for this recording. Leader Hugh McGraw is an active singing master and executive secretary emeritus of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company.
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