The best known shape note tradition, Sacred Harp singing, takes its name from The Sacred Harp, a widely used tunebook first published in 1844 and repeatedly revised since, whose collected hymns, fuging tunes and anthems remain the core repertoire sung at Sacred Harp singings held today, gatherings organized around communal, all-day group singing from the book rather than rehearsal for any public performance.
The tradition developed in the rural American South, particularly across Georgia, Alabama and neighboring states, from earlier New England singing school traditions that had introduced shape note notation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries specifically to improve congregational singing ability, and it survived as a genuinely continuous living folk practice in parts of the rural South even as shape note singing declined or disappeared in most of the rest of the country during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the later twentieth century onward, Sacred Harp singing experienced a substantial revival and geographic spread well beyond its Southern heartland, with new singing groups forming across the United States and internationally, drawn both by descendants of the original tradition and by newcomers attracted to its distinctive sound and strongly participatory, non-performance-oriented communal structure, so the practice today spans both its original rural Southern communities and a considerably wider, more geographically dispersed community of practitioners.