Long Ago and "Fasola" Away

Would it surprise you to discover that a popular and yet persecuted cult had once been wide-spread across the Southern Highlands, even well into the 20th Century? A cult centered on music, entwined with religion, made a central element of rural education and a social institution in its own right? A cult that became so widespread that in our Grandparent's times almost all rural folk of the uplands of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky, no matter their religious leanings, belonged to it? It was, as a tradition, handed down from their parents and grandparents, the sturdy stock of German and Scot-Irish pioneers who first settled the coves and valleys of the Southern Appalachians. It was a cult born in Europe and popular before the American Revolution in Puritan New England, a cult eventually despised by the church and driven to extinction in those parts even before the United States was born. It was brought to the South by the Pioneers that came down the Great Wagon Road in the mid 1700s, to be preserved for more than a century in the isolated hills of the Southland. It was finally "found out" here, though, as "progress" made its inevitable way up the coves and hollows, and has now become a forgotten memory to the vast majority, even of those who "know" about music. This is a cult, or a cultural practice, or folkway that even the student of Southern Appalachian Folk Music might well miss. Yet at one time it was central to the forces that made the region what is (or was).

This was the cult of Fasola, a widely popular movement in these regions, and several others eventually, such as the hills of Arkansas and the mountains of southern Missouri. Fasola flourished from about 1800 until the 1930s. Fasola, although regaining some of its popularity today, was brought almost to its end by the forces of "organized" religion and the Institutions and promoters of "proper" Music Education. This has always been the struggle of the Fasola, better known in the South as Sacred Harp Singing, or "Signing the Shaped Notes", since its first inception over 300 years ago.

The beginnings of Fasola, the "fa-sol-la" of the musical scale, are a bit murky at best, but the roots accepted by most historians place the beginnings in Elizabethan times. In the England of Shakespeare notes were sung in the Fasola fashion of "fa sol la fa sol la mi fa". [Jackson P4] This practice slowly faded until a renewal in Europe in the late 1600s, toward the middle of the Baroque musical period. The issues surrounding its re-birth lie in the changes going on in the Protestant Church in those years. The traditions and austerities of the democratic early church had given way to a rise in the power of the leadership of the churches over the years, and the attraction and excitement of the churches had become less intense. These once vibrant religions had become "boring". The songs sung by congregations, always sung by rote based on the musical knowledge of the Deacon in the old "Common Way" had dwindled in number and in variety as the years went by, and by that period there were just a few worn sacred songs to be sung. [ Jackson, P6 ]

Some of the early founders of the "new" churches cast about to find a liturgy that would invigorate the new denominations, and soon leaders such as Isaac Watts of the Church of Christ and the Wesley brothers, founders of Methodism, in England settled on the publishing of Hymnals, intended to introduce new songs to the congregations, as the route to creating such excitement. The problem arose however that these common Christians were mostly illiterate, and certainly not familiar with the nuance and complications of traditional musical notation. Enter Fasola, coming to the rescue! By 1698 hymnals began appearing with Musical Notation and the letters F, S and L printed below the staff ("Mi" was added later). Now it was found with very little instruction the congregation could sing a song to a tune, even if never before heard. In Thomas Walters 1721 manual, Grounds and Rules of Music Explained, which was considered the premier authority on singing for a quarter century, says that with his book "even children or people of the meanest capacities can come to sing." [ Bealle, P9 ]

While the rise and fall of Fasola in Europe is a tale in itself (albeit familiar to our own), American Fasola made its way across the Atlantic and found its way into the Congregationalist Churches of New England by the early 1700s. The same forces that had brought Fasola to popularity in England saw it rise as the "Regular Singing" movement (as opposed to the traditional "Common Way") in New England by 1721 with the import of Walter's book. [ Jackson, P 6 ]

