The crowded room echoes with lilting voices raised in a simple, timeless song. There are no instruments, no audience. Just a chorus of four-part harmonies sung from a book that's as thick as a Bible.

NPR's Scott Simon speaks with Laura Atkinson and Justin Hicks of Louisville Public Media about shape note singing and its influence across the American musical tradition.

PITTSBURGH – Alexa Kay is a Quaker, a denomination which has embraced simplicity and shunned more extravagant forms of worship, even singing. Nevertheless, Kay likes to sing, and that’s what led her ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Dec. 24—As haunting harmonies drifted through the rafters of the third-floor attic chapel, echoes of the past rose and fell with ...

Add doses of culture, conviction and tradition, all of which materialize as the Old Fields Singers’ All Day Singing on Nov. 5 at St. Paul’s A.M.E. Zion Church in Johnson City, Tennessee. Everyone is ...

Shape note singing is one of the oldest musical traditions in this country. It’s a practice that began in colonial America, and after centuries of ups and downs in ...

MARS HILL - Western Carolina, and Madison County in particular, boasts a historically important and extensive musical background that dates back generations, chronicled in part by Cecil Sharp's 1932 ...