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The Star of Bethlehem

I. H. Hall, J. H. Ruebush, and Aldine S. Kieffer

Collection:

Notable marginalia:

Still to come

Librarian's note:

I have a sickness, and it's name is "shape note singing." It bids me to attend every singing event I can feasibly travel to, even crossing state lines, to shout from a 180-year-old Christian hymnal, despite not being (or having ever been) a Christian.

I hear that it's possible to be repelled by this singing tradition, or even, somehow, to only casually enjoy it and not feel unbelievably sad when driving back from a two-day singing event because your regular evening singing group doesn't meet again for another week. But when you have the bug like I do, there is no cure.

My specific strain is The Sacred Harp (the Denson edition) tradition, which is friendly with some other tunebooks like those produced by the Shenandoah Harmony publishing company. But there's a whole universe of historical tunebooks that have simply fallen by the wayside as the market for traditional singing schools dried up.

Throughout early U.S. history, instruments were a bit of a novelty -- even if you could hire someone to play an organ, not many churches were in the position of having one. So they made due with the natural instrument: the voice box.

But few are born knowing how to read music, and adding shapes to the sheetmusic was used as a way to quickly teach people to sight read hymnals on the spot. Singing school teachers would rove the lands teaching basic music theory through this method. By the end of a day, you could have a nice little choir together.

There were a plethera of small, regional publishers who published nothing but this type of music. Some were popular folk tunes, some church revival compositions, and some original compositions entirely; others were popular folk tunes with the lyrics gutted and replaced with Christian poetry.

Over time, music was professionalized. Gone were the days of amateur musicians and singers. And things have remained that way, more than you might think. A non-professional choir singer recently told my wife he couldn't stand shape note singing, because of how ugly it sounds (as she was kindly putting up a flyer for our local group's upcoming shape note class). And it is ugly. But I happen to like ugly things.

Many oblong tunebooks enjoyed immense popularity in their day and can still be found lurking in antique stores -- this might be the fate of my own tunebooks when they've been pried from my cold, dead corpse. That's how I found this 1889 tunebook, The Star of Bethlahem, which I bought to help satiate my obsession, a mere 60 miles from where it was printed over 100 years ago in Dayton, Virginia.

It comprosies the usual fare from the genre: an opening explaining music theory and the shapes (using the 7-shape Aikin system), followed by sheet music with deceptive names. There is an unfortunate lack of songs about dying, but the wear, tear, and writing in the book suggests it was well-loved by its owners.

Other notes and quotes:

1. It's always a challenge to make out the faded pencil of 100-year-old handwriting, but I distinctly read something that says Bow and the Cow

2. This book also seems to at one point have been owned by a Phil Kagey, Esq.

3. The authors and compilers of The Star of Bethlehem are fully aware of the fact that the average musician dislikes a preface. (Preface)

4. They remark that the 7-note Aikin notation system has in the last few years acquired immense popularity and is destined to become the universal musical notation, which was a true enough prediction in its time -- there was a lot of hullabaloo about 7-shape systems -- but the original 4-note system has remained incredibly prevalent among shape systems. (Preface)

5. A large majority of the so-called singing-class books are devoid of solid church and devotional music. In this collection there will be found an unusually large amount of true, genuine Church Music, which fact, of itself, must commend it to the public. lol

6. The Sunday-School Department is replete with cheerful and pleasant songs suited to the wants of the children, successfully avoiding the 'milk and water' character of so much known as Sunday-School songs and hymns. I can't imagine what they could possibly mean.

7. Question: What is sound? Answer: Sound is anything audible.

8. As often is the case, the song titles are here to play mind games. The song titled Antioch, which is a banger in the Sacred Harp, is really what we'd recognize as "Joy to the World." Boooooo

9. Page 107/108 seems to be torn out.