Hoboken Style: Meaning and Change in Okefenokee Sacred Harp Singing

• Main Author: Laurie Kay Sommers
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Emory Center for Digital Scholarship 2010-08-01
• Series: Southern Spaces
• Subjects: Music; Regional Studies; Religion and Spirituality
• Online Access: https://southernspaces.org/node/42823

Karl Musser, Map of Okefenokee Swamp, 2007. This essay explores "Hoboken-style" Sacred Harp singing of the Okefenokee region of southeast Georgia and northeast Florida. It considers the history of this tradition, distinctive characteristics of this variant of Sacred Harp, and how "Hoboken-style" leaders have negotiated rapid change while maintaining core values of memory, legacy, and spiritual meaning. Sacred Harp singing in the Okefenokee dates to the mid-1800s, but, remarkably, local singers rarely sang with outsiders until the 1990s. Two important sound recordings from Florida Folk Festivals (1958 and 2000) serve as sonic benchmarks and as points of analytic departure for understanding the recent hybridization of Hoboken-style singing.