The Christian harmony

In 1866 William Walker switched from the four-note system that had enjoyed such success in the Southern Harmony to publish the Christian Harmony in seven shapes. Books used at Christian Harmony singings in the early 1950s were from the 1901 printing of the 1873 edition; they were scarce and most were in poor condition. John Deason and O. A. Parris of Alabama began work on a revision, deleting some of the songs sung less often and adding new music along with popular music of that time. They used Jesse Aikin's rather than Walker's shape notes for this revision. The Deason-Parris revision arrived in 1958 and was adopted by the Alabama State Convention and by the Newton County Convention in Mississippi. It gained wide acceptance in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and other states. It was reprinted, with minor changes, in 1994 and 2002. The Deason-Parris revision was also widely used in western North Carolina. When a facsimile copy of Walker's 1873 book became available in 1979, singers there often carried both books to singings. Additional copies of Walker's 1873 book were printed in 1994, with four songs from the Deason-Parris revision, in Aikin shapes, included at the end. With the increased availability of Walker's book, a few North Carolina singings came to rely exclusively on the 1873 Walker book, although at most singings in North and South Carolina today both books are present. The Deason-Parris revision has come to be known informally as the "Alabama book" while the 1873 edition is called the "Carolina book." The idea of merging the Deason-Parris revision with the 1873 book was discussed for several years. When the decision was made to move forward, a group organized into a committee and asked others to serve as advisors. About half of the committee and advisors discovered the Christian Harmony as adults, and about half have been singing from it since childhood. A few have been singing from the Christian Harmony well before the appearance of the Deason-Parris revision. This diverse group decided to include all of the roughly 200 songs dropped in 1958 from Walker's 1873 book, and made decisions about which harmony to use for songs common to both books, if there were differences. In this resulting revision we have presented the songs from the 2002 printing of the Deason-Parris revision mostly in their original order, and the remaining songs from the 1873 addition follow. - Preface / John Hollingsworth and Billy Hollingsworth.