Early Shaker Spirituals

Daniel W. Patterson is Kenan Professor Emeritus of English and Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of numerous books, including The Shaker Spiritual (2nd edition, Dover Books, 2000). He has also collaborated on several documentary films and recordings. The following essay is adapted from the notes Patterson wrote to accompany a 1976 Rounder Records album entitled Early Shaker Spirituals Sung by Sister R. Mildred Barker with Sisters Ethel Peacock, Elsie McCool, Della Haskell, Marie Burgess, Frances Carr, and Other Members of the United Society of Shakers, Sabbathday Lake, Maine (Rounder 0078).

In 1780 a Baptist preacher from the Berkshires crossed into New York to investigate a "strange work" in the wilderness above Albany, where converts were flocking to an "Elect Lady" from England. He returned home proclaiming the fulfillment of Revelation 14, for his eyes had seen the Lamb and Its virgin company.

"I would as quick speak against the Holy Ghost, as speak against that people," he declared to neighbors gathered in a large barn. "They sing the song of the redeemed, they sing the song of the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth … they seemed like an innumerable company of Angels, and Church of the first born, singing praises to the Heavenly Host."^l

He had seen and heard Ann Lee, the daughter of a blacksmith in the slums of Manchester, who six years earlier had fled to America to escape mob violence and harassment from the law. She died in 1784, but her personality and teachings were the foundations on which American converts founded the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, commonly called the Shakers.

In the nineteenth century the group's distinctive beliefs and practices brought it much notice. Rejecting the commonly held doctrines of the Trinity and the atonement, the Shakers conceived the Deity to encompass both the male attribute of "Power to create" and the female attribute of "Wisdom to bring forth into proper order."² They held that the millennial dispensation had already begun, manifested first through Ann Lee and then as a gradual and increasing work in the hearts of the Believers and in the Church. It was the coming of the Christ Spirit, or Divine Love. All could share in it who would cleanse their hearts through confession of their sins and then take up a "full cross" against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. To further this work the Believers separated themselves from the World, refusing to vote or bear arms,

and gathering into self-supporting farming communities where they put "hands to work and hearts to God" and shared all their goods as children of one family. They maintained traditional sexual distinctions in dress and labor but practiced celibacy and at all levels of both the temporal and the spiritual governance of their society gave women an equal role.

Although most of their beliefs and practices had a biblical foundation and parallels in those of other radical Dissenting groups, the Shakers carried them all to their logical limits. What most often caught the eye of travelers and journalists in the course of the century, however, was the Shakers' mode of worship. At a public service they saw lines of Believers in uniform attire file into the meetinghouse, the brethren taking their stand in ranks on the left side of the room and sisters on the right. After singing a hymn or anthem, the Believers began a series of religious dances and marches interspersed with shorter songs and with testimonies. Their speaker generally addressed not the Believers but the World's people seated in special sections along the wall. As the service progressed, it often grew emotional and was attended by such Pentecostal manifestations as shaking, turning, speaking in tongues, or "singing in the gift."

In their worship the Believers played no musical instruments, which for the Shaker had disturbing associations. Instruments had too often been used "to excite lasciviousness, and to invite and stimulate men to destroy each others lives." But more important, the Shakers believed that the direct result of introducing elaborate instrumental music into a church had always been to "induce a lifeless form."³ For the same reason they could not countenance part-singing or the use of trained choirs led by a hired professional. They instead wanted "each one for one" to seek "that power of God that alone saves the soul from sin." The Shakers, like others in the Dissenting tradition, were reacting against the exclusion of the common man from full participation in religious worship.