At first the traditional churches embraced the new idea, but soon it became obvious to the leadership that this may indeed be too much of a "good thing". The "singing" seemed to take on a life of its own as people became excited about their new found abilities. Singing Schools not sponsored by the church grew up across the countryside and social gatherings outside the direct control of the Puritan leaders began to become commonplace. Soon stories of a friendly "mixing of the sexes" came to the ears of elders, and an aura of some never quite explained moral "risk" fell upon the Singings and their promoters. A "backlash" of sorts had also developed among the educated purveyors of music, who believed this primitive form was a threat to the "real" reading of music, and these forces combined to find the Hymnals using the Fasola "banned" from the churches by the 1760s. A pamphlet was circulated as early as 1722 which outlined the objections:

1. It is a new way, an unknown tongue.
2. It is not so melodious as the usual way.
3. There are so many tunes we shall never have done learning them.
4. The practice creates disturbances and causes people to behave indecently and disorderly.
5. It is Quakerish and Popish and introductive on instrumental music.
6. The names given to the notes are bawdy, yea blasphemous (i.e., fa-sol-la-mi, etc.)
7. It is a needless way, since our fathers got to heaven without it.
8. It is a contrivance to get money.
9. People spend too much time learning it, they tarry out nights disorderly.
10. They are a company of young upstarts that fall in with this way, and some of them are lewd and loose persons. [Leonard Ellenwood, The History of American Church Music, p. 20]

The next chapter in Fasola was written in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania. In those same years as popularity declined in New England, the areas around Philadelphia PA were filling up with new immigrants. Scot Irish and German settlers, mostly poor and protestant were coming in torrents to the new world, invited by the Quaker William Penn to the new lands of religious freedom he had established there. Singing teachers from New England, in some disrepute there and "out of a job" discovered they were welcome among these new inhabitants and the cycle of the Singing School began anew in those regions. For a generation or two the Fasola prospered, but then as in England and New England before, the same forces led to its demise. [Jackson, P 7]

It was the children raised with Fasola, the children of the original immigrants, who carried Fasola onward. Pennsylvania had become overcrowded and land expensive by the end of the French and Indian War, 1763, and now the children of the original settlers were lured away to the south and west by promises of cheap land on the frontier. They departed on foot, or with crude wagons and ox carts, taking their families across the Susquehanna and on across the Potomac Rivers into the Valley of Virginia. Here Fasola found its most permanent haven. Onward they came down the Valley and into the Carolinas before the Revolution, following the crude trail known to history as the Great Wagon Road. Everywhere they went the old worn Fasola Hymnals traveled secured as treasure next to the ever present family Bible in the settler's meager collection of possessions. [ The Great Wagon Road, p 199]

The Revolution brought a certain democratization of the churches, especially on the frontier, decreasing the pressure of the "opposition", and as the settlers moved further west, into the former lands of the Cherokee and Shawnee; Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky and the uplands of the Carolinas, they took the popularity of the Singing School to new heights. By 1798 this surge of popularity brought about a new innovation in the Hymnals, the printing of the score in Patent or Shaped Notes. Shaped notes were a simple extension of the Fasola, changing the round heads of the standard notation notes on the staff to a series of geometric shapes corresponding to the Fa (right triangle), Sol (circle), La (square) and Mi (diamond).

The first of this genre may have been printed by an obscure singing teacher named John Connelley in Philadelphia, and another 1798 publication by Andrew Law adopted a similar method, but these were followed by the much more popular book by Little and Smith published in the frontier river town of Cincinnati OH in 1800 named the "Easy Instructor". [ Story of the sacred Harp ] These books and their descendants were unique in the period in that they always begin with a very basic instructional section intended to teach the use of the notes to those with no musical background. "The clear advantages of the shape note system are almost immediately apparent. Providing an individual shape for each syllable enables anyone, after a modicum of attention to the matter, to name the proper syllables of any piece of music instantaneously. One of the genuine difficulties in ordinary solmization is that… the student must make continual mental computations. With Shape notes, this is completely avoided" [Bealle P1]

Such instruction drove the development of Singing Schools, for now any person educated enough to read, who might come into possession of one of these treasured book could become a Singing School Instructor. In the isolated coves and valleys of the frontier education was a scarce commodity, so often the public services of remote communities depended on Itinerate, or traveling, teachers and preachers. In fact it was often true that such people were often both Teacher and Preacher, serving up the three "R"s during the week and the "Hellstorm and Brimstone" of the Great Awakening on the Sabbath as they moved from community to community in a great cycle. The addition of "Singing Teacher" to this resume was a natural one, for in this world where Musical Instruments were extremely rare due to poverty, isolation and bad roads, any musical entertainment was a blessing. "Singing" combined the Church with the three "R"s in such a way that it was often impossible to separate the two. In addition the schools offered adults the ability to interact with members of the community that did not share their particular Protestant denomination, making such schools and singings an invaluable "glue" to bond together the many diverse members of the community, as well as provide common ground for chaperoned exposure of young folks to members of the opposite sex.

