Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp, Co-directors Matt Hinton & Erica Hinton

Erica and Matt Hinton's are the filmmaking team behind this endlessly fascinating documentary Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp. It is the first feature documentary to explore the history, music, and traditions of Sacred Harp singing, the oldest distinctively American form of music. This haunting music has survived over 200 years tucked away from sight in the rural deep South and occurs mostly at community singing events, which typically include anywhere from a dozen to a couple of hundred singers. The events, called “singings," emphasize participation over consumption since they are not generally performed for an audience. Sacred Harp singers begin each song by intoning syllables which are represented by specific “shapenotes” in their hymnal. To the casual observer, it is some foreign, unintelligible language, but to the Sacred Harp singers, it is the key that unlocks mysteries: songs of both beauty and sorrow, of life and of death, songs that cause feet to stomp and tears to flow, often at the same time.

What is Sacred Harp Singing? Sacred Harp singing is a form of a cappella shape-note hymn singing that preserves some of the earliest distinctively American music. Sacred Harp has persisted for almost two centuries in the Deep South, particularly in the context of community singing events that emphasize participation over consumption, as it is not generally performed for an audience. The tradition uses shape notes, in which triangle, circle, square, and diamond shapenote heads are paired with the syllables fa, sol, la, and mi to represent the notes in the scale. Sacred Harp is one of the open secrets of American music.

A New Revision - Awake, My Soul originally aired nationwide on PBS in 2008 and was been featured in TIME, Paste Magazine, NY Times, Pitchfork, SPIN and on NPR. Awake, My Soul, the 2025 Revision, is the result of the long-term desire to make the film available again for a new generation. “The original film was released at precisely the best time and worst time," according to co-director/ editor, Matt Hinton. “It was the best time because there was still a strong monoculture: if a film aired on PBS, lots of people saw it. It was also a period of physical media, so we sold tons of DVDs. But on the other hand, it was the worst time to have made a film– from the time we began production to the end of post-production, the culture was moving from standard definition to high definition, so within a year of its release, very many people owned high definition TVs. Nothing makes a standard definition film look standard like high definition.