Annual National Sacred Harp Singing Convention

Sacred Harp is four-part a cappella shape note singing from the historic 165-year-old Southern tunebook, The Sacred Harp (first published in Hamilton, Ga., in 1844). There are no rehearsals and no performances. Singers gather to enjoy singing the historic Sacred Harp hymns and anthems. Many Sacred Harp singers now travel considerable distances to sing with others who have come to love the music and the democratic, welcoming tradition that sustains it.

Sacred Harp was primarily a rural Deep South tradition of community singing until about the past 30 to 40 years, when it spread to metropolitan areas outside the South – and now to a number of other countries, particularly the U. K. Thirty-nine states in the U. S. now have Sacred Harp events.