The Shenandoah Harmony 7.5×10″, 480 pages ISBN: 978-0-615-74366-0
The Shenandoah Harmony is a shape-note tunebook concentrated on the music of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the early nineteenth century. At 469 songs across 480 pages, it is the largest new book of its kind published in more than 150 years.
The book’s original inspiration was Ananias Davisson, a Valley singing master whose Kentucky Harmony (Harrisonburg, 1816) and A Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony (1820) gathered European congregational hymns and New England singing-school tunes alongside the new sound of frontier folk hymns and camp-meeting songs. Davisson’s books left their mark on every shape-note book that followed, including The Sacred Harp, which has been in continuous publication since 1844.
John del Re and Kelly Macklin of Boyce, Virginia have been singing from Davisson’s books for more than twenty-five years — drawn first by recordings of songs from John Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second (Harrisburg, 1813) and from Kentucky Harmony itself, and then by the broader recognition that much of this music sits in out-of-print, hard-to-find tunebooks. The current committee formed in 2010. Over the years that followed, the project widened beyond strictly Valley sources to take in related New England, Mid-Atlantic, and Southern repertoire in the same idiom, along with sixty songs from living composers. The committee considered thousands of nineteenth-century shape-note songs from more than seventy sources before settling on the final selection.
Because shape-note singers hold the book in one hand while marking time with the other, the committee trimmed prefatory material and endnotes wherever possible to keep the volume’s weight down. The electronic edition restores thirty-five additional pages of bibliography and indices that didn’t make the print cut.
The debut singing from The Shenandoah Harmony was held on June 2, 2013, near Ananias Davisson’s grave outside Harrisonburg, Virginia. More than 100 singers came from at least sixteen states.
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Shenandoah Harmony Music Committee
John del Re
John W. del Re is a brick and stone mason in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He runs a small sheep farm and is an avid builder and shape note singer. John and his wife, Kelly Macklin, have run a monthly singing and an All-Day singing since the early ’90s. He received a Folklife Master award from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in 2011. His children Leyland and John Daniel have sung shape notes their whole lives.
Kelly Macklin
Kelly Macklin has been singing shape-note music since the late 1980s. She and her husband John del Re co-host the Northern Shenandoah Valley monthly singing, the NSV All-Day Shenandoah Harmony Singing on the first Saturday in June. In 2011 she received a Master Folklife Award from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. She gardens and raises sheep and works as a building estimator.
Leyland del Re
Leyland W. del Re, daughter of John and Kelly, has been traveling all over the country to sing since she was 3 years old. She currently co-hosts the Richmond Sacred Harp 1st and 3rd Tuesday singing and the James River All-Day Singing. She is a cardiac ICU nurse and also works in Richmond’s birth center as a labor assistant.
Daniel L. Hunter
Daniel L. Hunter has been a shape note enthusiast since 2008. He has organized singing in the Lehigh Valley and traveled all across the country to sing & learn. Daniel operates Hunter Hill Farm, a produce CSA in Easton PA. Before encountering shape note he played upright and electric bass in various jazz and classical ensembles and studied performance at Berklee College of music.
Myles Louis Dakan
Myles Louis Dakan began singing shape note music at Swarthmore College in 2008. After graduating he held a linguistics research fellowship at University of Maryland, and worked as a lab manager at Northeastern University. He is an avid contra dancer and a member of Gamelan Galak Tika. He has studied classical voice & piano, gyil, and taiko.
Nora Miller
Nora Miller has been a devoted singer since a friend took her to a Tuesday night singing in Northampton, MA on August 3, 2004. She grew up Irish Step Dancing, playing violin, and singing in chorus and musicals in high school; she never really considered herself a singer until she found Sacred Harp. Nora co-sponsors the Baltimore Weekly Sacred Harp Singing every fourth Thursday and works as a special education teacher in Baltimore, MD.
Rachel Wells Hall
Rachel Wells Hall grew up in a family of folk musicians. She first sang shape note music with her mother in the late 1980s in Cincinnati, Ohio, and returned to singing in Philadelphia in 2009. As a member of the folk trio Simple Gifts since 1995, she has recorded three albums and toured throughout the Mid Atlantic. She has travelled to Norway and the Shetland Islands to study traditional dance music on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in 1991-2. In addition to singing, Rachel plays English concertina, diatonic accordion, piano, fiddle, and tabla. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
