The War on Shape Notes (documentary)
Will Fitzgerald
We have a problem. Look at these notes. Notice anything strange? What about these? We've got triangles, squares, diamonds, ovals, half circles. What do they mean? Why are they there in the first place? And how do they serve the music? These are shape notes, a near-extinct American notation system once popular with Appalachian liturgical music. In fact, if it wasn't for the concerted efforts of two men who, for whatever reason, really, really hated triangles and squares—backed, by the way, by one of the most powerful music societies and the framers of early American education—there's a good chance that music notation today would look a lot less round and a lot more square.
This is that story. It's a story about shapes—musical, yes—but it's also about the shapes of our ideas and how the actions of a few can ripple through time to affect the many. In a lot of ways, it's a familiar tale: rural versus urban, community versus exhibitionism, the common folk versus the aristocracy, all coming to a boil underneath the war between two diametrically opposed composers and the movements they championed. It's also a story about class division, about musical aesthetics, about parallel fifths, and a rehashing of that old classic debate around what makes music perfect. And it would take the struggle of a Civil War until the dust finally settled on the matter. Welcome to the war on shape notes.
If you know anything about music, it's probably this. This is what we call solfege. But the historically informed among us know that this is a fairly modern representation and that at one time or another, this same solfege looked more or less like this. But if you grew up in the rural borders of a place like Madison County, North Carolina, you might have been taught it like this. The old Fa-Sol-La singers, as they're sometimes referred to, trace their lineage through the Sacred Harp tradition to what musicologist George Pullen Jackson called America's "lost tonal tribe" and the Yankee Tunesmiths.
The shape note is their symbol. Let me show you how it works. It's pretty simple. Fa is the triangle. It appears on one and four. Sol is an oval, two and five. La is a square, three and six. And Mi, our seventh, the leading tone, gets its own little special symbol: the diamond.
Shape notes were most likely invented by a chap called William Little. He was part of the Yankee Tunesmiths, what academics called the First New England School. An interesting name given that most of its composers were self-taught. Among others, the Yankee Tunesmiths included singing blacksmith Lewis Edson, hatmaker Timothy Swan, and America's first choral composer, William Billings, for whom Paul Revere famously made engravings. Regrettably, we know very little about Mr. Little. He likely lived in or around Philadelphia at the turn of the 19th century, but we don't know when or where he was born, how he died, if he was married, if he had kids. We don't even have a portrait of him. Other than being a compiler and presumably a singing master, we don't know his occupation. You see, in that time and in that place, it was very unlikely that someone could sustain themselves with a music career alone. Some things never change, I guess.
We do know this: together with his even less well-known partner, William Smith, the two would scrounge up enough money to publish the world's first oblong-style shaped music book, The Easy Instructor, in 1802. The goal: make reading music as easy as possible. By replacing traditional oval notation with shapes, Little and Smith reasoned that they could teach a novice to sight-read twice as fast using their system. And in a way, if you think about it, it does kind of make a sort of intuitive sense. For example, we all know that if we read about an adorable Australian Shepherd named Jordy and then draw said adorable pup while saying his name aloud—"good boy, Jordy"—we are far more likely to remember his name later than if we just read it and moved on. The more associations and links, the better the information sticks.
Shape notes associate the note of a scale with a syllable and a shape, a triple association. When you experience shape-note singing in action, you'll notice that a lot of the time the lyrics are thrown out entirely to be replaced with the solfege. Ever eavesdrop on an Indian tabla lesson? In exactly the same spot, you'll hear something like rhythmic solfege called bols articulated by a master which is then replicated by the student. Same thing in traditional sitar music with sargam. Each note has a name. So, it's an incredibly useful articulation and learning tool, partly because it's a double association. You learn with your brain, but also with your body. Add shapes to the mix and you'd be unstoppable. At least that was the theory.
