Sounding Spirit Hymnody Index: Documenting the Diversity of Southern Sacred Song

FAIN: PW-296882-24

Emory University (Atlanta, GA 30322-1018)
Jesse P. Karlsberg (Project Director: July 2023 to present)

The transcription and indexing of 117,500 hymns published between 1850 and 1889 in and for the southern United States.  

Sounding Spirit Hymnody Index (SSHI) will support rich engagement with 300,000 printings of hymn tunes and texts in 1,311 significant books of vernacular sacred music from the southern United States published between 1850 and 1925. This open access reference resource will index the tunes, texts, and people in a collection of gospel songs, spirituals, folk hymns, art music, and Sunday school songs recently digitized for the Sounding Spirit Digital Library. In this project period we will index the 430 earliest published books from this corpus, publish the SSHI, contribute data to Hymnary.org and RISM, recruit a cohort of volunteer subject matter experts to index alongside an experienced team of editors, and develop an interoperable data model for indexing hymnody. The SSHI will illuminate the experiences of diverse Americans including rural Black, white, and Native southerners, whose wide-ranging hymn singing practices accompanied their navigation of a modernizing nation-state.