Common and Uncommon Tunes
Each year for the last few years, Will Fitzgerald, a Sacred Harp singer from Kalamazoo, Michigan and NASA scientist in his spare time has published a list of the frequency of tunes led at Sacred Harp singings over the previous year, compiled by examining the published minutes of Sacred Harp singings worldwide, made available by the Sacred Harp Publishing Company. His lists
are straightfowardly presented without analysis, but are fun to peruse. They offer some surprises (to me) both at the top and the bottom and a wealth of information (for folks similarly obsessed with stuff like this) throughout.
This year Glenn Latimer, a new singer from McDonough, Georgia, has duplicated Will’s efforts and produced a similar list (though there are minor discrepancies), I think by entering the minutes by hand! Glenn has gone ahead and compiled lists as well for the frequency of songs sung from other popular shape note tunebooks as they appear in the Sacred Harp minutes, and has provided some interesting analysis, including lists of the most common opening, closing, commemorative, and memorial committee songs. Rather than publish the complete listing, Glenn has chosen to focus on the top and bottom of the list, though he as published the entire listing on the fasola singings and discussion listservs.
A Minnesota singer has posted Glenn’s findings to his web site:
Aside from the casual interest I have in these lists as a singer, I suspect there’s some interesting work to be done tracking the changing popularity of songs over the years. David Ivey recalled at Camp Fasola this year that Sardis, a relatively popular tune but one that certainly does not make the top 25, was one year the tune sung most often. More localized analysis could track disparities in the frequency of different songs being led accross different regions, or from year to year at particular singings. I would be interested in tracking, for example, the occurence of songs by new composers added to the 1991 Revision, to examine how, when, where, and to what extent these songs were taken up by singers, and seeing what, if any, interesting patterns emerge.
What would make analysis of the richest sort possible would be the dissemination of an Excel spreadsheet containing all of the information compiled in the Minutes book. (something like this may already be available, or at least, in the hands of the minutes book committee. If so … uh … cool!) Generating lists like Will’s and Glenn’s would be a fairly straightforward for someone armed with such a spreadsheet, but more specific and finely textured analysis would also be possible, since these lists would index the leaders and singings associated with each particular incidence of a song being led.