Abstract: Shape Note singing, a style of congregational singing, developed an informal institution of local singing 
groups separate from the churches for which this music was envisioned by its early pioneers. Within these groups, a 
number of ritual practices developed which I argue emphasized a distinctly Protestant vision of democracy. Among 
these practices are the traditional arrangement of chairs which faces the singers inward and marks out a square-
shaped ritual space in which singers take turns leading the tunes of their choice. Additionally, the shaped note heads 
with which the music is notated and the practice of “singing the notes” before singing the lyrics lower the barrier 
of entry and thus invite singers of all skill levels to participate. !ese practices, though, do much more than make 
the tradition more accessible. !e tradition creates sacred space and carves out a ritual environment in which a 
stylized form of American democracy is performed. !ere is a system of elections and parliamentary procedure that 
ritualizes an idealized vision of Protestant democracy untainted by the divisive in"uence of politics. !e result of the 
ritualized equality is a powerful sense of fellowship and aesthetic experience for the singers. 

Aisthesis      Volume 13,  202220

Let Every Land !eir Tongues Employ: Ritualized Democracy 
among Shape Note Singers

by Allen Duggar

Introduction
 On a warm Saturday in September, 35 people 
walk into a church fellowship hall in Simpsonville, 
South Carolina carrying oblong red books. !ey are 
shape note singers preparing for four hours of music 
making. !ey sit in folding chairs arranged in a 
square facing inward and sing a strange sort of music. 
!e #rst notes are intoned with fa, so, and la, and 
the hands of the singers move up and down in time. 
!en lyrics about su$ering and death swirl around 
the formation in a stark fugue. !e harmonies are 
broad and open, enveloping the singers in a wall of 
sound. By the end, everyone is exhausted but still 
#lled with the tunes that will haunt them until they 
meet to sing again in a few weeks’ time.
 Sacred Harp Singing, also known as shape-
note or fasola singing, is one of the United States’ 
oldest cultural products. Tracing its roots back to 
the Congregationalist movements of the eighteenth 
century in New England, shape note singing has 
continued in an unbroken tradition for around 250 
years. As the nineteenth century saw the Second Great 
Awakening sweep across the United States, shape note 
singing followed the tent revivals south to Georgia 
and Alabama, the states with which it is most closely 
associated today and where the most famous shape 
note tune book, !e Sacred Harp, was #rst published 

in 1844. Due to direct attacks from the musical elite 
of the “better music” movement who saw shape note 
hymnody as unre#ned and inappropriate for church 
worship and increasing urbanization in the South, 
the shape note movement fell into obscurity apart 
from in rural areas of the deep South, Texas, and in 
some Amish and Mennonite communities where the 
tradition continued to evolve and serve an important 
social and spiritual role.
 Today, shape note singing continues to persist 
thanks to an ongoing global revival. However, no 
revival can leave the original practice unchanged, and 
the Sacred Harp tradition is no exception. What was 
once a primarily rural, isolated movement has found 
acceptance in urban centers among predominantly 
well-educated and antiquarian-minded individuals 
who o%en have as much ethnographic interest as 
they do musical and spiritual commitment to the 
tradition. However, due to strong conservative 
forces, embodied in the oral tradition by the former 
head of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company, Hugh 
McGraw, many pre-revival features such as “singing 
the notes,” arranging seats in the “hollow square,” 
and a system of parliamentary procedure remain 
intact even among primarily revivalist groups. Fasola 
uses the hollow square to mark out the ritual space in 
which singers perform an idealized form of American 



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democracy underpinned by a complex mythology of 
shape note singing. !e result is a profound sense of 
communitas and aesthetic experience for the singers.
 In researching this unique form of religious 
expression, I attended singings in Savannah, 
Georgia and in Charleston and Simpsonville, 
South Carolina, interacting with traditionalist and 
revivalist gatherings alike. I conducted participant 
observation as well as a series of six interviews with 
subjects ranging from a contemporary shape note 
composer to a Lutheran priest, which covered a wide 
cross section of the revivalist communities centered 
in coastal urban areas such as Charleston and 
Savannah. !ese two cities are not historic centers 
of shape note singing; the singers there are generally 
revivalist in contrast to Simpsonville where there 
are more traditionalists represented in addition to 
revivalists. 

