Month: August 2010

Some of us had a brief discussion at the Berkeley singing tonight about whether men could sing in the alto section. One person suggested that alto sections are always all women. I thought that there had to be a place for those few men whose strongest voice is their falsetto (i.e., counter-tenors), which places them in the alto section. But did I know of any men who sang with the altos? Yes, I did: Bruce Randall sings in the alto section — you know, that Bruce Randall, the one who has one of his songs in the 1991 edition of The Sacred Harp. But I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with that justification, for Bruce Randall is not a traditional Southern singer.

When I got home, I looked at the relevant section in the Rudiments of Music section of The Sacred Harp, Chapter I, section 5: “The Sacred Harp uses four-part harmony. The parts, in order of increasing pitch, are bass (sung by men), tenor (men and women), alto (usually women)….” So the primary reference source holds out the possibility that men can sing with the alto section, albeit rarely; and presumably there have been some traditional male Southern singers who have sung alto.

This, however, raised another question for me. What about women, like my friend Bette, whose voice gets lower as they get older? In Bette’s case, her voice is now so low that she sings in the bass section of her church choir. We in the northern revival might have the tendency to interpret the Rudiments of Music fairly literally, and lean towards excluding women from the bass section; or we might put the question out on the Fasola email list — appealing to a higher authority, assuming that someone out there with a broader knowledge of the tradition could tell us about a time when a traditional Southern singing included a woman, or women, in the bass section.

More newcomers this week. I asked one of these newcomers how he came to find out about Sacred Harp singing. I didn’t get the full story, but apparently he had seen the book somehow, was interested enough the music that he got the book, then got some of his friends to sing through some of the songs. Early on, he found recordings of Sacred Harp songs by Chanticleer; he knew about field recordings but was less interested in them. (Interestingly, he never found the “Rivers of Delight” album by the Word of Mouth Chorus, or the sound track from the movie “Cold Mountain,” two recordings that have inspired other people to seek out the northern revival of Sacred Harp.) Tonight was the first time he had attended a Sacred Harp singing, but he already owned the book, he had already heard recordings, and he had already started to sing the music. At the same time, he didn’t know about singing the shapes, nor was he familiar with the traditions that go with leading a song — two things that for many Sacred Harp singers are defining elements in the tradition.

In short, his path into Sacred Harp singing resembles the paths taken by the first singers in the northern revival: find the book, get a group of friends together to sing the songs, and only then encounter elements of the tradition like singing the shapes and leading styles.