William Walker (May 6, 1809 – September 24, 1875)

AKA Singing Billy Walker

William Walker is best remembered for the shaped note songbooks he compiled and published.

Walker grew up near Spartanburg, South Carolina during the early 19th century. Attending singing schools and leading music in Baptist churches from an early age, he wrote his first song at the age of 18. Walker and Benjamin Franklin White (who published the popular 19th century shaped-note songbook The Sacred Harp) were married to sisters.

In 1935, Walker published a songbook titled Southern Harmony, And Musical Companion featuring 335 songs. This book employed a four-shape/four-syllable system of notation: triangle=fa, circle=sol, square=la, diamond=mi. The syllables fa, sol, and la and their corresponding shapes were used twice to complete the seven-note scale.

The most enduring song from Southern Harmony is "Amazing Grace." Both the lyric (originally known as "Faith's Review And Expectation") written by John Newton in 1779 and the American folk tune now commonly known as "New Britain" had been published previously, but Southern Harmony was the first songbook that combined the two. Southern Harmony was expanded/revised in future editions published in 1840, 1847, and 1854. It should be noted that while Walker's name appears as a composer on many tunes in Southern Harmony, he admitted that in many cases the credit should only apply to his work adding harmony notes to an existing melody.

Walker published a shaped-note songbook titled The Christian Harmony a year or so after the end of the Civil War in either 1866 or 1867. Most of the songs found in the 1854 edition of Southern Harmony are also included in The Christian Harmony. A key difference is The Christian Harmony adopts a seven-shape system of notation to more clearly indicate the corresponding scale steps for each syllable. More than one system of seven shapes were developed around this time. Some of the subsequent editions of The Christian Harmony ultimately adopted Jesse Aikin's competing seven-shape system after it became the de facto standard used by most major publishers of songbooks.

For many years, a "Carolina edition" of The Christian Harmony differed significantly from an "Alabama edition." The Carolina edition was essentially a reprint of Walker's 1873 edition, while the Alabama edition published in 1958 removed 179 songs and added new titles. A 2010 "combined" edition includes all the songs from both the Carolina and Alabama editions and adds a few more for good measure, bringing the total to 672 songs.

The 1952 folk opera Singin' Billy is based on Walker's life and includes five hymns from his songbook Southern Harmony.