But the Shakers did not sing the psalmody or hymnody of the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, or Methodists among whom they were raised. They found the texts of these songs surcharged with erroneous doctrines or sentiments. They felt impelled to make new songs of their own. For melodies they turned, as other groups were then beginning to do, to Anglo-American folk song, itself a tradition that favored unaccompanied solo or unison song. Sophisticated observers often recognized—with derision—the source of the Shaker songs. A high-toned Virginian, for example, wrote that he had heard the Kentucky Shakers sing such tunes as "Fire in the Mountains" and others "made use of among the vulgar class at their frolicks."⁴ And many of the Shakers were well supplied with such melodies. By his own word the early Shaker leader Elder Issachar Bates could in his youth sing "about every song that was going, whether civil, military, sacred, or profane."⁵ He was also a fifer-boy at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

But there was another and deeper reason why the Shakers drew on secular folk song. As the music that they knew and loved best, these tunes met one of the Shakers' major aesthetic criteria, that of helping the members to "unite" in worship. They needed familiar songs that even indifferently gifted members could join in singing, ones "substantial, not given to great extreems, forcible, clear & plain."⁶ In services they used them to bring the feelings and thoughts of the Believers into harmony, at times even appointing a specific song to be sung in every village at the same hour, to achieve a more perfect union. They sent songs by travelers or in letters from society to society, finding that they operated "like the magnetic telegraph, to convey love and union from one branch of Zion to another" and "strengthen the bond of relationship already existing with every true Believer."⁷ When used with the dances and marches, the songs had a doubly strong effect. The Believer saw these exercises as "beautiful and glorious" because their "unity and harmony" were "emblematical of the one spirit by which the people of God are led."⁸

The Shakers, however, did not simply borrow the World's music. They instead used it freely as a musical language with which to create new melodies. They might convert a ballad melody into one for the dance by stripping off two of its phrases and adding a strain appropriately higher or lower, singing each half of the new tune twice. Or they might combine the high section of one familiar dance tune with the low part of another, or elaborate a new melody from the opening phrase of an old one.

Shaker musical creativity was encouraged by a second important Shaker aesthetic principle, namely, that only those songs were recommendable that bore the "feeling" of being "given or matured under a heavenly sensation or spiritual impulse"—in other words, ones "received by divine inspiration."⁹ We have many accounts of how the inspired received their songs. "I have listened for hours," wrote one sister, "to delightful music, which seemed to flood the air high above my head. And tho' it seemed to be human voices, it sounded like chimes of bells, of different sizes & tones, but in perfect harmony." At other times, she said, "I heard no audible voice, but felt my soul filled with music which flowed forth in songs," sitting at twilight singing "one new song after another till they seemingly numbered hundreds, all joined together like links in a chain."¹⁰ Other Shakers received songs from heavenly spirits while having dreams and visions or sang them in possession states as instruments of these spirits.

As a corollary of their openness to inspiration, the Shakers declined even to be bound to any one set of songs or mode of worship. "No gift or order of God," they held, "can be binding on Believers for a longer term of time than it can be profitable to their travel in the gospel."¹¹ As a consequence, new songs kept crowding old ones from the repertory, and as the decades passed, song type succeeded song type in popularity. In the earliest years their congregational music was the "solemn song," generally a ballad tune sung with vocables instead of words. About 1805 these were displaced by long doctrinal hymns, and these in turn gave way about 1820 to shorter hymns of sentiment, both sets of hymns being sung to melodies taken from balladry. Dance, which began as a spontaneous expression of emotional transport, was regularized in the 1780s, and in the eighteenth century the Shakers practiced at least seven different forms, each with its own set of tunes. Two, the "regular step" and the "holy order" dances, continued popular until the Civil War years. Meantime, new dances had been introduced, and beginning in the 1820s, some six forms of marching, all with their special songs. The dances had fallen into disuse by the 1880s, but some marches were still practiced in "young people's meetings" as late as the 1930s. During the pauses between the laboring exercises, the Believers began in 1810 to sing short "extra songs" and about the same time accepted the use of long anthems to open a service. Between 1837 and 1850, during a period of intense revivalism called "Mother's Work," there was an astonishing outpouring of "gift songs," often highly irregular in form—songs with rhapsodic melodic structures and texts wholly or partly in unknown tongues or pidgin English.

