The Gift to Be Simple: Songs, Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers

Edward Deming Andrews's The Gift to Be Simple, Songs, Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers, published by J. J. Augustin in 1940, is the standard early collection of Shaker devotional songs and dance forms, gathered by Andrews directly from surviving Shaker manuscripts and from interviews with then-living members of the community. Its strength is that it captured this material while Shaker communities and their oral memory of these practices still existed in meaningful numbers, work that could not be repeated once that direct line of transmission ended. Its limit is that Andrews's own transcriptions and interpretive framing, however carefully done, reflect one outside collector's period assumptions about what deserved recording, so a claim about the full range of Shaker devotional practice should be checked against later Shaker studies that have reexamined Andrews's own source material.