Hollow Square
 Upon entering a church fellowship hall for an 
All Day Singing in the shape note tradition, one 
will immediately notice the odd arrangement of the 
chairs. !is formation, called the “hollow square” by 
participants faces all of the seats inward. !e four 
sides are reserved for each respective vocal part, and 
the center is reserved for o&cial business, mainly 
for the leaders of each tune when their turn comes 
to choose what to sing. !e hollow square marks 
out the sacred space, setting the stage for the music 
and storytelling that takes place within its borders 
to transcend the “here-and-now” (Bell, “Ritual” xi). 
Notably, the chairs face inward, rather than in other 
Christian rituals in which the participants all face 
the priest or preacher at the front. !is arrangement 
spatially represents the democratic ideals of the 
singing movement. !e singers do not face a 
clergyman or an audience, but rather they face their 
fellow singers. !e music is designed for the bene#t 
of the singers themselves #rst. !e ritual space serves 
to “set apart” the music and storytelling “in striking 
ways and then make those activities distinctive” (Bell 
398). A simple song or anecdote takes on increased 
signi#cance because it occurs in the hollow square. 
!e songs will be recorded for the minutes, entering 
them into the public record for the event, and the 
anecdotes from past singings, biographical tidbits 
on the composers and great singers, and testimonies 
of spiritual connection with the music, having been 

ritually o$ered to the community, will then come 
to make up the conversations for future singings 
across the country, broadening their reach from the 
individual to potentially the entire community of 
shape note singers.
 So if the hollow square carves out the singing 
space spatially, what does it carve it out from? What 
is the here and now according to !e Sacred Harp? 
On the whole, the corpus of lyrics depicts a fairly 
bleak life with the only true escape being ascending 
to Heaven upon death. Applying J.Z. Smith’s idea 
that “the temple serves as a focusing lens, marking 
and revealing Signi#cance,” a basic mythological 
premise becomes clear (Smith 113). Life is a time of 
toil and pain, and death is the ultimate release from 
su$ering. !ough not a groundbreaking theological 
claim in the American Protestant world, it functions 
here not to describe the literal material condition of 
contemporary singers (who are o%en middle class), 
but to contrast with the fellowship and aesthetic 
beauty idealized by the singing culture. It applies 
the aesthetic of nineteenth century rural life to 
accomplish the task of separating the singing from 
the everyday. !e popular tune #282 “I’m Going 
Home” gets at this distinction quite well. !e second 
verse puts it this way: “I’m glad that I am born to die 
/ from grief and woe my soul shall "y / and I don’t 
care to stay here long.” So, then, singing in the fasola 
serves as a respite from the violence and pain of the 
everyday. Singers adopt the perspective of a poor, 
nineteenth century person represented in the lyrics 
of the tunes in order to facilitate the change between 
the here and now and the hollow square.
 !e stark moral didacticism of the music serves 
mostly as a reminder of the moral purity of the quasi-
mythical early singers. !e people I interviewed did 
not widely adopt the worldview of the music—that 
is to say they did not always believe death was on 
the doorstep—but rather they saw the lyrics as more 
of a “raw, unvarnished look into a di$erent world” 
(Jones). In this way, they are able to commune with 
the mythical past and the people who populate it. 
!us, singers are able to experience the theology as 
a way to recenter themselves without ever having 
to fully buy into it. As Catherine Bell argues, “ritual 
acts as an opportunity… for seeing what is of value” 
(Bell 398). Sacred Harp singing, then, as alternative 
to modernity, allows participants to inhabit the 
purer world of religious community depicted in the 



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music, all the while being aware that, much as they 
cannot or do not adopt the full letter of the lyrics, 
they cannot permanently separate themselves from 
the apparent moral and spiritual degradation of 
contemporary life. When I asked about the #xation 
on themes of death, su$ering, and sickness, one 
informant said that while most singers did not adopt 
that worldview, “modern people need to hear that 
threat [of death] every once in a while” (Talsness). 
!us, the lyrics work more to evoke older forms of 
Christianity rather than to directly advocate for that 
theology. As John Bealle has argued, !e Sacred Harp 
has become an “overdetermined cultural symbol, 
representing America’s ‘musical ancestors,’” and 
that notion still holds true among some singers who 
see a connection to older forms of Christianity that 
contemporary ones lack (5). !e evocation of musical 
and spiritual ancestors serves to ground the music 
in some essentialized form of tradition. !us, the 
importance of the lyrics is not in their literal content, 
but in their connection to the past. Combined with 
the stories told by singers in the hollow square, this 
stylized historical grounding makes up a body of 
mythology for the tradition.

