The Shenandoah Harmony

The Shenandoah Harmony
7.5×10″, 480 pages
isbn: 978-0-615-74366-0

The Shenandoah Harmony is a new shape-note songbook with a concentration on Shenandoah Valley music of the early nineteenth century.  At 469 songs on 480 pages, The Shenandoah Harmony  is the largest new book of its kind published in more than 150 years. Its coauthors, John del Re, Kelly Macklin, and their daughter Leyland del Re; Nora Miller; Daniel Hunter; Rachel Hall; and Myles Louis Dakan are residents of the Mid-Atlantic states.

The original inspiration for The Shenandoah Harmony  was to create a tunebook that included the best of the shape-note songs collected, printed, and published by Ananias Davisson from 1816 to 1826 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Davisson’s works, Kentucky Harmony  and A Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony, combine European congregational hymns and New England singing-school repertoire with the frontier sound of arranged folk hymns and camp meeting songs. They had a profound influence on later tunebooks, including the popular shape-note book The Sacred Harp, which has been in continuous publication since 1844.