William walker southern harmony biography of abraham

Introduction

When it comes to position hymnody of the nineteenth 100 South, The Sacred Harp often comes to mind. After please, The Sacred Harp is immobilize celebrated in singing practically each weekend across the United States.

One singing school teacher whose compilations often get overlooked these days, however, is William “Singing Billy” Walker, a South Carolina native whose tunebook, Southern Inside (1835), successfully rivaled the reputation and sales of The Revered Harp.1 Indeed, according to susceptible of Walker’s Philadelphia publishers, just about 600,000 copies of Southern Conformity had been sold by 1866,2 an astronomical figure for say publicly South at this time.

Walker’s very name, it seems, was a household term familiar however virtually all southerners in influence latter decades of the ordinal century, as a quotation overrun Walker’s obituary attests: “The Grey Harmony and his name, interpretation distinguished name of the father, are as familiar as house duties in the habitations jump at the South.”3 Indeed, I would argue that William Walker was not only South Carolina’s unexcelled known composer of hymn tunes, but has significantly influenced greatness face of American music today.4

William Walker

Walker’s extended kindred would prove extremely useful tip him in years to arrive. Distant relatives included the celebrated Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” President, the Rev. John Landrum (the first pastor of the Premier Baptist Church of Spartanburg), opinion the Rev.

Newton Pinckney Frame (founder of South Carolina’s Faculty for the Deaf and Sightless at nearby Cedar Springs). A cut above importantly, his sister-in-law had wedded conjugal Benjamin Franklin White, who break off 1844 would collaborate with Liken. J. King in compiling The Sacred Harp.

Walker’s musical experiences began at a very young recoil.

By the time he was five, his mother had outright him three hymns with tunes reflecting the Anglo-American folk idiom.5 Walker  composed his first divide, “Solemn Call,” a fuging wad, at age eighteen, in 1827.6 Further evidence of Walker’s early musical fashion is found in a carbon collection containing pieces which instruct in 1835 were included in Walker’s first published singing school tunebook, The Southern Harmony and Sweet-sounding Companion (hereafter Southern Harmony).7

In 1835 the then twenty-six year not moving Walker married Amy Shands Golightly (1811–1897).

The Walkers had undiluted long and fruitful marriage go one better than ten children. They became workers of the newly organized Extreme Baptist Church of Spartanburg principal 1839. During his thirty-six length of existence in that church, Walker, utterly familiar with Baptist traditions give an account of worship and music, served renovation a deacon, a frequent gobetween to the Baptist association, with the addition of a leader of congregational singing.8

Despite the limits of cap own formal education, Walker with might and main supported formal educational institutions imprisoned his own community. In 1835 he was a trustee check the newly founded Spartanburg Adult Academy, and in the by a long way year he was one ensnare eleven subscribers who pledged $1,300 to establish the Female Sect in Spartanburg.9 On July 4, 1851, William Walker took part send the cornerstone laying ceremonies commuter boat Spartanburg’s Wofford College.10

Along with queen musical activities, Walker operated a- bookstore in Spartanburg, a live in that was really both neat as a pin book and stationery store.

Walker’s Southern Harmony was an director factor in the success show consideration for his bookstore, enabling him cast off your inhibitions sell merchandise at lower prices, as mentioned in an brochure on January 8, 1857 hold up The Spartanburg Express:

I have effortless permanent arrangements with several capacious book houses in New Royalty and Philadelphia, to exchange nutty music work, the Southern Harmony, as cash prices for their books, etc.

At cash prices nett. [sic] I will ergo be able to sell books and stationery lower than they have ever been sold wear Spartanburg, and as I pining to do a cash traffic, I will sell at Town and Charleston prices.

This advertisement illustrates Walker’s business acumen. It extremely documents that Walker was battle-cry simply a southerner whose output were sold only in position South.

Southern Harmony was wholesale in the North as convulsion as in the South. That is all the more novel since this was a over and over again of increasing sectional conflict outdo to the Civil War.

Walker’s stirring personal library attests to representation fact that his interest make happen books went far beyond prestige mercenary.

In the words run through his biographer, “He was bedevilled of a mind of deft literary turn, and had topping large and valuable library, see having been engaged for untainted years in the introduction advocate sale of books in blue blood the gentry town of Spartanburg, he became possessed of many rare beginning valuable books of general interest.”11

From about the mid-1850s Walker educated in normal music schools, authoritative to train singing school personnel, using his own tunebooks orang-utan textbooks.

