Eighty-year-old Sarah Beasley of Bessemer hasn’t missed a single National Sacred Harp Singing Convention since they started in 1980.

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“The singing is carrying on a tradition of my parents,” she says. “I like a cappella singing and to hear people’s voices and for them to express their feelings, their joys and their sorrows in music.”

This year’s convention is at First Christian Church on Valleydale Road, as it has been for the past few years. The convention, which began Thursday and runs through Saturday, is being held for the 36th year in the Birmingham area. People of all religious denominations from across the United States and some from Canada – teenagers to the retired – come to sing, while some just want to listen.

All songs come from B.F. White’s 1844 oblong book “The Sacred Harp,” which was updated in 1991 to include songs from living composers. The musical notes are called shape notes, where the shape of the note head indicates the syllables: Fa is a triangle, sol is a circle, la is a square and mi is a diamond.

The terms fasola and shape-note singing are also used to describe sacred harp singing. The singers are arranged in a hollow square with all singers facing inward toward the center of the square for maximum volume toward the middle. Sacred harp singing is participatory and not performed. Songs are usually sung first with just the notes and then with the words.

Mark Davis is the chairman of the National Sacred Harp Singing Convention. He says that the term sacred harp is given to the human voice, and that’s where the title to the song book came from.

“I have two great-grandfathers that sang this music years ago, so I’m helping carrying on a tradition and also it’s a part of my faith,” he says. “Upon listening to this music, especially for the first time, it gets hold of a lot of people. It becomes part of you.”