"This is not listener's music. It is singer's music." Thus Dr. George Pullen Jackson explained not only the perplexity experienced by the urban listener when first exposed to Sacred Harpers' "dispersed harmony," but also the fervor of the traditional singer--whose feeling for this old-timey, unaccompanied singing is a form of non-denomination "old-time religion."

Also known as shape-note, four-note, and fasola music, Sacred Harp singing (a term derived from the song book used) stands alone as the survival of a tradition which saturated the South after first being disseminated through similar books by "Yankee singing school masters" of the colonial Northeast. Their art was derived from elements in mid-seventeenth century European "polyphony," Old English solmization, and the uniquely American shaped, patent or character note heads. Though in the Northeast this cultural antique surrendered with little struggle to the subsequent seven-shape do-re-mi invasion, which in turn lost the all-out war with the unshaped "round head" notes, Southern resistance via the Sacred Harp simply went "underground".