Shape-note singing was extremely popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Abraham Lincoln was reportedly a shape-note singer. An ungodly amount of copies of The Easy Instructor were sold; they were absolutely everywhere. As is often remarked, necessity is the mother of invention. At a time where a decent education was hard to come by and a musical one was nearly non-existent, shape notes just kind of made sense, particularly to the non-musicians. Lined-out hymnody, essentially call and response, thrived in early Black churches because it didn't require that a congregant be able to read to sing the music—something that African-American anti-literacy laws made sure of for many. Literacy for whites wasn't illegal, but particularly in rural areas, proved hard to come by. Shape notes, according to its architects, are easy and inclusive.
There's actually some psychological literature which supports this. A UC Berkeley study found that students learn significantly better with shape notes opposed to round notes. As far as I can tell, this study hasn't been replicated or peer-reviewed since its publication in the 1960s, so take this for what it is. But the author does note that of the students in the experimental group—the group that learned with shape notes—63% of them signed up for choir the following year, where the average for the round-note control groups only had a 20% enrollment rate. So potentially, shape notes do more than just instruct. Maybe they inspire.
I actually have a shape notebook in my library, and it truly does stand as an oddity amongst an already esoteric collection of music theory books. It's called Pentecostal Harmonies. Look, it's even got a little shape note right there. This book uses a seven-note system developed by the Pennsylvania singing master Jesse Aiken. Aiken was a bit of a radical. He didn't believe in minor scales or minor keys. All you really needed, in his opinion, was the major scale. Multiple clefs? Unnecessary. So in his notation, he tossed them. Key signatures? It's just visual clutter when plain text would do just fine. Time signatures? Come on, don't overcomplicate things. Kick out that bottom number and we're good to go. His goal was the same as William Little's with The Easy Instructor: make learning music notation as simple and as streamlined as possible. Most of Aiken's ideas beyond his seven-note system never really caught on, but they're a fantastic example of what I consider to be shape-note values. This is common music for common folk so that everyone—rich, poor, skilled, or tone-deaf—can all experience a sense of community together. This is shape-note ideology.
So, if shape notes are so great, then why would anyone hate on them? I mean, who would disagree with any of this? And how is it that a triangle could be so divisive that it split the country's musicians in two?
Meet Lowell Mason, probably the most important composer you've never heard of, and a professional shape-note hater. In contrast to William Little, we actually know quite a bit about Lowell Mason. He was born on January 8th, 1792, in Medfield, Massachusetts. Mason was a self-made man, a very successful banker, and a closeted musician. Seriously, he insisted that his first musical publications not be associated in any way, shape, or form to his name because he was afraid of how being a musician would look to his friends and how it might affect his career prospects. He'd start to get away from the sheer embarrassment of being a musician and start to embrace the label later in life, eventually composing over 1,600 hymn tunes before his death sometime after the Civil War.
The reason he's one of the most important composers you've never heard about has very little to do with the music he actually wrote and everything to do with what he did for education. He invented it. Public music education, that is, at least in America. Formal music education—as in music as part of the curriculum in compulsory public schools—wasn't really a thing in post-revolutionary America going into the antebellum era. Public schools looked different back then. If you were Black, and in much of the South, literacy was literally illegal. If you were white and in New England, common schools were, well, common-ish. Imagine students ages 6 to 16 all being stuffed inside one large barn-style schoolhouse with a single teacher in front running the show. You'd be taught the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic, all with a focus on civic virtue and moral instruction. Neither prep schools, grammar schools, or common schools offered courses in music.
And Lowell Mason felt like it was his divine duty to do something about it. So he up and quits his career as a banker, moves to Boston, and gets to work. He petitions local government to include music in public school curriculum. He meets with community leaders, argues his cause in the papers, becomes the director of multiple church choirs, and does everything he can do to get the public to bend to his vision. It wasn't easy. Lowell had to fight tooth and nail to get anyone to take him seriously. And when no one does, he co-founds the Boston Academy of Music and says, "You know what? Fine. I believe in this so much that I am willing to teach for a year for free. Let's just see how it goes." It's a giant success, and the rest is history. Through the rest of the century, a desire for a more robust public school system grows. Tax and education reform blossoms, and that system is eventually established with the subject of music becoming an unwavering pillar forever holding it up.