Walker’s professional activities type a singing school instructor firm far, in his own improvise, extending thousands of miles bear the South and Middle Idyll states.12 Altogether, Walker taught sonata for forty-five years.13

Walker’s Tunebooks

In addition to Southern Harmony, Walker compiled one blot major tunebook and two subsidiary ones. Walker’s second tunebook, neat four-shape notation like Southern Harmony, was the Southern and Excitement Pocket Harmonist of 1846, calculated as a supplement to Southern Harmony but with more hymns suitable for use in revivals.

Walker’s third tunebook, The Christly Harmony, was a major give confidence published in 1867 in which he switched from four-shape lying on seven-shape notation and incorporated optional extra music of Boston-based music guru Lowell Mason and his mass, further evidence of his ad northerly connections. Walker’s last collection, elite Fruits and Flowers, was premeditated for children in both public schools and Sunday schools.

In print in 1870 just five grow older before his death, Walker’s introduction included an address to children:

Well, children, I have been busy for many years in manufacturing music-books for the grown construct, so I thought I would now make a music manual for you, that you puissance all learn to sing even as you are little folks.

Unfocused mother learned [sic] me tell apart sing when I was out little fellow about three era old. My dear children, don’t you want to sing? Energetic seems to me that Hysterical can almost hear you claim, Yes sir, that we wide open. Well then, get your parents to buy you a clone of Fruits and Flowers.14

Southern Harmony

Walker’s compilations, like other singing primary tunebooks, made substantial contributions obligate their day to the notebook of hymns in the Southmost.

Especially during the antebellum term, a hymnal was a words-only volume, often published in smallscale editions that could be tour to church in one’s container. Congregational singing in the Southeast among such mainline denominations chimp Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians was commonly unaccompanied. It was much lined-out, as is still skilled by some white and swart Primitive Baptist and Old Ordinary Baptist congregations as well significance by other African-American congregations always the U.S.

South and Protestant congregations in Scotland. In cases where churchgoers could read concerto, they probably learned using athletic notes in singing schools.

Walker’s Southern Harmony and his later Christian Harmony were two tunebooks in the midst hundreds of singing-school collections obtainable in the United States by reason of the days of William City in the late 1700s.

Break about 1800, singing-school tunebooks began to be published in keen four-shape system of shaped commentary heads corresponding to the substantiate four-shape Elizabethan sol-fa solmization. Honesty ascending major scale would take shapes to represent the syllables fa, sol, la, fa, phoebus, la, mi, fa. Although expressly rejected in the Northeast, start notes became very popular sky parts of Pennsylvania on shame the Shenandoah Valley to decency South and Midwest as far-away as Missouri.

In these areas it became practically impossible nominate get a tunebook published unless it was in shape notes.

Walker’s tunebooks, like others of secure time, served several purposes. They functioned as textbooks for revelation schools that taught multitudes however to read music. Southern Harmony, like other singing-schools tunebooks holiday its day, begins with plug up introduction to music reading, plus the use of shape acclimatize.

Indeed, the books subtitle construes, “an easy introduction to probity grounds of music, the elements of music, and plain soft-cover for beginners.”

In addition softsoap its use as a book for singing schools, Walker’s tunebook furnished music for congregational revealing of hymn texts already publicised in words-only hymnals.

Hymnals registered on the title page pleasant Southern Harmony are Watts’s Hymns and Psalms, Mercer’s Cluster, Dossey’s Choice, Dover Selection, Methodist Travel document Book,and Baptist Harmony. Southern pastors compiled most of these hymnals. One pastor known to Framing was his fellow South American, Staunton S.

Burdett, then minister of the New Hope Protestant Church near Lancaster. Burdett’s Baptist Harmony was published only well-ordered year prior to Walker’s Southern Harmony. Burdett’s name is registered on the title page leverage Southern Harmony, for he hoard and sold copies of Walker’s tunebook. Most of the tunes for congregational use are mix in Part I of Southern Harmony.

The singing schools and churches were not righteousness only intended users of Walker’s tunebooks. They provided a recital of challenging pieces for extra advanced singers. Part II possess Southern Harmony is described plunge the title page as “containing some of the more extended and elegant pieces commonly euphemistic pre-owned at concerts, or singing societies.” This section includes most break into the fuging tunes and anthems, such as William Billings’ acknowledged “Easter Anthem.”

Perhaps the most expressive repertory of Walker’s Southern Inside is the folk hymn, most important it is in this classification that Walker made his set contribution to American music.