By 1810 the Great Awakening had come to the mountains of the South and a sense of community was growing in the isolated hills. With the threat of Indian attack finally quelled by years of war, and the valleys and coves filling up, the settlers sought ways to "connect" and be social that they hadn't looked for in the past. The "singin' schools" were a wonderful opportunity, a chance to become proficient with the "new fangled" notes and show off your new talents on Sunday at church, but the settlers wanted more. Thus "Singings" became an institution born to fill these needs. For generations "singings" were held across the area, ranging from small groups of ten or twelve, to extravaganzas with hundreds of "singers". These events became a cherished custom.

Deep in the Southern Appalachians in the earliest years of the 1800s a man lived that was the epitome of the "Teacher, Preacher and Singing School Teacher" that persona that became such an institution in the area. His name was Reuben Philips. Born in 1795 near Charlotte, NC, he moved as a child to the mountains and grew up near Asheville NC. He would grow to be an old man of 90, and he ended his years in Alabama at the extreme far southern end of the hill country, a preacher and singing teacher to his last breath. In 1884 he wrote his memoirs for his daughter which included a section which illustrates the early days of the "Singings". In it he describes events leading to a summer school at the "Shook House" in Clyde, NC in 1818.

"In the fall of [1815] I commenced a school on Sandymush Creek in the west part of Buncombe County near Colonel James Lowrey. The neighborhood was composed of about forty families and no church but the Methodist and an excellent community. I enjoyed myself very well and being anxious to learn music I applied to the same Mr. White to come over and teach for us. He accordingly sent articles and the school was made up. He employed me to make the manuscript books. The school commenced. He attended and taught two days and at the close of the second day he informed us that he could not teach any more so the school was done. The young people had a meeting and resolved that I should take his place and that they would sustain me. I concluded to try, so I commenced in good earnest, only knowing four or five tunes in the parts [Fa So La]. [I] appointed the next Saturday for the first day. I soon memorized the rules [ Shaped Notes ] and practiced some more tunes on Saturday. The first Saturday in October 1816 I commenced my first music school. I taught on Saturdays only and sang on Sabbath gratuitous.
My good success was published all over the county and a petition was sent from Locust Old Fields where I had before taught school for me to teach a reading school and a singing school for them. I opened a school at Locust Old Fields [ Canton NC ] on the first Monday of January 1818 and a music school also for Saturdays and Sundays gratuitously.

Old father Shook came to hear us sing and was so delighted that he proposed his house [five miles west in Clyde NC] for me to sing in. Old Father Shook had a fine house and in the third story he had a room 40 feet square well finished for preaching for the Methodist. I made a large school at that place some fifty scholars and had the assistance of my old friend Humphrey Posey who was an experienced music teacher. This school drew together a vast concourse of young people from both schools.

Towards the end of the summer my friend Rev. Posey and Parson Byers requested that we should call all the Sandymush and Newfound music scholars for a three day singing - two at Father Shooks and on Sunday at Waynesville five miles further west. We had over 120 singers; the greatest singing ever witnessed in that county. On Sunday we went in procession to the muster field where a stand was erected for preaching. The hymn was sung that effects my heart. I was so overcome as to be scarcely able to stand on my feet. The hymn was commenced "Oh tell me no more of this worlds vain store etc."