Mythology in Singing Culture
 In turn, this corpus of mythology serves to 
inform the ritualized democracy that is performed 
in the hollow square. I divide the contents of the 
mythology into two basic categories which function 
in di$erent ways. I call the #rst category testimony, 
and it consists of the stories spontaneously told in 
the hollow square. At a given singing, this is the 
form of myth with which the singers engage the 
most. It o%en takes the form of anecdotes from past 
singings at which the caller had sung the tune most 
memorably, but it can also manifest itself in the form 
of tributes to other singers, personal appeals to the 
spiritual power of a given tune, or a biographical 
detail about the composer or lyricist. While the most 
common form of mythological material and o%en 
the most resonant for individual singers, testimony 
tends to remain localized to one region. It is a sort 
of spontaneous mythology, not simply small talk. 
In fact, the stories that are told in between tunes 
have an extremely important role in structuring the 
ritual because they color the emotional and spiritual 
responses to the music. For example, I attended a 
Sacred Harp funerary ritual known as a Memorial 

Lesson. It was held at the regular monthly singing 
of the Savannah Sacred Harp Singers and honored 
a founding member of that group who had recently 
passed away. I and a few others had not known the 
man, but we as newcomers were given a portrait 
of a great hero for the cause of shape note singing. 
His favorite tunes were chosen in advance and led 
by his close friends and family. !e #nal tune of the 
Memorial Lesson was o$ered by the man’s daughter 
who was not a shape note singer herself. In tears, she 
described to the singers the immense positive e$ect 
they had had on her father’s life and how much joy 
he had gotten from his time singing with them. She 
then led #500 “In the Sweet By and By” from the blue 
book (a variant version of !e Sacred Harp). As they 
sang that they “will meet on that beautiful shore,” 
the power was exceptional. !e testimony o$ered by 
singers colors the emotions that the singers feel in 
subsequent songs. !ese stories are not interjections 
“between” the ritual, but actually an important part 
of it. !e histories of particular annual singings also 
fall into this category. During the business meeting 
of the singing in Simpsonville, the chair gave a brief 
overview of the history of this particular singing. It 
began as a part of a Greenville Pioneer Day festival 
along with other sorts of living history exhibits and a 
parade before becoming associated with the Church 
of Greenville, a small predestinarian Baptist group. 
!e purpose of the history was both instructive and 
invitatory. It informed the newer singers of the roots 
of the group, but it also invited the older singers to 
recount their tales from the 16 annual singings and 
thus enter them too into the oral historical record 
of the group. It is by entering the sacred space, 
which is to say the Hollow Square, that the stories 
told transcend the realm of normal social activity 
and enter the realm of mythology. Again evoking 
Smith’s “focusing lens,” these stories come to serve as 
powerful points of connection between communities 
as they are told and retold at singings across the 
country and between individual singers. 
 !e second category is what I call the general 
myth of Sacred Harp, which at its simplest, goes that 
around the time of the American Revolution, a group 
of pious people saw the state of congregational music 
to be in disarray. As a solution, they invented shape 
notes as a way to decentralize musical skill from 
the elite, educated musicians of the major churches 
to something that every believer could master. !e 



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style "ourished until the Civil War a%er which the 
tradition was only strong enough to endure in the 
South, where dedicated rural people continued to 
sing and compose shape note tunes. !is version 
of the story was told to me with little variation by 
all of my informants, and it illustrates how the 
community sees in its origin a vision of Protestant 
democracy that is also embodied by practices such 
as singing the notes and running singings with 
bylaws and parliamentary procedure. Because the 
tradition developed many of its distinctive features 
in the Early Republican period, the values of the 
tradition are informed by the patriotic sentiments 
of the time. For example, #242 “Ode on Science” 
represents an entangling of early anti-imperialist 
ideology with the ethos of shape note singing. “!e 
British yoke, the Gallic chain,” and “all haughty 
tyrants we disdain” are put in opposition to the 
“young and rising states” whose “sons are set among 
the stars” by the personi#ed Science. !e spiritual 
project of democracy is here bound up with the 
explicitly political, demonstrating how tenuous that 
distinction can be. To this category, I also add the 
narratives of prominent composers and singers and 
in particular B.F. White, the original compiler of 
!e Sacred Harp as well as the histories of particular 
singings. For a more recent example, Hugh McGraw, 
who represented the arm of traditionalism, oversaw 
the #rst wave of revival singings, and ensured that 
traditional performance practices were brought 
to the new region, has achieved very high regard 
among singers, revivalist or otherwise. Stories about 
his appearances at various singings in the past and 
his favorite tunes have been told in the hollow square 
at almost every singing I have attended. 

