How Sacred Harp music is sung

The performance of Sacred Harp music involves customary styles that are not expressed in the musical notation itself. The phrase "performance practice" is used in a broad way: Sacred Harp singing is participatory, not audience-oriented, and thus is not really "performed" in a traditional sense.
Transmission of Sacred Harp
The reason why Sacred Harp includes practices not notated in the music (that is, in the various published editions of The Sacred Harp) is that the printed music is not the only way that the music is transmitted among singers and across time—there is an oral channel as well. Many Sacred Harp participants can be described as "traditional" singers. They learned Sacred Harp by being taken to singings as children, and usually are the children of traditional singers of the previous generation. The parents, in turn, also learned the tradition as children. Thus there is often a chain of direct transmission dating back to (or even before) the original appearance (1844) of The Sacred Harp. This chain has evidently developed and transmitted a number of singing practices distinct from what is printed in the book. As Sacred Harp scholar Warren Steel states, "traditional singers use the printed book in learning songs, and refer to it while singing, but the notes in the book are not interpreted literally, but according to a performance practice and style that is learned through oral tradition and varies among different regions and families."
Sources of evidence
Although none of the practices described below are notated in the music, there are several ways that scholars can gather information about them.
The most obvious is to attend singings where most of the participants are traditional singers. The disadvantage of this method is that the notes are fleeting, and repeated observation concerning musically subtle questions is not possible.
A more stable source of evidence is recordings made by traditional singers. Among these are the recordings made by Alan Lomax under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution during the 1940s; these are commercially available. The Sacred Harp Publishing Company, the publisher of The Sacred Harp, 1991 Edition, produced six albums of recordings from 1965 to 1976, which are also currently obtainable (for both sets, see References below).
More recently, recordings of Sacred Harp singings have been posted on the Web (see

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