Northampton Harmony

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.