Okefenokee musical traditions

Article from the New Georgia Encyclopedia describing musical traditions in the Okefenokee swamp area:

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-550

Here's an excerpt:

Sacred Harp sings date back to at least the 1860s in the Okefenokee. The "shape-note" singing tradition in Georgia began during the antebellum period as a way to teach congregations to sing. Traveling teachers used "four-shape" tune books with religious lyrics in which different-shaped note heads were assigned to the European musical scale of fa, sol, la, and mi.

Within southeast Georgia, conservative Primitive Baptist beliefs combined with the relative cultural isolation of the Okefenokee to foster a distinctive stylistic variant of Sacred Harp. Characteristics included walking time in a counterclockwise fashion according to the meter of the tune, and the same slow tempos and melodic ornamentation found in the Primitive Baptist meetinghouse. Primitive Baptist churches, with their unaccompanied, lined hymn traditions, exist in much smaller numbers today, but they have been a major force influencing local culture. The simple wooden meetinghouses of the Crawfordite subsect of Primitive Baptists are a distinctive feature of Okefenokee traditional architecture. Missionary Baptist, Pentecostal, and Methodist churches now dominate the region, however, and tent meetings, revivals, and gospel sings have superseded the Sacred Harp tradition.

Collector Francis Harper documented swamper secular music such as locally composed songs and variants of "Barbara Allen," "The Little Mohee" (or "Lassie Mohee"), and other widely disseminated ballads, a few of which are still sung. Harper also documented hollering or yodeling, a distinctive alternation of head and chest tones sometimes interspersed with song fragments, which was used to call hogs and cattle, to signal that an individual was returning home, or simply to have fun. This tradition is no longer widespread, although a few families maintain the practice. Country western and bluegrass bands have largely replaced old-time frolics and square dances.

-- Laurie Kay Sommers, Valdosta State University