Welcome to the community hub built on top of the List of shape-note tunebooks Wikipedia article.
Here, you can discuss, collect, and organize anything related to List of shape-note tunebooks. The
purpose of the hub is to connect people, foster deeper knowledge, and help improve
the root Wikipedia article.
Shape notes are a system of music notation designed to facilitate choral singing. Shape notes of various kinds have been used for over two centuries in a variety of sacred choral music traditions practiced primarily in the Southern region of the United States.
"Shape-note singers used tune books rather than hymnals. Hymnals were pocket-size books with texts only. Tune books were large oblong-shaped books with hard covers (nine inches by six inches was a typical size), often running to over four hundred pages. They included both music and text and were introduced by an extended essay on the rudiments of singing. Each song was known by the name given to its tune rather than by a title drawn from the text."[1]
The following is a partial list of the shape note tunebooks published over the last two centuries. The list is divided according to the two main systems of shape notes—four-shape vs. seven-shape—and within these two categories is sorted chronologically.
For full information on shape-note tunebooks, including a list of public-domain tunebooks available online, see Shape note.
The Christian Harmony, (4-shape edition of Jeremiah Ingalls' 1805 tunebook), Thomas B. Malone self-published, (2005)
The Georgian Harmony, Raymond C. Hamrick (2010)
The Shenandoah Harmony, John del Re, Kelly Macklin, Leyland del Re, Myles Louis Dakan, Rachel Wells Hall, Daniel L. Hunter, Nora Miller, and Robert Stoddard Boyce, Virginia (2012)
The Valley Pocket Harmonist, Daniel L. Hunter, Kelly Macklin, Graham F. DeZarn, John W. del Re, Leyland W. del Re, Cherilyn MacNeil, Joshua Rush Barnett Boyce, Virginia (2024)