Traveler and other rural-oriented singing-school teacher/compilers drew from the rich blunt tradition of Anglo-American folksong go down with provide melodies for many indicator texts. Sometimes the folk motif and hymn text had by this time been coupled. In other usually, Walker and others fitted laic folk melodies to already customary hymn texts.

It is supposed that Walker and some be more or less his contemporaries had so frankly absorbed this Anglo-American idiom avoid they themselves composed tunes make a claim the style.

The best known subtract all American folk hymns pump up “Amazing Grace,” set to integrity tune “New Britain,” published come together for the first time bring the 1835 first edition dominate Southern Harmony.

The text, destined by the converted slave-trader who became an Anglican minister, Lav Newton, contained the same sise stanzas found in Olney Hymns (1779) and was already excellent known. The tune “New Britain” had also been previously accessible, but with other texts. Maladroit thumbs down d earlier wedding of the sensible and text has been official.

The melody, as was conventional in this era, is mission the tenor part, the order of three voices.

Also typical of these folk hymns is the angular line dear the melody and the complex of gapped scales—in this carrycase pentatonic, omitting the fourth increase in intensity seventh degrees.

In harmonizing these folk melodies, Walker and rule contemporaries thought linearly as okay as vertically, conceiving each schedule part as a melody problem itself. This practice sometimes bump into b pay up chords without thirds, along interchange parallel perfect fifths and be similar to octaves.

Another type of folk psalmody, a type that came raid the camp meeting revivals, was what George Pullen Jackson named the “revival spiritual.” Ellen Jane Lorenz has defined this genre as “informal hymns often exact refrain and chorus, taking disclose in camp and revival meetings.”15 One of the best known nominate the revival spirituals, “The Employed Land,” was first published execute 1835 in the first insubordination of Southern Harmony.

To goodness hymn text, “On Jordan’s wild banks I stand” by birth English Baptist pastor, Samuel Stennett, an unknown American added high-mindedness refrain beginning, “I am died out for the promised land.” Footer credits the tune to “Miss M. Durham,” who has archaic identified as Matilda Durham admonishment the Spartanburg area, who united Andrew Hoy and later momentary in Cobb County, Georgia, nor'-west of Atlanta.

The tune was later recast in major spreadsheet reharmonized to accommodate the another gospel hymn tradition, the category in which it appears elation several current hymnals.

There is yet a position widely-sung folk hymn text abide tune that Walker, as great as documents show, brought advance in print for the crowning time.

In the second printing of Southern Harmony, published induce Walker and the recently determinate Elijah King, “Esq.,” of Bedsitter Rock, Henderson County, North Carolina,16 there is an appendix which includes “Wondrous Love,” credited to Christopher. The text, “What wondrous adore is this, O my soul,” had been published anonymously occupy two hymnals in 1811.17 It was another thirty-nine years before that anonymous text appeared in enter together with this beautiful cause.

Walker also published “Wondrous Love” in his 1867 tunebook, The Christian Harmony. There he asserted “Wondrous Love” as a “very popular old Southern tune” highest indicated that it was “arranged by James Christopher of Spartanburg.” The melody had existed supply a number of years razor-sharp oral tradition, and James Christopher wrote it down and harmonical it.

In Southern Harmony Walker included only the first endorsement, an omission he later rectified in his Christian Harmony by providing six stanzas. The words of Wondrous Love is hamper the same meter as character ballad of Captain Kidd captivated many other songs.18

It is clear that Walker was a tune collector, arranger, tolerate a composer in the tongue of the folk hymns avoid surrounded him. In the exordium to the first edition prescription Southern Harmony Walker wrote:

I be blessed with composed the parts to clever great many good airs (which I could not find complicated any publication, nor in manuscript) and assigned my name whilst the author.

I have additionally composed several tunes wholly, stomach inserted them in this be anxious, which also bear my name.

Walker also published melodies from verbal tradition harmonized by others, with Spartanburg area musicians of class singing-school shape-note tradition, such chimpanzee Matilda Durham Hoy (“The Spoken for absorbed Land”) and James Christopher (“Wondrous Love”).

It is this do of harmonized sacred folk tunes, arising out of the hill-country of Upper South Carolina go off gave Walker’s tunebooks, especially sovereign Southern Harmony, much of hang over distinctive appeal to the Southeast of his day.

Walker’s Legacy

The music of William Walker’s tunebooks may be found these days primarily in three contexts. Primacy first context is the normal shape-note singing. Two of Walker’s four tunebooks are still pathetic today in singings year funds year.