Aesthetic Democracy and Democratic Aesthetics  
 !e hollow square makes sacred the space and 
creates an environment of creativity and possibility, 
and the mythology informs the emotional and 
spiritual dimension of the music and justi#es 
conservative in"uence in the tradition. But how 
does the idealized form of democracy play out? A 
traditional all-day singing or convention enacts 
democracy through two main processes: the #rst 
strategically dissolves social barriers between singers 
to emphasize their spiritual equality, and the second 
establishes a system of parliamentary procedure 
which both keeps the event organized and formalizes 
the Protestant ideal of religious democracy. 

 !e maintenance of equality among the singers 
is accomplished through several techniques that 
collectively make up a sort of aesthetic democracy 
at a singing. Control over the choice and sequence of 
tunes and indeed the rendering of the music is fully 
decentralized. At the large singings I attended, any 
participant could sign up to be added to the rotation 
of callers, but at the monthly singings in Charleston, 
the group was small enough that the choice of 
music moved informally around the hollow square. 
!us, control over the ritual is le% completely to the 
participants. Further, aesthetic choices in rendering 
the music are also le% to the singers. !e Sacred 
Harp itself gives little information about how to 
perform each individual song. Besides the key, 
which, though given in the text, is always chosen by 
the relative pitch of one or two chosen tuners, there 
is no information on how to sing. !e tempo is le% 
to the singers themselves, and I found that this issue 
was one of the dividers among born and bred singers 
and revivalist ones. !e older singers tended to favor 
breakneck tempi for fast tunes and crawling ones for 
slower tunes. !e revivalists favored tempi that were 
less extreme. In fact, this o%en led to spirited debates 
in between singing the notes and singing the words. 
!ese minor aesthetic choices are statements about 
the singers themselves, with certain choices made as 
an attempt at greater authenticity.
 Further aiding in the rendering of the music is 
the shape note system. !e Sacred Harp uses a four-
shape system sometimes referred to as the “fasola” 
system. It assigns the seven notes of a major scale to 
four shapes and four syllables associated with each 
respective shape. Take for example C major. C would 
be called “fa” and notated with a triangular notehead. 
D would be “so” with a circular notehead. E would 
be “la” with a square. !en the system repeats with 
F, G, and A. Finally, B would be called “mi” and 
notated with a diamond shaped notehead. Each 
tune is begun by what is called “singing the notes” 
in which the tune of the song is sung, but the words 
are replaced with the syllables associated with the 
notes of the music. Only a%er the music has been run 
through once with the notes can the words be sung. 
Both of these features of the tradition serve to lower 
the barrier for entry. !e shape notes make reading 
the music much easier for untrained musicians 
because they begin to associate the shapes with the 
intervallic relationships between the notes. One 



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of my informants, a professional church organist, 
even expressed that shape notes made it easier for 
him to sing even though he had two music degrees. 
He likened singing the notes to wearing a name tag 
because it gives everyone a chance to participate 
whether they are familiar with the system or not, 
“because if even the person that everybody knows 
has a name tag on that, I don’t feel weird having a 
name tag on because I’m the new guy” (Stecker). In 
other words, singing notes as a built-in part of the 
ritual ensures that everyone can fully participate. 
While a range of skill levels certainly exists, singing 
the shapes gives even the complete novice a chance 
to sing. 
 !e tune book itself also invites singers to 
participate in the creation of new shape note music. In 
the beginning of the book, there is a section entitled 
“Rudiments of Music” in which the fundamentals of 
music theory are explained, and tips for composition 
are o$ered such that a singer could easily transition to 
becoming a composer. !is section emphasizes that 
the aesthetic democracy runs deeper than simply 
the singing. It also means that anyone is invited to 
contribute their own music, and that they should 
be given the tools to compose whenever possible. 
Of course, a full education in music theory cannot 
be o$ered by a few pages at the beginning of a tune 
book, but it goes in depth about issues of harmony 
and counterpoint which separate the aesthetic 
traditions of the Sacred Harp style from other forms 
of Western choral music. !us, the creative power is 
o$ered freely to everyone who owns a copy of !e 
Sacred Harp, such that even the production of new 
music is decentralized and democratized.'
 Another important element of the ritualized 
democracy is the taking of minutes, a classic feature 
of democratic meetings. !e singing conventions 
and all-day singings, i.e., the well-attended and 
most institutional singings, follow a system of 
parliamentary procedure to keep the event moving. 
!is practice also has the e$ect of temporally 
marking out when the ritual is occurring, as well 
as further emphasizing the democratic ideals of 
the singing. Usually, the minutes provide little 
more than a list of names and the tunes that those 
people called, but their lack of information does 
not mean that they are not important. In fact, the 
submission of minutes to a singing newsletter or 
website signals that the “event is thought to have 

