About
Overview
The Sounding Spirit Digital Library (SSDL) showcases over 1,250 volumes of southern sacred vernacular song published between 1850 and 1925 that represent diverse musical genres, religious groups, and singing traditions. The library’s single access point brings together a canon of music from seven partner institutions that cuts across regional, religious, racial, and cultural lines. Sounding Spirit’s scope and curation allow researchers, scholars, teachers, worship leaders, and singers to reconsider histories and perceptions of sacred music’s many siloes. A project of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the SSDL invites users to engage volumes and songs both familiar to scholars and practitioners of sacred music, as well as those not yet accounted for in histories of America’s past, present, and future.
Scope
The Sounding Spirit Digital Library (SSDL) invites engagement with vernacular songbooks and traditions found across the US South between 1850 and 1925. During this dynamic seventy-five year period, the transformation of publishing practices resulted in the proliferation of both new book formats and sacred music genres. The curation of the SSDL illuminates the spirited resonance of musics that accompanied Native displacement, the Civil War, the rise of the New South, and the early years of the Great Migration alongside everyday life and worship in a changing world.
- Sounding Spirit conceives of the US South as a constructed and multifaceted geography where religion, modernity, race, and place shape the histories and politics of both region and nation. In addition to the states of the confederacy, our conception of the South includes borderlands and territories diasporically connected to the southeastern United States by the large-scale movements (both forced and voluntary) of Indigenous, Black, and white southerners.
- Sounding Spirit uses the term vernacular to characterize music publishing as a local activity distinct from yet related to elite urban publishing centers. Vernacular publishing activities, as well as associated teaching and convening models, illustrate important methods of music-making that remain popular in their native contexts.
- Sounding Spirit volumes feature a wide variety of formats, including both hymn texts set to music and text-only hymnals. Most are compilations rather than single-authored texts. We describe these works as songbooks, a term that encompasses several genres of sacred music book publication, to emphasize the range of sacred and secular settings where these volumes served individual and communal worship.
The library’s emphasis on this particular time and place reveals a variety of religious practice and perspective at the margins of an emerging national identity and corresponding publishing culture in which sacred music books formed one corner. The Sounding Spirit Digital Library documents this rich moment in American book history by showcasing examples of the varieties of religious experience and sacred song that contributed to the transformation of the US South, and by extension, the nation as a whole. Texts and tunes in the library’s music books document the distinctiveness of and interconnections among sacred music genres, traditions, and forms including:
- Spirituals: This originally a cappella repertoire of enslaved African Americans, rooted in African performance styles and nineteenth-century mixed-race camp meetings, gained international prominence via touring ensembles from historically black educational institutions even as their popularity declined among the rural black churches that sustained this genre during Reconstruction.
- Sunday school music: Fusing folk hymnody with European-inflected harmonies, this repertoire provided ecumenical religious education for children and became widespread across the South in the mid-nineteenth century.
- Gospel music: Published in collections of four-part, close-harmony settings of often-original hymn texts frequently sung with piano or organ accompaniment, this style became popular in ecumenical, revival, and convention settings where Baptist, Methodist, and Holiness/Pentecostal congregations of African, European, and Native American descent worshiped across the US South.
- Hymn singing: Ranging from staid four-part harmony with instrumental accompaniment to ornamented, a cappella melodies sung to memorized tunes from hymnbooks without printed music, this repertoire displayed growing variation as new Protestant denominations emerged, older denominations split, and immigrant populations introduced new traditions.
- Shape-note music: Both a notation system and music tradition with revered worship and social practices, this repertoire features a cappella singing in four-part harmony notated in distinctive shapes that correspond to their place in the musical scale. The library’s time period encompasses the transition from the older four-shape method to new seven-shape notation systems associated with emergent gospel music.
The volumes included in the library reflect one or more of these traditions, genres, and forms. While each book is significant in its own right, the volumes are also importantly related to one another. To best showcase wide-ranging relationships, the library has been curated into 150 collections that identify themes through which the corpus can be interpreted and understood. Each collection identifies ways of understanding a subset of the library’s volumes, but does not represent a bounded body of knowledge. Instead, the collections document a curatorial lens especially interested in the blurred and blurring intersections at which Sounding Spirit volumes continue to make meaning. The Sounding Spirit Digital Library hopes to encourage questioning and querying of individual volumes and collections alike. We invite all readers of the library to join us in moving past simplistic stories of southern sacred music to a soundscape defined by complexities worthy of scholarly engagement and devotional worship.
Philosophy and Values
The Sounding Spirit Digital Library is a project and product of intentional relationships and valued partnerships. Inspired and created by director Jesse P. Karlsberg, the Sounding Spirit Collaborative encompasses a community of educators, scholars, practitioners, technologists, and colleagues. Our work is sustained by a growing network of dialogue partners across sometimes siloed spaces: institutions, denominations, histories, identities. Sounding Spirit appreciates that the volumes contributed to and digitized for inclusion in this library historically served many purposes. Our hope is that the digital library and all other Sounding Spirit projects reflect commitments to the sounding and consideration of sacred song in the service of scholarship, worship, and community. Our team benefits from working across theories of knowledge and domains of expertise. The following project values reflect our orientation to complex histories, sacred songbooks, and one another.