Beginning about 1870 the repertory of early songs began largely to pass from use. Shakerism was entering a liberal phase, a change expressed musically in a growing acceptance of nontraditional practices. The Believers now purchased pianos and organs, studied harmony, and, taking late nineteenth-century gospel songs and the parlor ballad as their models, created an entirely new repertory of songs, ones they printed in harmonized settings in a dozen hymnals between 1875 and 1908.

These later songs became in many societies the music of the Shaker worship service. Most of the earlier songs would have been lost had Believers not undertaken to write them down. This they facilitated by inventing a simple system of musical notation using the letters of the alphabet as the heads of the notes and dispensing with the notions of fixed pitch and key signatures. Between the years 1820 and 1870 most of the villages had scribes who recorded the new songs in this "letteral notation." Nearly eight hundred of their manuscript songbooks survive. They hold a repertory of between eight and ten thousand different tunes, a body of folk songs far outnumbering all the ballads and even all the other spirituals known to have origiated in America. Yet at their height in the 1840s the Shakers had a membership of only six thousand persons in nineteen villages scattered from Maine across New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York to Ohio and Kentucky.

In the nineteenth century several hundred of the Believers could read the music manuscripts. With the change of taste in the 1870s, however, the younger Shakers began to study conventional musical notation and as a consequence to lose all knowledge of the letteral system. To present-day Shakers the early tune transcriptions are a closed book, but the sisters at Sabbathday Lake recall a good number of the songs. The Maine communities had always been among the smallest, poorest, and most traditional of the Shaker villages. In the 1870s the ministry in Maine even held out for some time against the urging of the other societies that they purchase instruments and music books from the World. "The truth is," wrote one elder there, that instruments "lead to fashionable life. The more musical instruments the less manual labor, more dress, etc., etc. For us in Maine there is no way or hope, only, to work out our salvation."¹²

In Maine many of the early songs are used even yet in services, and when recent members there came among the Believers as children, they heard the older Shakers sing them. The late Sister Elsie McCool learned her repertory at Sabbathday Lake, where she grew up. The late Sisters Ethel Peacock and Della Haskell and Sister R. Mildred Barker were already young women when they came to Sabbathday Lake in 1931 on the closing of the community at Alfred, Maine, and had learned their songs at the latter society. Sisters Marie Burgess and Frances Carr came to Sabbathday Lake in the 1930s and learned from all the older singers there, especially from Sister Mildred. Eldress Harriett Coolbroth at Alfred had been particularly pleased to find Mildred musically gifted and a lover of songs. In the evenings she often invited the child to her room to learn a new one. Sister Mildred taped some 200 early spirituals.

A hundred years have passed, however, since the Shaker folk spiritual began to drop from the active repertory. Present singers therefore cannot offer a sampling of all the song types that once had a place in Shaker worship. No one can sing any of the early wordless dance tunes or solemn songs. Two

or three general favorites, such as "The Rolling Deep" and "I Never Did Believe," originated as early as the 1820s. Sister Mildred sang a number of the "gift songs" of the 1840s, and all the singers know quite a few dating from the 1850s and 1860s. Many of the most beautiful of the early spirituals, however, are preserved only in manuscripts.

Doubtless sheer happenstance played some role in determining which ones would remain in active use, but there are additional reasons. After the uniting of the two Maine societies in 1931, the members tended to sing only the pieces already known to both groups. Sister Mildred's comments show that she also kept some songs like "Mother Has Come with Her Beautiful Song" because they evoke memories of older Shakers whom she loved. The melodies of other songs have intrinsic appeal. Most of all, however, the singers hold to a song because its text moves them. The anthems are usually settings of favorite passages from the Bible. A gift song from "Mother's Work" may still touch the Believer with its words of admonition and comfort from heavenly spirits. But most of the remembered songs are prayers and testimonies, and in present-day worship they are usually sung spontaneously as the spoken testimonies of the various members call them to mind.

"We must remember," wrote Eldress Marguerite Frost of Canterbury, "that these were not just songs, but deep feelings from the soul."¹³ They speak vows of renewed dedication. They voice thankfulness and joy in the calling. They are prayers for aid in attaining a more careful walk or a deeper spirituality. Especially in the more modern compositions, these sentiments are often expressed in direct wording.