more certainly ‘happened’ to the broader collective 
of singers” (Bealle 171). John Bealle traces the 
importance of the minutes to the “conservative 
in"uences of traditional performance practices” 
that lead singers to follow the customary ways of 
organizing and running an event (172). A singing is 
seen to be more legitimate if it takes minutes because 
they are distributed to a wider singing world that 
scrutinizes the singing and chooses if a future event 
by that group is worth a trip. !us, the parliamentary 
procedure extends the reach of isolated groups and 
serves to make claims at authenticity in the tradition. 
To illustrate my point, let me o$er an example from 
my #eldwork. My contingent from the Lowcountry 
Sacred Harp Singers arrived early at the Pioneer Day 
All-Day Singing in Simpsonville, SC. We sat down 
in our respective vocal sections and chatted with the 
organizers and other early birds. A%er a while it was 
decided to warm up before the rest of the singers got 
there. 30b “Prospect” was called, but it was made 
clear that this song was a warm-up only. !e chair 
made a point to the secretary not to record it on the 
minutes. When not in o&cial session, these songs 
are simply music, but when they are sung under the 
proper conditions, they become much more. Taking 
minutes does more than record the order of events. 
It is seen as a signal of a legitimate singing and as an 
embodiment of the equality between the singers.'
 Finally, the last feature of ritual democracy is 
its most basic – elections. Like any organization, 
shape note singing groups bene#t from having an 
established leadership to work out the logistics of 
having an all-day singing or convention. However, 
the elected leadership also has a ritual role, that of 
presiding over the activity in the hollow square. 
For the most part, this is a very small role to play, 
but its importance is more in its presence than in 
its true function. For example, in Simpsonville, the 
president was unable to make it to the singing. !e 
vice president was there but chose not to step into 
the role. !e group then decided to elect someone 
else to act as president. At the end of the singing, 
a single vote was held to nominate and elect all of 
the o&cers to their current positions, and it passed 
unanimously. In this group, there was no political 
struggle to accompany the elections because the 
president of an all-day singing group does not 
carry with it many duties or any privileges. In 
this way, it modeled an ideal body politic for the 



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Protestant democrat. Singers already have almost 
complete control over how the ritual plays out, so 
the governance of the group need not insert itself 
beyond the easy work of presiding over the meeting. 
!us, the singers perform a perfect democracy free 
from the negative in"uences of politics. 
 !e Covid-19 pandemic o$ers a prime example 
of the way that the singers deal with political con"ict. 
Every group that I interacted with or researched 
attempted some sort of online video conferencing 
format for their singings during the height of Covid 
restrictions. Due to the opinion that the music needs 
to be performed live to be properly experienced and 
because many of the older singers had technological 
limitations, most participants were eager to 
transition back to singing in person. Some singers, 
though, were hesitant to return for health reasons. 
At the singings I attended in July through September 
of 2021, masks were suggested but few singers wore 
them. Before and a%er the singing, people made 
their opinions on the matter quite clear on both 
sides, but there was an understanding that during 
the singing political argument is o$ limits. “Politics” 
is arti#cially prohibited from the hollow square, not 
because the movement fails to engage with politics, 
but rather because the ritual demands that those 
“degrading in"uences” not be modeled as a part of 
their pure Protestant democracy. 
 All of these e$orts to separate the hollow square 
from the mundane, break down barriers, and 
structure the ritual democracy serve to bring about 
a state of communitas as well as a profound aesthetic 
experience. !e hollow square becomes a classically 
liminal space separated from the mundane world 
both spatially and by the prayers and procedures 
which call a convention to order. !e singers also 
do a great deal to ensure ritual equality and promote 
“direct, egalitarian encounter… between people 
as people” such that it become almost a textbook 
example (L. Jones 9406). However, the singers 
themselves would describe this sense of connection 
with other participants as “fellowship” instead. 
One informant described the feeling as similar to 
a runner’s high with endorphins “coursing through 
[his] head… thinking about the friends that I may 
have seen that day” (Stecker). !is sort of fellowship 
is also a major lyrical theme, underscoring its 
importance to the tradition at large. Appeals to 
Christian unity are exceedingly common, such as 

