About the On-line Southern Harmony
"William Walker's The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion is
a remarkable book by virtually any measure. During the nineteenth
century, when advertising was mainly by word of mouth . . .
Southern Harmony sold about six hundred thousand copies. It is
perhaps the most popular tunebook ever printed. Its longevity is also
remarkable: it is still being used and sung from with loving care over
one hundred and fifty years after its first edition. It is virtually
unparalleled as a repository of the musical idioms current in the
early nineteenth century, as well as of earlier idioms that were
already becoming rare at the time of its publication. And it is one of
the prime resources for succeeding generations of tunebooks. . . .
this must be considered a publication of remarkable import."
-- From the introduction to the University Press of Kentucky
edition
This edition is based on an Informix database and LiveWire programs
running in conjunction with a Netscape Enterprise server. The hymns
and bibliographic information reside in the database and the pages are
generated on demand. The pages generated by the database program (except
for search results) were then all copied to disk using a Perl program.
All of the midi files, hymn texts, and page scans are in the public
domain and may be used for any purpose.
Hints
- The high-resolution (printable)
gif images of page scans print quite nicely and may be printed
and duplicated for singing. Set your page layout to landscape and
print the wide gifs for better results.
- The gif images don't print well in Netscape Navigator 4 for the
Macintosh, and perhaps for other platforms, however.
It appears that to save memory, Netscape has thrown away the higher
resolution of the image. Internet Explorer handles the images
correctly; or, you might be able to download the GIF image directly,
load it into a program such as Photoshop to set the resolution to 300
dpi, and print.
- Configure a helper application to play the midi files. That way,
clicking a "midi" link won't open a new netscape window.
Credits
Peter Irvine, ObJN has recorded the midi files. See his web site.
Vic Johanson typed in the texts.
Guy-Paul Bédard is creating PDF sheet music.
Harry Plantinga set up the database and programs and scanned page
images.