Filling my cup: Belonging to a community
Filling my cup: Belonging to a community
by Jen Davies, nerd
Aug 26, 2026
I lost my grandmother last week, and if I could say the timing was lucky it's because just a few days later it was time for the Central Ontario (ie, Toronto) Annual Sacred Harp Convention. It's 4-part acapalla music with a tradition of travelling to sing in each other's communities, which emerged in the US in the 1800s as both entertainment and worship. It can now be found all over the world.
Like a lot of people, I stumbled on it through the film Cold Mountain. It was not a great movie, but the scene in the church where people are singing in harmony and waving their arms to keep the rhythm with each other... I was entranced. I learned it was called shape note singing, the most popular book is called the Sacred Harp (ie, your voice). We found a group in Toronto and showed up at their next "singing" (a noun). Someone pushed loaner Sacred Harp books into our hands, directed us to sit beside someone in our sections and they would help us, and the group sang at the tops of their lungs for two hours. At the end we didn't understand exactly what happened, but we liked it and couldn't wait to do it again.
Almost 10 years later, we appreciate the people we have met and the community and its both written and unwritten rules about how to make broad belonging work. People with wide ranging social and political beliefs are able, through the shape note singing community, to come from all over the place, be friendly with each other, and have shared emotional experiences through the music.
The Sacred Harp is the main book we sing from, and the songs are generally themed around love and death (I'd say Christian themed but it's hard to generalize that these days - and although the words tend to be religious, there's no implied faith required to enjoy the music or the meaning). That was a great part of what I needed, to express words talking about love and dying.
The other thing I really needed was community. Over 10 years even if you only see someone once a month, or twice a year, you still get to know them. And singing beautiful songs at the top of your lungs, songs about love and dying and finding a purpose and joy and heartache, it brings us closer. And for me THAT is the spiritual part of singing Sacred Harp and shape note music: being fully present for two days for people who needed my voice, and them to be fully present for me when I needed theirs for the songs I wanted to hear.
Learn more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8356KlQmUmk. (I'm grateful to say I know several of the people who are visible in the huge singing in Atlanta, which was the launch of the latest version of the Sacred Harp book.)
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