Sugarlands Visitor Center Singing
(This page uses info from processed Minutes; that task is ongoing in 2025.)
About this singing
Some notes by Bob Richmond, made in 2007:
The singing at the Sugarlands Visitor Center in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, convened every year the second Saturday in December, is unique in combining singing from the New Harp of Columbia with singing from a gospel shape note book, Best Known Songs and Hymns, edited by Ruth W. Shelton, published by the R.E. Winsett Music Company in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1961. Shaped like conventional printed books rather than being long and narrow, gospel shape note books (sometimes called Stamps-Baxter books) are set up in Aiken seven note shapes, with the do, re, and ti shapes different from our Swan shapes. The music is greatly different also, harmonized according to the conventional rules of traditional harmony, rather than being in the very different dispersed harmony of the harp traditions. Gospel shape note singers rarely sing the shapes, and usually use a "fixed do"—do is always the note C on the piano—though gospel singers at the Sugarlands singing said that moving the pitch to suit the voices at hand is common among local gospel singings.
The Sugarlands singing always attracts a number of old family Old Harp singers who usually don't venture to singings farther west.