Benton: Where Shape-Note Singers Have Gathered Since 1884

Benton was founded in eighteen forty-two as the seat of Marshall County and named for Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. But the town's most enduring claim is musical. Every fourth Sunday in May since eighteen eighty-four, singers have gathered in the Marshall County courthouse to sing from an eighteen fifty-four book called The Southern Harmony, using the old shape-note, or fasola, method of reading music.

The event is called Big Singing Day and is billed as the oldest continuous Southern Harmony singing in the country. The tradition arrived when a family from North Carolina brought the book west, and it has never stopped. No amplification, no ticketing, just hundreds of voices filling a courthouse with centuries-old hymns in a county-seat town on the edge of Kentucky Lake.