Northampton Harmony was unintentionally the only performing Sacred Harp quartet of the late 20th century. That didn’t seem remarkable at the time, because why would there even be one? Sacred Harp singing is decidedly community music practice, not only because that’s what people decided over time but because of the nature of the music. It’s hard enough to make more than a twenty-minute set of full bore, two minute songs in hardcore punk, which built a whole ethos around performance as assault. Some years later, in 2004, in the wake of the attention the movie Cold Mountain brought to the practice, early music group Anonymous Four released an album centering shape-note music broadly described. They made it work by taking the lead of larger ensembles like Boston Camerata and Northern Harmony by employing a lighter touch, bits of arrangement, “dynamics” and other, more concert-friendly, repertoire. Also, they sang good. But Northampton Harmony was always less interested in performing than in singing this great music together and spreading the word that anybody who wanted to could do the same. In our performances and recordings we did think about things like song order, variety and trying to sound good, but our focus was less on any sort of professional aspirations than take-it-or-leave-it documentation of our micro-community music practice of Sacred Harp singing and dumpster diving for useful, unused music. It’s been lovely to see so many of the songs we helped introduce to Main Street America find a home in other people’s mouths, at home and abroad.
Several of us started making music together in various combinations as a small coalescing friend group in our teens and twenties involved in stuff including alt-rock, overtone singing, composition, Karnatak and experimental music. Kelly and I, along with early shapenote conspirators Paul Booth and Michael Theodore (Batteries Die), sang in the first modern staged performance of Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum directed by Robert Eisenstein. For some reason Kelly and I also sang a Mozart piece accompanied by composer Harold Meltzer, the only time I ever tried Western classical singing until my “how do you get to Carnegie Hall” moment with Evan Chambers’ symphonic song cycle The Old Burying Ground.
I had first encountered Sacred Harp as a discrete category in the course of writing a term paper on traditional arts in the United States for an American History class when I was 16 and thought it was strange and interesting, but no more so than other music I was excited about: George Crumb, Meredith Monk, Nina Simone, Throbbing Gristle, Fred and Annie McDowell, Ali Akbar Khan, Factrix/Cazazza, kabuki opera, Angel Witch, Krzysztof Penderecki, Black Flag, Alvin Lucier, Florence Foster Jenkins, The Ramones, Harry Partch, Shaker songs, New England ballads- there was a lot of competition for my attention, especially from my own bands.
As a first semester freshman in David Reck’s American Music class at Amherst College, when I had the opportunity to practice ethnography at the tiny group of singers who met at a local bookshop, I was too shy, and wound up doing a paper on David Kaynor’s contradance music instead. I was still self-conscious as a blue haired teenager in a group of ancient 30 and 40 somethings, but at least there were more of them to hide behind. I messed around a little with shapenote music, and learned a couple of tunes, but it wasn’t until a few years later that Kelly and I started putting some energy into it, and it wasn’t until the Fall of 1990 when Jeff, Kelly and her sister Karen were living together in a farm house in Westhampton, MA with no television that it really began to take hold. I’d gone to graduate school to continue my study of Karnatak music with T. Viswanathan and hopefully work with Alvin Lucier, and was distraught and confused by how much that involved reading long books by French people, a chronic condition for people in the humanities. Just about every night I didn’t have a gig or a paper due the next morning, I drove over to sing with Kelly, Karen, Jeff and Bradford West (Cordelia’s Dad, Slava’s Snow Show). I’d gotten as far as grad school without being able to read music, and it was that Fall and Winter (after I “took a leave of absence”) that it started to make sense, and with help especially from Bradford, Kelly and the genius of the shapenote notational system (for the music it works for, anyway) I finally got to where I could look at notes and feel a connection to how things were supposed to sound and what I was doing with my body.
