'I Belong to This Band' follows the practice of shape-note singing from 1922 through to the present, offering 30 distinct cuts, spanning a mess of geographies, years, and intentions. Shape-note singing, a church-based southern song system based in four notes (sung as fa, sol, la, and mi), was initially designed as an all-inclusive, participatory choral tradition - it's not necessary to know how to read music to sing shape notes, most songs are transposed a cappella, and each piece is specifically engineered for swarms of singers, meaning the whole always trumps the parts. Although there are several shape note songbooks, The Sacred Harp is the most celebrated collection (published in 1844, by Benjamin Franklin Wright and Elisha J. King, it contains over 250 songs), and somewhere along the way, it became the movement's lone manifesto and remains tucked under the pillows of dedicated shape-note singers everywhere - appropriately, each track included here was born from The Sacred Harp.