Older songs at their best draw instead upon symbols once common in Shaker thought and discourse, ones taken from the work-a-day activities of a farming community, from folk tradition, or especially from the Bible. Almost always the symbols that already had currency have been redefined to express a distinctively Shaker view. Thus for the Believers the willow does not stand for weeping but for bending to God's will. The dove is not a symbol of the Holy Ghost but an emblem of the humble soul. The valley is neither a place for penitence nor the valley of the shadow of death, but the low vale of humility. Jordan's banks are not stormy but covered with lilies for the faithful, and its waters roll with cleansing, not mortal, tides. Many of the songs are filled with metaphors for the activity of soul that is the goal of Shaker worship. They call the Believer to rouse from "death," "bondage," or a "scattered sense" and to "wake up" and "shake out all the starch and stiffening." "I feel the need of a deeper baptism," says one thoroughly characteristic song, "into the work of the Lord, The Holy Ghost and fire from heaven, the sharp and quickening word!"

The importance of song to the Shakers grew directly from its relation to this quickened life. In worship the songs helped to lift the Believer from dull spirits into "life and power." They could even be the means by which the seeker passed from the World into the Faith. One early convert said, for example, that when he went to scout out the English Shakers near Albany, he was not affected by the preaching of the elders, though they bore "a faithful and sound testimony against all sin of every name and nature." But when Mother Ann Lee and "her little family" sat down that afternoon and sang in "a solemn and heavenly manner," he said, "I felt as tho I had got among the heavenly hosts, and had no right there; for I had neither part nor lot in it. I cried aloud, in distress of soul; for I believed it to be the worship of the living God, such as my ears had never heard, nor my soul ever felt before."¹⁴ Once quickened, the Believer found his own creative powers and contributed to this tradition of Pentecostal folk song. "And what makes it more striking," wrote one Shaker in 1820, "it is those who had never learned to sing at all—they could scarcely follow after those who were singers. Now they will sing as beautiful as I ever heard anyone; yea beautiful Anthems & Songs, all given when they are under the beautiful operations of the power of God."¹⁵

ENDNOTES

1. For permission to quote from unpublished manuscripts I wish to thank the following institutions: The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum (hereafter cited its DWt), the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress (WLC), the Shaker Museum of Old Chatham, New York (NYOC), the United Society of Shakers, Sabbathday Lake, Maine (MeSL), and the Western Reserve Historical Society Library (OCWR). Where possible I cite the library's identification number for the item. DWt, SA799.1, pp. 119–120.

2. A Summary View of the Millennial Church (Albany, 1823), p. 92.

3. OCWR, SM506, p. [18], and WLC, No. 241, pp. 8–9.

4. "Nourse-Chapline Letters," Kentucky Historical Society Register 31 (1933), p. 167.

5. NYOC, Ac. 12.051, vol. 1, p. 19.

6. OCWR, Letter, Lebanon, N.Y., Aug. 6, 1830, Isaac N. Youngs to Andrew, p. [2].

7. OCWR, Letter, Enfield, N.H., June 8, 1854, Ministry to Beloved Ministry, p. [2].

8. Benjamin S. Youngs, Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing, 4th ed. (Albany, 1856), p. 588.

9. OCWR, Letter, Lebanon, N.Y., Aug. 6. 1830, Isaac N. Youngs to Andrew, p. [2].

10. OCWR, Alonzo G. Hollister, "Book of Lovely Vineyard," p. 56.

11. Millennial Praises (Hancock, 1813), p. iv.

12. MeSL, Letter Book, May 1872-Jan. 1883, p. 65.

13. Letter to author, May 25, 1965, p. 3.

14. Testimonies Concerning the Character and Ministry of Mother Ann Lee (Albany, 1827), p. 127.

15. OCWR, Letter, Pleasant Hill, Ky., April 1, 1820, Samuel Turner to Br. Calvin.

EARLY SHAKER SPIRITUALS

ENDNOTES

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