COLUMBIA — When the Columbia Shape-Note Singers get together, no one knows exactly what they will sing. They arrange themselves in a square according to vocal range, wait for suggestions and begin.

DULUTH — Once a month, typically on a Sunday afternoon, the Friends Meeting House is filled with voices singing together. It's not a performance because everyone present is involved in the singing.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - If these singers were in a sanctuary or on the church grounds, you’d think you were at an old-time revival. But these voices, distinct in tune but united in harmony, are ...

Groups of Sacred Harp singers are working together to revise their hymnal The a capella tradition uses shape-note music to sight-read songs from the hymnal's 554 options Families pass the musical ...

Shape note singing, which took root in America by the early 19th Century, employs either four (fasola) or seven note (doremi) styles. “We do the seven-shape,” Wiley said. The Old Fields Singers will ...

PITTSBURGH – Alexa Kay is a Quaker, a denomination which has embraced simplicity and shunned more extravagant forms of worship, even singing. Nevertheless, Kay likes to sing, and that’s what led her ...

Shape-note singing started during the late 18th century in New England. A form of communal prayer, many of the songs focus on "the coffin, earth and winding sheet," according to the event handout.

Lou Kujawinski is a member of the Columbia Shape-Note Singers. My wife and I sing in a wonderful group called Sacred Harp, also known as shape-note singing. Shape notes are an older style of music ...

On a quiet Saturday afternoon, eight people gathered in Christ Episcopal Church in Cape Girardeau to practice shape-note singing, a form of traditional music used in Christian worship for more than ...

BREMEN, Ga. — Singers at Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church in West Georgia treat their red hymnals like extensions of themselves, never straying far from their copies of “The Sacred Harp” and its ...

Step into St. Monica’s church hall in West Wyoming on a Tuesday evening, close your eyes and listen. Members of the Choral Arts of Luzerne County are sitting in a semi-circle, singing earnestly and ...

The crowded room echoes with lilting voices raised in a simple, timeless song. There are no instruments, no audience. Just a chorus of four-part harmonies sung from a book that's as thick as a Bible.