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The digitization of 1,284 books of vernacular sacred music from the U.S. South published between 1850 and 1925.

The Sounding Spirit digital library provides access to 1,284 books of vernacular sacred music from the US South published between 1850 and 1925. This corpus of gospel songbooks, collections of spirituals, shape-note tunebooks, and hymnals offers critical insights into the lived experience of Americans who used these works to navigate a modernizing turn-of-the-twentieth-century musical landscape. Led by a team of humanities scholars and technologists based at Emory University's Center for Digital Scholarship, the Sounding Spirit digital library includes six partner archives holding an impressive range of southern sacred song. Digitizing and making accessible works representing the sacred music making of blacks, whites, and Native Americans, and supporting their interpretation via digital collections and descriptive entries, the Sounding Spirit digital library recasts our understanding of American music for a broad public of researchers, teachers, and practitioners of sacred song.

Preparation of print and digital editions of five volumes of American Protestant music from several traditions, including gospel, spirituals, lined-out hymn singing, and shape-note music. (36 months)

“Sounding Spirit: Scholarly Editions of Southern Sacred Music, 1851–1911” will make available connected open access digital editions and print volumes of five widely influential but currently inaccessible books of Protestant music, including gospel (Class, Choir, and Congregation; Soul Echoes, No. 2), spirituals (Jubilee Songs), shape-note music (Original Sacred Harp), and lined-out hymn singing (Nakcokv Esyvhiketv). The intermingling of black, white, and Native American populations in the southern United States dispersed the music presented in these songbooks across the country. In critical editions richly annotated with text and multimedia, joined with in-depth introductions, and published by the University of North Carolina Press, the “Sounding Spirit” series offers scholars of history, musicology, folklore, regional studies, and religious studies access to key texts and appeals to a general audience, including contemporary populations engaged in sacred music making.