Without Limits: Singing the Congregation’s Song

This sectional explores what hymnody from historical sources can mean in the present day and brings hymn singing repertoires with diverse racial, geographic, and stylistic associations into conversation with each other. Pairing participatory singing from three forthcoming scholarly editions of hymnbooks in the Sounding Spirit series with contextualizing commentary, the session demonstrates the wide-ranging purposes to which contemporary singers can put historical hymnody. Members of contemporary hymn singing communities for whom these historical sources continue to make meaning will join in song with Hymn Society attendees.

Stephen Foreman and Samuel Worcester’s Cherokee Singing Book (1846) set Cherokee-language hymns to choral settings by Lowell Mason and others. The hymnal was unsuccessful because it imposed this repertoire in place of other tune-text pairings in oral circulation among Cherokee hymn singers. Today, the songbook is facilitating language learning in Western North Carolina through the new Cherokee Language Repertory Choir, whose members will join co-directors Sara Snyder Hopkins (volume editor of the edition) and Garrett Scholberg in singing songs from the collection. Soul Echoes No. 2 (1909) is an early collection of Black gospel hymnody that introduced popular hymn texts by minister Charles Albert Tindley. Rylan André Harris, a music minister and associate editor of the Soul Echoes edition, will lead singing from the work as a means of reengaging with Tindley’s hymnody by recounting its socioeconomic and historical context, and exploring its possibilities for congregations today. Joseph Stephen James’s Sacred Tunes and Hymns (1913) sought to bridge the gap between Sacred Harp and congregational hymn singing. The paired four-shape notation with keyboard accompaniment and dispersed harmony with the Sunday school repertoire. Joined by Atlanta-area shape-note singers, volume editor Jesse P. Karlsbeg will explore the possibilities in this songbook’s provocative challenge to conventions of Sacred Harp singing around repertoire and accompaniment.