It seemed that "singing" had caught fire. Several new hymnals were published in the Valley of Virginia, the most well known of the early ones was the Harmonia Sacra of Joseph Funk published in ten editions from 1832 to 1860 in Singers Glen VA. "Singing" Billy Walker of Spartanburg SC introduced his book, Southern Harmony in 1835 and soon it had sold 600,000 copies, an incredible number in those days. Not to be outdone, Walker's partner, stung by "Singing Billy's" notoriety, left that association and went west before the Civil War to the hills of Alabama, and there he published in 1844 what was to become the most popular of all the Shaped Note books, the Sacred Harp which had sales in the millions.

Time rolled along, and the same forces of "Proper" Music and Morality that had done in Fasola in other areas began to erode the original tradition. Music aficionados, always critical of the limitations of the old four note system stretched the tradition to include seven notes, and by the 1870s seven note song books had become the norm for Fasola. More than anything though, it was urbanization of the South and the centralization of the Protestant denominations that brought the end to mass popularity of Fasola. Organized religion, its headquarters always located in some distant area where Fasola had long been forgotten chose the Hymnals, the well trained Choirs determined the music to be sung on Sunday. Fasola took on such adjectives as "Primitive" and "White Spiritual" singing. It was only in the most rural of settings that the Singings still flourished, and there only until the advent of "new" forms of entertainment such as Radio and Instrumental concerts and dances found their way there. By the late 1930s Fasola and Shaped Note Singing had almost disappeared. But the assault continued, it can be seen in the struggle of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Pelham SC which was refused entry into the Southern Baptist Association up until 1964 because it refused to ban the Shaped Note Hymnals. [ Heritage of Tabernacle Baptist Church, Sightler ]

Fasola may seem to be extinct, but not quite. In the rural coves "Primitive Baptists" and "Free Will Baptists" still hold on to the old ways, and another group, the rural Black Gospel Churches have adopted the simple notations for a while, and wrote their own words to the old tunes they sang from the hymnals. Famous and popular Fasola favorites like Amazing Grace, Keep on the Sunny Side and This Little Light of Mine continue to be popular to this day in other genres. Adding instruments to the singing led to the birth of another Mountain Folk Tradition, the Family Gospel Singers of the South. Many of the hymnals became song books for the new instrumentalists of the region, finding their way into the Traditional Blue Grass music of today, a tradition that only extends back about as far as the demise of Shaped Note Singing. In fact, the notation used by traditional banjo players in Bluegrass is called "Tabular Notation", but is in fact recognizable as the old Shaped Notes. [ How to play the Plectrum Banjo, Donald Stevison ]

The growing interest in Folk Art and Folk Ways in the Appalachian region led to a renewed interest in Shaped Notes in the 1980s and this has led to somewhat of a revival. Today "Old Time Singings" are held here and there and all have the same old traditional structure of "Singing with Supper on the Grounds". From the web page that announces the annual "Shape-Note Singing at the Cullowhee Baptist Church" held the "Saturday before third Sunday in April" each year comes this description of the affair: "Unaccompanied by instrumentation‚ the music is created entirely by the human voice - the "sacred harp." The hosts of the singing have extra hymnals to share‚ and offering to share a hymnal with others is a prevailing and friendly gesture on the part of the singers. Visitors are genuinely welcome to attend as listeners‚ but ideally they should not join in the singing unless they are practiced singers themselves. Participants typically prepare and share a potluck dinner‚ and visitors who want to eat should always bring along a food item to contribute to the general meal. Any dish that's typically served at a covered-dish supper would be a suitable offering from a visitor."

Now, in the first years of the 21st century, we find ourselves witness to the rise once again of this strange "cult" of singers. Today's "converts" find satisfaction in the simplicity of Fasola in today's complicated and dehumanizing electronic age. It is a simplicity born of a tradition and the power of fellowship over shared meals, of the influence of family and local history, of the democracy found in ease and accomplishment of learning the simple notes or of the strength of the unaided human voice joined in unison. The attraction may also be, as it always has been with Fasola, that recognition of joy that can be found in revolt, in wanting to keep alive something that the "powers that be" want to stamp out.

Is such persecution as Fasola has received across the centuries reasonable? Morally it is hard to see by today's standards certainly, but from a musical standpoint? Maybe that can only be answered properly by one's listening to the "democratic" union of vocal cords as they strum their "God Given Sacred Harp".