Final Report, Faculty Research Grant, FY 04 Preserving the Sacred Harp Singing of Southeast Georgia Submitted by Dr. Laurie Sommers, July 6, 2004

This project facilitated field research and archival sound preservation and restoration of southeast Georgia Sacred Harp singing (also known as "Hoboken-style" singing) through two activities:

1) field research and video recording of a singing school by David I. Lee of Hoboken Georgia at the 14th Annual Rocky Mountain Sacred Harp Singing Convention (Sept. 26-28, 2003). At this event, local singing school teacher David Lee gave his "last" out of town singing school, at which he presented the unique singing style in which he was raised to an audience of outsiders. Follow-up interviews also were conducted with convention co-organizer Sharon Sherman and with David Lee.

2) tape transfer to CD by professional sound recording engineer Paul Butterfield of 6 original cassette tapes of early Hoboken-style Sacred Harp singing to 16 archival CDs. This tape transfer is the first step toward a future documentary CD on southeast Georgia Sacred Harp. Duplicate sets of the CD copies were also sent to David I. Lee. This project successfully met all of its objectives and forms a solid base for future research and publication on southeast Georgia Sacred Harp. The field research in Boulder was presented in "Voice, Tradition, and Identity in the Sacred Harp of Southeast Georgia," a paper presented at the 2004 Interdisciplinary Conference, VSU, February 27, 2004.