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by Secretary Michael (Author)
The 36 Jo Puma songs in this book are note-for-note the exact same music as 36 of the famous Sacred Harp songs that the American settlers used to sing. But the Jo Puma songs no longer have the barriers that have kept the old songs out of our schools and lives for so long. They now have egalitarian, secular lyrics. They now have more legible shape-notes. And they now have solfege names (Jo, Pu, Ma, Bee) that don't create confusion with conventional solfege names. These changes allow our public schools and colleges to now include this important 4-part choral music in their programs. These multi-part songs are short and rather easy to sing. To an outside listener they might sound like loud, complicated machines. But the songs aren't sung for the pleasure of outside listeners - they're sung for the pleasure of the singers. Centuries ago church members would gather together, divide into 4 groups that faced each other, and sing these songs with full-throated abandon just for the fun of it. It was a social event - something like square dancing for the voice. These songs violate the rules of harmony left and right with their parallel fifths and octaves, their incomplete and second-inversion triads, their open fourths and fifths, and their pentatonic melodies down in the tenor voice. So the songs might sound raw and unpolished to our modern ears. But that makes them all the more fun to sing! So if you want a very different experience, learn this music and teach it to your family and friends. It may seem strange at first, but it's doable. People have been doing it for centuries!
