The Southern Musical Advocate and Singer’s Friend ledger information

The Southern Musical Advocate and Singer’s Friend, which was renamed The Musical Million in 1870, was a monthly periodical first produced by Joseph Funk and Sons and then by its successor, The Ruebush-Kieffer Company. The journal’s content featured shape-note music, articles related to the importance of music to religion, letters from subscribers to the journal, and advertisements for the company’s other music-related products. These magazines were intended to promote both the Ruebush-Kieffer Company and the advantages of shape-notes over round notes.

Joseph Funk and Sons company recorded vital information about the demographics of who subscribed to the magazine and where they lived in a ledger book. This book shows that print material, such as the Southern Musical Advocate was a vital part in spreading shape notes and religion to a wide scope of people throughout the United States. The subscribers listed in this ledger lived as far west as Missouri and as far north as Michigan in the upper United States. This mailing list contained in the ledger shows how shape-notes spread throughout the United States and not just in the Southern States. It also shows how the subscribers changed over time from 1859-1861 to 1867-1868. Some examples of these changes are, where they were located and the density of subscribers in a particular area at one place compared to another.

The ledger book for The Southern Musical Advocate and Singer’s Friend later called The Musical Million contains the names, dates, places and other information about who subscribed to the musical journal. This periodical was among the first musical magazines published in the southern United States and came out of a small print shop owned by Joseph Funk, a member of the Mennonite church, in a small community in the Shenandoah Valley located about 20 minutes from Harrisonburg in Rockingham County, called Singer’s Glen.

The ledgers are another source which provide primary evidence of small towns which people lived in which may no longer exist. They also show family relationships by listing who in the family was on the subscription list. The ledgers also show westward movement and expansion of the shape-note traditions from the Shenandoah Valley down to the southern states, out to Texas and California and the west coast as well as through the Ohio river valley on the western trail to Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa.

 

From this ledger book there were over 2,000 names of subscribers living in 21 states in a time period ranging from 1859 to 1867. Metadata from this ledger book yields information about the individual subscribers ranging from titles such as Reverend, Professor, Doctor, Captain, colonel, or esquire, and shows a list of the names of both men and women, who subscribed to this shape-note music periodical during this time period.

 

This is a searchable table of all of the names of the people who subscribed to the Southern Musical Advocate and Singers Friend from 1859-1861 and 1865-1867.

 

Pie Charts

The data contained in the spreadsheet is shown through pie charts to show the statistics of some of the information gleaned from the data otherwise hidden in the ledger. 

These percentages on the pie charts represent actual individuals who were members of their communities in each respective locality. There was both a local and a national community which shared the culture and traditions surrounding shape-note music notation, whether the people lived in the Eastern, Northern, Southern or Western states.

These pie charts show a comparison of the number of subscribers to The Southern Musical Advocate and Singers Friend by state and county in 1859.

 

These pie charts show a comparison of the number of subscribers to The Southern Musical Advocate and Singers Friend by state and county in 1867.

 

These pie charts show a comparison of the last names of subscribers to The Southern Musical Advocate and Singers Friend in 1859 and 1867.