in #228 “Marlborough” which proclaims, “Let every 
land their tongues employ,” or #276 “Bridgewater,” 
which calls to “Let the Redeemer’s name be sung 
ev’ry land by ev’ry tongue.” Beyond the general 
theological claim about the fundamental equality 
of all believers, many tunes directly address the 
fellowship of shape note singing rituals. A popular 
closing song, #62 “Parting Hand,” gets at the feeling 
of communitas quite well in its second verse. !e 
hollow square where the singers “met to sing and 
pray” is noted as the place “where Jesus shows his 
smiling face” (62). Not only is the singing the closest 
connection between the singers and God, it is also 
the “sweetest union” between the singers themselves.
 In addition to the sense of connection with 
fellow singers, it is common for participants to feel 
“very much overwhelmed by the power in the room 
and even be brought to tears to the point that [they] 
cannot even vocalize [themselves]” (Jones). !e 
sensation of standing in the middle of the hollow 
square is particularly a$ective because each of the 
independent parts can be heard in balance with each 
other, and they create a sort of swirling e$ect as the 
fuguing subject moves from voice to voice. “When 
everything just lines up and the sound is just like 
otherworldly,” the singers frequently report getting 
goosebumps and being overcome with emotions 
(Stecker). For example, the tune #178 “Africa” has 
a particular sequence of rises and falls which, when 
sung well with a large group has been known to bring 
many singers to the “liberating and alarming regions 
of human experience” (including myself at a singing 
in Savannah) (Bealle 235). !e powerful sensations 
are in part enhanced by all of the aesthetically 
democratic features of the tradition. For example, 
notating the music with shape notes and taking the 
time to sing the notes as a part of every tune makes 
sure that the singers will have the technical aspects 
of the music down to bring about the most powerful 
e$ects. 
 In conclusion, Sacred Harp singing is a 
complex ritual informed by the ethos of nineteenth 
century American Protestantism. !ough it takes 
its roots from that collection of traditions, it 
continues to evolve to this day as these practices 
are recontextualized. !e work of establishing 
ritual space is accomplished by the hollow square 
arrangement which centers the singers on the 
music and the community. It emphasizes that the 



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Aisthesis      Volume 13,  2022

music exists for the singers rather than an audience 
or the clergy. Further, parliamentary procedures 
democratize the singing such that social barriers are 
dissolved to bring about ritual equality. !is e$ect in 
turn brings about a strong fellowship which ampli#es 
the aesthetic and spiritual experiences of the singers. 
In a moment of political polarization, this tradition 
demarcates the “sacred” with a classical vision of 
democracy. It is one free from the division of a two-
party system, one which attempts to rise above the 
insularity of social media and corporately-owned 
news outlets, and construct in its place unanimity 
centered on devotion to the music that is truly for 
the people and by the people.  
       
Works Cited

Bealle, John. Public Worship, Private Faith: Sacred 
Harp and American Folksong. University of 
Georgia Press, 1997. 

Bell, Catherine. “Ritual.” !e Blackwell Companion to 
the Study of Religion, edited by Robert Segal, 
John Wiley and Sons, 2006, pp. 396-411.

Bell, Catherine. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. 
Oxford University Press, 1997.

Duggar, Allen. Participant Observation. 
Simpsonville, SC, Sep. 11, 2021. 

Jones, Lindsay, editor. Encyclopedia of Religion, 
Second Edition. MacMillan Reference USA, 
2004.

Jones, Stephen. Interview with the author. 5 Aug. 
2021.

Smith, Jonathan Z. “!e Bare Facts of Ritual.” History 
of Religions, vol. 20, no. 1/2, University of 
Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 112–27. 

Stecker, Mitchell. Interview with the author. 23 July 
2021.

Talsness, Jason. Interview with the author. 11 Sept. 
2021.

White, Benjamin Franklin, and Elisha J. King. !e 
Sacred Harp. Sacred Harp Publishing Company, 
1991. 

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