Praise on the prairie
The dark poetry of the Missouri Harmony

by Peter Ellertsen

Once of the enduring myths about Abraham Lincoln's youth has him singing with Ann Rutledge out of a shape-note tunebook called the Missouri Harmony. It got into Carl Sandburg's American Songbag, a hugely popular collection of folk songs published in 1927. While Sandburg later backed away from it, it's the one thing people are must likely to know about Missouri Harmony, if they've heard anything at all. Like all good myths, it even has a kernel of truth to it.

"Carl Sandburg," oil on canvas painting by Steve Musgrave, from the City of Chicago public Art Collection. Use granted by permission of the artist.

Shape-note or "patent note" tunebooks featured triangles, ovals, rectangles, and diamonds for different intervals of the old fa-sol-la scale. In the absence of effective copyright protection, the notation was registered with the U.S. Patent Office. Hence the name "patent note."

The tunebooks give us a window on the music, religion and popular amusements of frontier Illinois — which were deeply intertwined.

In its full flowering, Sandburg's myth was: "Young Abraham Lincoln and his sweetheart, Ann Rutledge, sang from this book in the Rutledge tavern in New Salem, according to old settlers there." A poet and singer himself, Sandburg wrote in The Prairie Years of a "dark and moving poetry and music in the Missouri Harmony that "reached out to take the hearts of the pioneers in the log-cabin tavern, singing by candlelight there in New Salem. The old hymns taught, "Man is a pilgrim across scorching sands, longing for a cooling stream; a wandering sheep in a howling wilderness, seeking rivers of salvation and pleasant fields of paradise."

Like all good myths, Sandburg's tale reflects a more complex reality. For one thing, it seems to be based on a Rutledge family story that sheds scant light on Lincoln's relationship with Ann Rutledge. Instead, it tells of singing at family gatherings. Ann's younger sister Nancy Rutledge Prewitt told a reporter some 65 years later, "I can see him now just as he looked sitting by the big old-fashioned fireplace, absorbed in a book or chatting merrily with Annie or one of my brothers." Or singing, loud and off key.

Nancy said when Lincoln sang a song titled "The Legacy" by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, he would "tip back his chair and roar it out at the top of his voice, over and over again, just for fun." Ann's brother Robert tried to explain, saying Lincoln would "excite the most uproarious laughter by...substituting 'Old Gray' for 'Red Grape'. The effect is very ludicrous as any one can see by reference to the lines quoted." Well, if you have to explain a joke, odds are you can't. The lines are, "balmy drops of the red grape borrow / To bathe the relict from morn to night. And whatever the joke was, Nancy didn't appreciate it. Once, she stormed out of the room.

But she cherished the memory. In 1899 she told a newspaper correspondent, "I have the very book that [Lincoln] and Annie used to sing that and many other songs from, together." The reporter added, "and Mrs. Prewitt showed me an old green-backed singing book called the "Missouri Harmony."

"What funny notes!" said the reporter.

"Yes," replied Nancy Prewitt. "They were called patent notes."

Singing, like fiddle playing, runs in families. And the Missouri Harmony was not the only tunebook handed down in the Rutledge family. Another was called the Christian's Harp, and it once belonged to Ann's uncle James Miller of Carmi.

James Miller, who founded the first Cumberland Presbyterian church in Illinois, was a singing master who taught singing schools in what now are White and Wayne counties. The music was usually sacred, but singing schools were an important social outlet in frontier days.

Writing in 1883, a White County

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historian said, "the singing school was an occasion of much jollity, wherein it was difficult for the average singing-master to preserve order, as many went more for fun than for music. Laura Isabell Osburn Nance, who grew up near Petersburg, said young people "usually on horseback in small groups, loosened up their vocal chords with a little harmonizing as they rode along the country lanes to a home or schoolhouse or church where they spent the evening singing, for the most part, sacred songs." On the south fork of the Sangamon River, old settler M.C. Wadsworth said the Missouri Harmony was used at singing schools, and when "the young folk flocked in for miles around, crowding the houses where they were held, old 'Consolation,' 'Ninety-Fifth,' 'Jefferson,' and 'Russia' would waken the echoes."

Musically, most shape-note songs were texts by 18th century English divines like Isaac Watts set to melodies in the idiom of ballads, jigs, and dance tunes in the Anglo-Celtic oral tradition. Moore's "Legacy" is one of the few secular art songs in the shape-note repertory, but even it is related to a jig called "St. Patrick's Day in the Morning." Of the songs Wadsworth wakened the echoes with, "Consolation" is a modal folk hymn and "Jefferson" is a lively psalm in 2/4 time, while "Ninety-Fifth" and "Russia" are "fuguing tunes" in four-part harmony with catchy melodies in each of the parts. All are, quite simply, a lot of fun to sing.

We have little reliable evidence that the Missouri Harmony was used much in public worship. Mostly, people knew the melodies and preferred their preachers to "line out" the words, the congregation joining in line by line. But we know many homes had the Missouri Harmony or another shape-note tunebook on hand.

The same White County historian who described the "jollity" of singing schools also spoke of private devotions at which fathers would "read a chapter in the Bible, announce the hymn and tune by commencing to sing it, when all would join; then he would deliver a most fervent prayer." The historian recalled the "familiar tunes of that day...as being more spiritual and inspiring than those of the present day" and named no less than 38 from the Missouri Harmony. The noisy fun at singing school, the gathering of family and friends, the spiritual devotion and the dark poetry of the music were all inextricably intertwined.

Peter Ellertsen teaches English at Springfield College in Illinois. He speaks on 19th-century Illinois music for the Road Scholars program of the Illinois Humanities Council, plays Appalachian dulcimer and sings tenor with the New Salem Shape Note Singers. For more information see his website "Singing the Sacred Harp in Downstate Illinois" at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/downstateharp.html.

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