The melody Copland built his most famous variations around began as a quick Shaker dance tune, not a hymn. Joseph Brackett, an elder among the Shakers, wrote Simple Gifts in 1848, the same year he was called from the Shaker community at New Gloucester, Maine to serve in the Ministry at Alfred, where most accounts place the song's composition; other sources instead trace it to New Gloucester itself, since Shakers who had just left that community were already performing the tune publicly before Brackett's own move to Alfred, so the exact address at the moment of writing is not fully settled. New Gloucester's Shaker village, known today as Sabbathday Lake, is the community that survives, much reduced, into the present day. Its lyric states the group's central teaching plainly: to be simple and free is itself a gift, and the moment a person turns and bows in the right place, in Shaker worship a literal, danced turning, they come out right.
The tune stayed almost entirely inside Shaker communities for nearly a century. Copland found it by chance, in a 1940 anthology of Shaker songs edited by Edward Deming Andrews, while searching for American folk material to anchor the ballet Martha Graham had commissioned from him. He built a set of five variations on it into the score's closing minutes, and it is that closing music, more than any other passage, listeners now identify with Appalachian Spring itself. The Shakers themselves, a celibate communal sect that never numbered more than a few thousand members at its nineteenth century peak, had no role in the ballet's composition or choreography; the tune reached Copland only through Andrews' documentary collection, decades after Brackett wrote it for his own community's worship.