We sang more and more, then all the time, and increasingly with anyone whose attention we could get. The little Amherst sing was either no longer happening or so far off the grid as to be unfindable in the old pre-internet days. I guess we were all happy enough singing with each other, but we did figure out there were a few little monthly Sacred Harp gatherings within a three hour drive- Boston, Middletown, Brattleboro, Brooklyn and a couple of places further up in Vermont. There were also some Vermont associated folk singers in Northampton for a minute, but that was about it. Kelly and I met Neely Bruce in the summer of 1990, right before I started graduate school, when we’d been singing shapenote music sporadically for several years but hadn’t hunkered down with it yet. Neely’s way with music has a touch of the Tasmanian Devil to it- we got swept up in his generous enthusiasm and ended up performing with him the day we met, at an event that memorably featured the first appearance of his song Millbrook, which people will be singing for generations to come, although it took us a couple of months to figure out it needed to be slow. I later watched Neely write music for a text I’d found, which took him about 3 minutes in the midst of doing something else. With music pouring out like that, we had to actually sit him down and show him he’d written one of the best things we’d ever heard.
I became pretty immediately curious about local history connections to the music in the Sacred Harp and enthusiastic about teaching the music, despite having no idea what I was doing on some of the customary levels. We started doing little presentations in clubs, schools, churches, historical societies, libraries and anywhere we might get a little gathering of DIY kids, history buffs, church music people and anyone else who was curious and willing to give it a shot. I was uncomfortably well known in certain circles by that time, but being “that guy” had advantages over being “some guy” when it came to getting venues and attendees together for something that was then broadly seen as a little strange, if not frightening. Writing about “why” any of this, is a whole other thing. But it was when Kelly, Karen our friend Paul booth and I were doing one of these little performance/teaching events, at the school on Long Island where my parents worked, that we had to come up with a name in order to be introduced. Northampton Harmony was the path of least resistance because of the 1797 tunebook of that name compiled by Elias Mann who lived a couple of blocks from where I was living at the time, and the practice of naming groups and books by attaching “Harmony” to some place or feature of significance. Becky Miller (Cordelia’s Dad) recorded a similar 1992 event at Russell House in Middletown, which became the first of the two cassette-only releases that preceded The Hookes’ Regular Sing.
I met Cath at a Cordelia’s Dad show at CBGB, when she was 19, living in the city working at Washington Square Church and doing anarchist direct action graffiti stuff. It was either late 1990 or early 1991. I don’t remember the exact sequence of events, but two episodes are worth mentioning in this connection. I crashed at her place after another show not long after we met, and in the course of talking about music she said she didn’t do any, but she played me a micro cassette recording of her singing along quietly into her answering machine with the first Cordelia’s Dad album. It was very moving and absolutely real. Not long after that, she hitched an overnight ride with us in Chris Crowley’s (Stands For Nothing) van after a show with Precious Wax Drippings, which I remember for some reason, to go visit her friend Sarah in Amherst. Only we weren’t going to Amherst, we were going to Boston, which most people outside of Massachusetts don’t realize is a different place. We played late, drove through the night and were planning to drop most of our gear and leave the van at Tim O’Heir’s studio before flying out of Logan to do a show in Minneapolis, but that’s another story. I guess Cath found her way to Amherst, and pretty much the next thing I knew she was living in Northampton. She learned the most about singing, I think, from Karen. She got the shapes, and by 1992 was writing tunes and helping me with my graduate research into aspects of sacred music practice in 19th century Northampton (as it turned out). Then when Cordelia’s Dad was left with one man down, she used the shapes to figure out bass guitar and after three months and one gig she joined the band for its first European tour in the Fall of 1993. She had already started performing with Northampton Harmony when Karen went to work in Guatemala earlier in the year, and Cath and I flew straight to Frankfurt for the Cordelia’s Dad shows from a UK tour in which Northampton Harmony joined Neely Bruce’s American Voices, playing the role of the slightly loud and inappropriately dressed young people.
This is a very short sketch that barely says anything about some very dear people, and even less about music, but it’s a start.