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Teaching

Teaching (with) Tunebooks

By Meredith Doster, PhD, Instructional Designer, and Erin Fulton, Music Bibliographer and Subject Matter Expert.

Considered individually, volumes in the Sounding Spirit Digital Library tell important stories about the practice and publishing history of sacred music across the US south and its diasporas. Engaged as a collection, library volumes emphasize the intersection of religion, culture, race, and place in a modernizing world.

The following lesson plans were designed to encourage broad engagement with Sounding Spirit’s approach to American sacred song and are relevant to a variety of disciplines, including:

  • African American Studies
    American Studies
  • Anthropology
  • Appalachian Studies
  • Book History and Bibliography
  • Choral Conducting/Pedagogy
  • Curatorial Studies
  • Critical Editing
  • Critical Geography
  • History (American, African American, Native American, Southern, Diasporic)
  • Native American Studies
  • Music History
  • Music Performance
  • Music Theory, including Sight Singing and Ear Training
  • Religious Studies
  • Theology
  • Translation Studies

Designed to support educators from a variety of disciplines in teaching with the Sounding Spirit Digital Library, the following exercises and associated recommended resources can be modified to meet a variety of learning levels and objectives. In addition to scaffolding activities for beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels,  a “text, texture, context” activity invites students to consider the cultural lifeworld of the library's books and their communities of use. Drawing from both individual volumes and the full collection, the exercises offer a starting point for teachers and students to learn about southern vernacular sacred song together.

Sounding Form: From Tunebook to Songbook

Suitable for music history surveys; book history and bibliography courses; and American studies courses.

Careful review of select Sounding Spirit volumes charts the transformation of the tunebook and emergence of the gospel songbook. Tunebooks served as sources of repertoire for choirs and music directors and were also textbooks for students enrolled in singing schools. Although this publication type fell out of fashion during the late nineteenth century, pedagogical materials typical of the tunebook continued to make their mark on later collections of sacred music. Featuring sacred music collections published between 1850 and 1925, the Sounding Spirit Digital Library makes visible both major and subtle changes in the format and layout of texts during this dynamic era of sacred music publishing.

Beginner

Consider the following volumes in chronological order: Hesperian Harp (1848), Temple Star (1877), and Eureka Echoes (1903). Chart similarities and differences, paying close attention to the following:

  1. Scope of use, as indicated in the title and prefatory matter;
  2. Dimensions and internal layout;
  3. Cover design, illustrations, and advertisements.

What can you glean about shifting trends in sacred music publishing by comparing these three volumes?

Intermediate

  1. Read B.C. Unseld’s “A Word of Explanation” (p. 3) and “Note to the Teacher” (p. 5) in Temple Star. What pedagogical method does Unseld promote? In which educational contexts would this book have been suitable?
  2. Read William Hauser’s “Rudiments of Music” (p. [v] ff.) in Hesperian Harp and John H. Smith and Hiel A. Key’s “Musical Catechism” (p. [5] ff.) in Eureka Echoes. How do these editors’ approaches compare to one another? Do they appear to address the same audience or invoke the same pedagogical style as Unseld? How do the rudiments tell a story about the evolution of the tunebook, and about the function of gospel songbooks within the twentieth-century singing school?

Advanced

  1. Assess the multiple indices in Hesperian Harp (p. 554 ff.) and Temple Star (p. [183] ff.) by selecting an item from each index and looking it up in the body of the book. What information does each index supply? What information is found on the relevant page, but not in the index? Under what circumstances (whether in performance, devotion, or teaching) would these various types of indices have been most helpful to the books’ users?
  2. Eureka Echoes has no indices. Compare several musical selections from this book to those that you discovered in Hesperian Harp and Temple Star. What features indexed in these earlier tunebooks are included in Eureka Echoes? Which ones are absent, or no longer highlighted like they once were? How do these omissions speak to the changing circumstances of use for sacred songbooks in the early twentieth century?

Text, Texture, Context

Watch this excerpt of a singing school taught at Old Country Line Church in Corner, Alabama, in 2009. Compare and contrast the teaching methods used to the rudiments included in Hesperian Harp (1848), Temple Star (1877), Eureka Echoes (1903). How have pedagogical practices evolved from 1848 to the present day? What content has remained stable in shape-note tunebooks and communities?

Recommended Resources

Citing this Resource

Meredith Doster and Erin Fulton. "Sounding Form: From Tunebook to Songbook." Sounding Spirit Digital Library Pedagogical Resource. Sounding Spirit Digital Library. Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. 2025.

The Sounding Spirit Collaborative promotes research, teaching, and publishing with the sacred songbooks that sound America’s musical landscape.
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