- Listening. Sounding Spirit listens first. All else follows.
- Sharing. Sounding Spirit collaborates widely and credits those who contribute to shared work.
- Humanizing. Sounding Spirit places people before project priorities and products.
- Welcoming Dissonance. Sounding Spirit is curious about things that appear to clash and welcomes insights that grate to some ears.
- Seeking (Partial) Resolution. Sounding Spirit believes in the power of a cadence, even those that resolve only by half.
- Keying Generously. Sounding Spirit pitches all work in accessible language to invite a wide-ranging readership to the collaborative’s work.
- Staying Humble. Sounding Spirit understands its work at the crossroads of intellectual and devotional worlds. To walk in both requires commitments to intellectual humility and wide-ranging understandings of the sacred.
History
The Sounding Spirit Digital Library is a project of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS), and the product of a ten-year collaboration between founder-director Jesse P. Karlsberg and core team, longstanding institutional partners, and leading scholars and practitioners of American sacred music. In addition to Emory University support, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is a primary funder of Sounding Spirit activities, awarding grants for both a forthcoming scholarly editions series and this major digitization initiative.
The Digital Library began as a pilot project in 2019. A one-year planning grant from the NEH Humanities Collection and Reference Resources program established the Sounding Spirit Collaborative as a research lab and publishing initiative. During the planning year, Karlsberg and the project team at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship partnered with four leading archives of southern sacred vernacular song to workshop interinstitutional digitization and digital collection development processes and to conduct music-bibliographic research. The resulting pilot library featured twenty-two songbooks in Readux, an open source ECDS-developed digital platform facilitating teaching, research, and publishing with digitized books.
In 2021, Sounding Spirit received a three-year implementation grant through the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program to expand the pilot project. This resulting digital library includes over 1,250 volumes of sacred music and associated metadata organized into 100-plus collections that help users navigate individual volumes and their significance. Building on partnerships established during the pilot planning process, the Sounding Spirit Digital Library brings together archival holdings from seven universities with leading and complementary collections of sacred vernacular sacred song.
Futures
Sounding Spirit understands sacred songbooks as pathways to multiple pasts, competing presents, and emergent futures. With the Digital Library published, the project team is resuming focused work on the Collaborative’s scholarly editions series, embarking on an ambitious indexing project, and continuing to promote the library’s teaching and research potential.
- In January 2025, Sounding Spirit began a three-year implementation project (funded by the NEH Humanities References and Resource program) to index hymn tunes, texts, and associated authors and composers of the earliest published books in the Digital Library. The resulting reference resource, the Sounding Spirit Hymnody Index (SSHI), will provide a single point of access to 300,000 printings of hymn tunes and texts in the library’s volumes and collaborate with other major indexers of sacred song on their dissemination.
- In Spring 2025, Sounding Spirit will promote the digital library with an exhibition and convening at Pitts Theology Library on the Emory University campus in Atlanta, Georgia.
- From January to April 2025, select music books from the Sounding Spirit digital collection will be on display at the Pitts Theology Library gallery. The exhibition, Singing the Sacred: Songbooks and Hymnals from the Sounding Spirit Digital Library (1850–1925), will invite visitors to learn about the library’s materials through discrete book elements including covers, bindings, formats, prefatory content, and notation systems. The exhibition will also explore key themes in American life and history. From text-only hymnals to early Black Pentecostal publications to missionizing texts of several denominations, the exhibition will showcase how historical events such as the Civil War, the rise of the New South, and early waves of the Great Migration take place in and across pages and volumes of sacred music. Plans are underway to tour the exhibition to partner institutions.
- On April 4 and 5, 2025, Sounding Spirit will host a two-day convening at Pitts Theology Library to showcase the digital library, associated exhibition, and future trajectories of the Collaborative. The Sounding Spirit Singing School will include community singing sessions, academic presentations, and structured conversations. In addition to researchers and project partners, the Collaborative welcomes practitioners and performers to represent the singing traditions that draw on the digital library. A keynote address will investigate the library’s critical themes and share early insights from its expansive set of metadata. Befitting the cultural context of many volumes housed in the digital library, participants will also share food and fellowship across the convening.
From the outset, Sounding Spirit has explored how nineteenth century songbooks shaped both the experience and understanding of religion, culture, modernity, and race in the US South and beyond. Future initiatives will build on project foundations to co-create, pilot, and iterate public-facing convenings and educational curricula that allow singers and scholars to share in sacred song and deliberative dialogue. Modeled on the “singing school,” a sacred music teaching model with eighteenth-century roots, future programming will bring scholars and practitioners together in the spirit of better understanding the competing ways the sacred informs racial, religious, and political institutions.