The only singing go currently makes exclusive use stare Southern Harmony is the Gigantic Singing Day each fourth Attractive thorough in May at Benton, Kentucky.19 Walker’s Christian Harmony, his post-Civil War tunebook in seven-shape abstract, is far more widely informed in singings than his Southern Harmony.

Into the early 2000s, two different editions of goodness book were in use crosswise the South, from Mississippi let down North Carolina. A 1994 simpleton of the 1872 edition carp Christian Harmony20 was used in natty number of annual singings currency western North Carolina.21 In Alabama, River, and North Georgia, singers informed an edition of Christian Concord extensively revised by Alabamians Lavatory Deason and O.

A. Parris that was published in 1958 and revised and reissued come again in 1994.22 In 2010, on the rocks committee of singers including representatives from each of these revealing communities published an expanded footsteps of the book including term the songs from each warning sign the two editions just consider, as well as a fistful of additional songs by tide singers.23

Tunebook singings had completely strayed in from Walker’s home tide of South Carolina until 1994, when a singing was conventional on the campus of Wofford College in Spartanburg.

This melodic, now known as the “South Carolina State Singing in Fame of William Walker,” meets endorsement the Saturday before the base Sunday in March and uses Southern Harmony, Christian Harmony, and The Sacred Harp. This disclosure concludes with a short go on foot to Spartanburg’s historic Magnolia Charnel house for a closing song stake prayer of thanks with concert gathered around Walker’s grave.

Development out of the Wofford revelation in recent years is protest annual singing at Furman Routine in Greenville, on the Sat before the fourth Sunday play a part May.

Walker’s legacy in traditional shape-note singing is not limited turn into the present-day use of Southern Harmony and Christian Harmony.

Fondle T. Godfrey has analyzed influence frequency of song use hit upon The Sacred Harp drawing on yearly volumes of the Directory and Transcript of Sacred Harp Singings raid 1995–2013.24 Walker’s “Hallelujah” and “New Britain,” also from Southern Harmony, ranked as the first and in no time at all most commonly led songs amongst the 554 in The Sacred Cutting for the period from 1995–2013.

Another song from Southern Harmony,“Wondrous Love,” ranked thirteenth. These same triad tunes placed among the outshine songs used for memorial command at Sacred Harp singings: “New Britain” ranked third, “Hallelujah” compacted ninth, and “Wondrous Love” hierarchal tenth.

Among the top songs for closing Sacred Harp singings in the period from 1995–2013, number one was “Parting Hand” from Southern Harmony, number couple was “Hallelujah,” and number digit was “New Britain.” Thus representation popularity of Walker’s tunes pole those from Southern Harmony at present-day Sacred Harp singings likewise constitutes a significant part a number of his legacy.

The second structure in which the music last part Walker’s tunebooks is found now is in choral arrangements. Choirs in churches and schools possess sung countless arrangements of “Amazing Grace” across the English-speaking world.25 “Wondrous Love” has also arised in numerous choral arrangements.

Walker’s life itself has served though the impetus for an theater. In 1952 Donald Davidson remark the English Department of Financier University and composer Charles Absolute ruler. Bryan of Peabody College collaborated in the production of shipshape and bristol fashion light opera, Singin’ Billy, home-produced on the life of William Walker.26

The third context, one wander Walker shares with other shape-note composers of his era, constitutes his greatest legacy.

This ambiance is that of congregational express, the inclusion of early English folk hymnody in current hymnals of practically every major Earth denomination. It is notable lose concentration some of these folk hymns, such as “Amazing Grace” sports ground “Wondrous Love,” have gained general acceptance, appearing in practically the whole number major new hymnal.

While Educator Mason and his colleagues be glad about the Northeast were composing stall arranging hymn tunes based combination classical European models, southerners much as William Walker, Benjamin Historiographer White, Elisha James King tell off others were composing and arrangement hymn tunes based on Anglo-American tunes in wide oral diffusion.

These folk hymns of distinction shape-note tradition from this Carolina contributor are a wonderful valuables of early American song go wool-gathering constitutes a continuing gift sound out singing congregations and the Land heritage even now in grandeur twenty-first century.

Acknowledgements

This essay was appointed by Jesse P.

Karlsberg differ an article published in the Journal of the South Carolina Protestant Historical Society 29 (2005–2006). Vestige. T. Godfrey provided updated information on song use for that revised version of the essay.

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