Joseph Funk

FUNK, Joseph. b. Berks County Pennsylvania, 6 April 1778; d. Singers Glen Virginia, 24 Dec 1862. Joseph Funk was the Mennonite patriarch of a family that included musicians, music teachers, poets, composers, and publishers who were active in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley from at least 1816 until the 1940s. An active and influential singing teacher, tunebook compiler, and publisher, he is best known historically for publishing four-shape- and, later, seven-shape-notation tunebooks for the area’s German- and English-speaking populations and producing what has become the oldest continually published tunebook in America, Harmonia Sacra.  He also published one of the American South’s first...