A Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony, Ananias Davisson, Third Edition 1825

Welcome to my web site which contains links to all the music from A Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony, a shape-note tune book of the Nineteenth Century. This book contains music mostly in the idiom of the most widely used contemporary four-shape tune book, "The Sacred Harp", a book which appears in three different editions, or in any of several other in print four or seven-shape books containing similar music. Here is Davisson's own title page: [Title Page]

The book was copied by Hans Bayer and I then aquired photocopies of the entire book from Hans' father, the most thoughtful John Bayer, and now all the music pages are available on this site. Please feel free to offer criticisms and suggestions for improvement. You can contact me at Berkley Moore. Also you can view the book as one continuous PDF file, thanks to Robert Stoddard, at his website Supplement to Kentucky Harmony

Mr. Stoddard has also reset a number of the files in a more legible a PDF format that corrects errors in Davission's original printed versions, that uses modern American English spelling, and that in some cases employs the more common variant of the poetry (lyrics). Where these files are available I have substituted them for the original JPG facsimiles.

Although Davisson taught singing schools as well as singing school teachers in Kentucky, he was actually based in Harrisonburg, VA less than 25 miles Northeast of my father's and grandparents' home in Staunton, and two titles in A Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony are appropriately named "Harrisonburg" and "Staunton".

Davisson, a Presbyterian, utilized almost entirely four-part harmonization in his Kentucky Harmony of 1815, the first truly Southern shape-note book. Indeed, many of today's shape-note scholars consider Davisson's alto parts to be just about the finest ever written in the shape-note tradition. In 1820, however, Davisson brought out the first edition of A Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony, which was specifically designed to serve his "Methodist friends [with] suitable and proper" songs. Unlike Davisson's earlier book, A Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony contains a sampling of revival hymns; also, more than one third of his tunes are printed in three parts only, i.e., there is no part for the altos to sing. This can be considered fortunate if one prefers three-part songs, but in view of Davisson's skifull alto part writing, unfortunate if one prefers them to contain four parts.

In the following Table of Contents, unless stated otherwise, comparison tunes are from "The Sacred Harp", missing or incorrect composer attributions are provided in parentheses, and. reference to other commonly used tune names refer to those in various Nineteenth Century tune books. An asterisk* indicates that a title is NOT the title having exactly the same name in The Sacred Harp 1991.

Davisson's Indices: first page [One], second page [Two].