NPR's Scott Simon speaks with Laura Atkinson and Justin Hicks of Louisville Public Media about shape note singing and its influence across the American musical tradition.

DULUTH — Once a month, typically on a Sunday afternoon, the Friends Meeting House is filled with voices singing together. It's not a performance because everyone present is involved in the singing.

PITTSBURGH – Alexa Kay is a Quaker, a denomination which has embraced simplicity and shunned more extravagant forms of worship, even singing. Nevertheless, Kay likes to sing, and that’s what led her ...

Add doses of culture, conviction and tradition, all of which materialize as the Old Fields Singers’ All Day Singing on Nov. 5 at St. Paul’s A.M.E. Zion Church in Johnson City, Tennessee. Everyone is ...

Standing inside the Laurelhurst Club in Southeast Portland, Karen Willard said some of her family members believe she’s in a cult. It’s not hard to see why. She and hundreds of others have arrived to ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Dec. 24—As haunting harmonies drifted through the rafters of the third-floor attic chapel, echoes of the past rose and fell with ...

The Raleigh Shape Note Singers meet every fourth Sunday from 2–4 p.m. at the Friends Meeting House, 625 Tower St. The Durham Shape Note Singers meet every second Sunday from 2–4 p.m. at the First ...

On a quiet Saturday afternoon, eight people gathered in Christ Episcopal Church in Cape Girardeau to practice shape-note singing, a form of traditional music used in Christian worship for more than ...

Isaac Green, 34, flips through his personal copy of "The Sacred Harp," a shape-note hymnal linked to a more than 180-year-old American folk singing tradition, at Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church ...

BREMEN, Ga. — Singers at Holly Springs Primitive Baptist Church in West Georgia treat their red hymnals like extensions of themselves, never straying far from their copies of “The Sacred Harp” and its ...