Morning Star Methodist Church, Canton, NC

Since 1889, the Morning Star United Methodist Church southeast of Canton has hosted a gathering known as Old Folks Day. Thanks largely to the encouragement of North Carolina Folk Heritage Award recipient [a12032911], Old Folks Day became a favorite gathering of shape-note singers. Smathers, who is now deceased, had learned shape-note singing as a small child from family and community members in Haywood County, and from traveling singing masters who would visit churches for several days at a time, instructing the congregations in the singing of shaped notes. The shape-note system, which was popular in congregations throughout the South in the nineteenth century—and to a declining, though still significant, degree in the twentieth century—was devised to simplify the learning of written music. The Old Folks Day singers sing from The Carolina Book, a revised version of the 1866 Christian Harmony, written by upcountry South Carolinian William Walker. Members of the Smathers family are still active participants in the Old Folks Day singings.