By Bill Leonard
Recent conversations about hymnody and history sent me back to a century-old family photo I discovered after my mother’s death two years ago. It shows a group of some 70 men, women and children standing in front of what I think was the two-room schoolhouse at Prairie Point, a wide spot on the road between Alvord and Chico in Wise County, Texas, northwest of Fort Worth. Prairie Point wasn’t a town; it was just a place where some farm families built the school and a Methodist chapel, not far from Chicken Creek. The photo includes a handwritten sign reading: “A. and N.L. School of Music, August 8-27, 1910.”
One of the singing school participants was my grandfather, Jim Henton, who farmed nearby. By the time I was born, almost 40 years later, he was dead and the Prairie Point school and church had been torn down, with only a small cemetery and a dry cistern remaining. Yet some of my earliest childhood memories are of the annual pilgrimage to the Prairie Point Homecoming, a September/October gathering when the “old settlers,” my Grandmother Henton and her children included, returned to reconnect with friends over food, conversation and shape note singing.
The food was vast and unforgettable: Mountains of fried chicken, okra, tomatoes, squash, and potatoes. (I think only the sweet tea was un-fried.) Pies the size of flying saucers and cakes as big as hay bales were laid out on boards held up by oil drums. The older women often wore hats like they did to church, and when they hugged you, you could feel their whale bone corsets holding everything in place. (I’m not sure why I still remember that, but I do.)
The singing was done under a brush arbor built for the occasion with a makeshift platform for the piano and musicians with their guitars, accordions and other instruments. At the Prairie Point Homecoming I first learned shape note singing. It became a one-day singing school, taught from dog-eared Sacred Harp or Stamps-Baxter paperback hymnals. The former straight out of 19th century frontier camp meeting “enthusiasm,” and the latter from the 20th century close-harmony gospel songs. Sometimes somebody’s son or grandson would even preach a little.
In an essay on “Sacred Harp Singing,” Steven Sabol writes that such music “is written in ‘shape notes,’ which resemble standard round notes in every respect except that the head of each note has one of four shapes to indicate its interval from the key (tonic) pitch. … The four-shape system (fa = triangle, sol = oval, la = square, and me = diamond) was invented around 1800 in the Northeastern U.S., and it enabled many untrained singers of the day to sight-read music without having to understand key signatures.” The singing school movement became a vehicle for teaching shape note singing, extending Christian fellowship and promoting personal conversion in a less intense environment than the normal revival service. Shape note singing represented a genuine peoples’ movement in music and piety.
Not everyone was appreciative. In 1921, Hubert McNeill Poteat, Wake Forest College Latin professor, denounced singing schools and their crowd of “howling, prancing, evangelistic singers,” whose music was little more than “sacred twaddle” demonstrating a “thin veneer of religion,” and given to the “sensual postures of a dance hall.” Gavin James Campbell recounts Poteat’s opposition in a 1997 article titled “Make Heaven’s Portals Ring” while noting that singing school teachers carried the Sacred Harp and Harmonia Sacra into rural settings “and used them in two-or-three-week singing schools that taught generations of rural southerners their ‘shapes.’”
These schools and their songs did something else. For better or for worse, they put theology in the mouths of generations of folks who may never have connected with such sermonic expositions as the substitutionary atonement, the Trinity, falling from grace, or once-saved-always-saved, but could sing every word of “I’ll Fly Away,” “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks” or “When I Can Read My Title Clear,” all coming down in four-part harmony.
From their earliest days, shape note lyrics were somber and celebrative, earthy and unearthly all at once. William Walker’s Southern Harmony (1835) contains a song he wrote in 1831 “while traveling over the mountains, on French Broad River, in North Carolina and Tennessee.” It begins:
High o’er the hills the mountains rise, their summits toward the skies; But far above them I must dwell, Oh, God! Forbid that I should fall and lose my everlasting all; but may I rise on wings of love.
The second verse cuts to the chase:
Although I walk the mountains high, Ere long my body low must lie, And in some lonesome place must rot, and by the living be forgot.
I never learned that song at Prairie Point, but I did discover tunes and words that stay with me yet. Like my grandfather, my mother benefited from the Prairie Point singing schools and, although racked by Alzheimer’s, she could sing every verse of Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior, almost until her dying day. Like most other Texas Baptists, she also remembered how to cuss when necessary. Life shapes all our “notes,” to the bitter end.