The Southern Harmony is a shape note hymn and tune book compiled by William Walker (1809 – 1875) was a Baptist song leader, shape note singing master, and compiler of three shape note tunebooks.

In 1835, Walker published a tunebook entitled The Southern Harmony, using the four-shape shape note system of notation. In 1846 he came out with The Southern and Western Pocket Harmonist, intended as an appendix to the Southern Harmony. In 1866, he published another tunebook entitled Christian Harmony, in which he changed from a four shape to seven shape system of notation. He incorporated over half of the contents of The Southern Harmony in the Christian Harmony. For the additional three shapes, Walker devised his own system - an inverted key-stone for do, a quarter-moon for re, and an isosceles triangle for si (or ti). Editions of the Christian Harmony are still available printed with Walker's system, as well as in the more common shapes patented by Jesse B. Aiken.

The Shakers originated in Manchester, England in 1747 in the home of Jane and James Wardley. They developed from the religious group called the Quakers which developed in the 17th century. Both groups believed that everybody could find God within him or herself, rather than through clergy or rituals, but the Shakers tended to be more emotional and participatory in their worship. Shakers also believed that their lives should be dedicated to pursuing perfection and continuously confessing their sins and work to stop sinning.

The name "Shakers," originally pejorative, was derived from the term Shaking Quakers and was applied as a mocking description of their rituals of trembling, shouting, dancing, shaking, singing, and glossolalia (speaking in tongues or foreign languages).  In 1774 Ann Lee pulled together nine of her followers from an English sect known as the Wardleys, founded by Jane and James Wardley, which she joined in 1758. They arrived on August 6, 1774 in New York City, and in 1776 the Shakers settled in Niskayuna, New York, where a unique communal life began to develop and thrive. Lee taught her followers that it is possible to attain perfect holiness.  Like her predecessors the Wardleys, she taught that the demonstrations of shaking and trembling were caused by sin being purged from the body by the power of the Holy Spirit, purifying the worshipper. Distinctively the followers of Mother Ann came to believe that she embodied all the perfections of God in female form.

The Shakers considered music to be an essential component of their religious experience. The Shakers composed thousands of songs, and dances; both were an important part of Shaker worship services. In Shaker society, a spiritual gift could also be a musical revelation, and they considered it to be important to record musical inspirations as they occurred. Scribes, many of whom had no formal musical training, used a form of music notation for this purpose: it used letters of the alphabet, often not positioned on a staff, along with a simple notation using conventional rhythmic values. This method is similar to ancient Greek music notation.

Sacred Harp singing came to be with the 1844 publication of Benjamin Franklin White and Elisha J. King’s The Sacred Harp. It was this book, now distributed in several different versions that came to be the most widely used shape note system.

B. F. White (1800-1879) was originally from Union County, South Carolina, but since 1842 had been living in Harris County, Georgia. He prepared The Sacred Harp in collaboration with a younger man, E. J. King, (ca. 1821–44), who was from Talbot County, Georgia. Together they compiled, transcribed, composed tunes, and published a book with over 250 songs.

King died soon after the book was published, and White was left to guide its further development.  He was responsible for the organization of singing schools and many conventions at which The Sacred Harp songbook was used. During his lifetime, the book became popular and would go through three revisions (1850, 1859, and 1869), all produced by committees consisting of White and several colleagues working under the auspices of the Southern Musical Convention.  The first two new revisions simply added appendices of new songs to the back of the book. In 1869 the revisions were more extensive, removing some of the less popular songs and adding new ones in their place. From the original 262 pages, the book was expanded by 1869 to 477. This edition was reprinted and continued to be used for several decades.

In America the Puritans used Psalters that they brought with them from Europe until the Bay Psalm Book (1640) was published.  The Bay Psalm Book is the earliest known American hymnal.  It was published in Cambridge, Massachusetts. William Billings wrote the first American hymns as distinguished from paraphrases of psalms and psalm tunes; another important composer during this period was Lowell Mason, whose song collections, such as Spiritual Songs (1831), compiled jointly with Thomas Hastings, attained wide distribution.

In the latter half of the 19th century the gospel hymn was developed. It is marked by lively rhythm, constant alternation of the simplest harmonies, and sentimental text. Arthur Sullivan's Onward Christian Soldiers (1871) is a well-known example of the martial hymn of the period. In the 20th century radical variations in church music have emerged: folk-song and jazz elements have been integrated with older music and frequently replaced it. Troubadour-style protest songs with theological content were common in the 1960s alongside a newly vital, more conservative hymnody.

The few early references to spiritual-like songs sung by black slaves date from about 1819. Black and white spirituals share many tunes and texts; blacks and whites mingled at camp meetings, and their musical influences were probably explored. Both traditions use pentatonic tunes, extensive melodic ornamentation, and lining out resembles the call-and-response (solo-chorus alternation) pattern of African music. Black spirituals also show significant melodic and rhythmic relationships with the songs of West African. They are also linked with the Ring Shout, an ecstatic dance of African origin. Black spirituals were sung with an African vocal quality and to African polyrhythmic accompaniment of finger-snapping, clapping, and stamping. It wasn’t until after the American Civil War they were sung without harmony. Examples include Deep River and Roll, Jordan, Roll. Black spirituals were often used as work songs and sometimes contained coded information as a form of secret communication. In the late 1800s both black and white spirituals largely were replaced in many churches by gospel songs, though they remained popular in concert halls.