Item Detail
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Karlsberg, Jeese P.
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Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Emory University
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Sounding spirit digital library
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This Sounding Spirit pilot digital library features songbooks and hymnals published across the southern United States from 1850 to 1925. Spanning holdings from four partner archives, the digital library’s twenty-two books include words-only hymnals, gospel songbooks, spiritual collections, and shape-note tunebooks, demonstrating the wide variety of form, content, and presentation in southern vernacular sacred songbooks. These songbooks employ competing notation systems and vary in musical style from dispersed harmony fuging tunes and plain tunes of the shape-note repertoire, to antiphonal gospel, to classically inspired arrangements of African American spirituals, to words-only hymns in Muskokee sung in unison, to tunes in oral tradition shared among southern black and white congregations. Organized into collections that highlight texts’ associated places, populations, genres, and denominational affiliations, the digital library allows for rich engagement with songbooks and hymnals seminal in their respective eras, but historically underrepresented in both archival holdings and scholarship. These works and collections illustrate the primacy of songbooks to the dynamic encounters among white, black, and native communities navigating modernizing forces across the US South and beyond. In selecting volumes for the pilot site, Sounding Spirit’s music bibliographer Erin Fulton, project director, Jesse P. Karlsberg, and project manager, Meredith Doster, collaborated with content consultants at each partner archive to balance the diversity of this 22-volume corpus with each collection’s strengths. Additional criteria guiding the selection included contemporaneous significance, influence, rarity, and existence of digitized copies or available facsimiles. (from the website)
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Website
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Atlanta, Ga.
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Emory Center for Digital Scholarship
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English
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Internet
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13894