But something's not quite adding up here. It sounds like Lowell Mason and William Little had the same goal in access to education: make learning music as easy as possible. Well, unfortunately, the rub lies not in the aim, but in the bow. Remember when I said that Lowell Mason would do everything he could to bend the public to his vision? Well, there was no stopping Lowell Mason, and William Little's shape notes simply stood in the path of his arrow.
Shape-note singing is not just about notation. It's a deep and rich style unto itself. Shape-note singing is loud. It's communal. Men and women take turns leading. It's folk-driven. It also can be very, very long. Sometimes when the mood is right, they have what are called all-day sessions. The original Yankee Tunesmiths were a self-taught lot. Their musical instincts were drawn from their ancestry. They'd pair old Isaac Watts poems and psalms with the folk melodies passed down by their parents, which were passed down by their parents before them. Lots of the original tunes were in minor keys with a focus on pentatonic melody. In the book White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, author George Pullen Jackson details the scales found in the most popular shape-note tunes. There's a lot of what he calls gapped scales—hexatonic and pentatonic scales, some that omit the leading tone and some the sixth. To Jackson, the notable absence of the leading tone in a lot of tunes is indicative of an older mountain style of song.
All that to say, shape-note singing has a unique, identifiable quality beyond its notational quirks. Harmonies were often written line by line with little regard to a Boston elite's idea of proper vertical harmony. There were parallel fifths everywhere, awkward cadences strung about, oblique motion where there should have been contrary. The harmony of the Sacred Harp and William Little's shape notes, according to Mason, were not a legitimate style unto themselves, but something more like a perversion of God's intent of the gift of song upon man. He thought shape-note musicians had no class because they broke all the rules. He'd use the phrase "crude and lewd" to argue that their music had no place in proper society. He called them "buckwheat notes." To him, William Smith and his ilk were amateurs who didn't understand the science of perfect music.
What was perfect scientific music exactly? Well, you might have already guessed: music that adheres strictly to the harmony and composition rules of 18th-century classical European functional harmony. Anything else? Buckwheat notes.
And so the war begins at some point after 1822. Lowell Mason reads a dissertation on musical tastes from composer Thomas Hastings. It's a 228-page document framing European tonal harmony as correct and true and everything else not so much. The two become fast friends. Hastings pushes this argument that musical taste correlates with the progression of modernity. Basically, modern music is objectively really good and moral because, well, it's modern, and we know more about stuff now. Old and particularly foreign music is really bad because, you know, it's old. He then places shape-note singers somewhere in between morally good modern music and morally dubious ancient music and implies that if we as a society aren't careful in policing our harmonies, we could backslide into savagery.
Lowell Mason loves this. So, the two partner up. They publish a music book together and, of course, can't help but throw shade at those tasteless buckwheat note novices. They kick off their crusade: the "Better Music Movement," aimed at eradicating crude and irregular folk practices in American hymn song. Their true goal: they want to replace a burgeoning wave of American musical culture they viewed as inferior with music deeply rooted in European identity. The Better Music boys start maligning shape notes. If you're a shape-noter, they say, you're poor, you're uneducated, and you have low moral character. Mason and his movement would start to indoctrinate community leaders with this kind of rhetoric, and little by little, they began to chip away at the grassroots institution that was Fa-Sol-La folk.
I'd like to take a second to try and understand how Lowell Mason understood music, because I think it'll provide some very necessary context. Lowell didn't think about music in the same way that most of us do today. To him, harmony wasn't something that was created. It was discovered. An octave is a 2:1 relationship. It's a doubling or halving of a given frequency. It's science. It's nature. And to him, it was God. You can start to imagine a world where little by little we get closer and closer to a rigid, caricaturized model that looks suspiciously like the model of 18th-century European tonal harmony. Until maybe parallel fifths? Not in my hymnbook, buddy. Sorry. The science says that parallel fifths are no good. Because remember, harmony is discovered science. Science is created by God. And when we go against the science, we're not just making bad music. We're literally going against God.
This is how Lowell Mason understood harmony. He never considered that the music of the Yankee Tunesmiths could be a legitimate style and genre unto itself. He only saw it as an imperfect, inferior praise to God. When you get God wrapped up in your idea of aesthetics, it quickly becomes impossible to be flexible. Lowell's worldview necessitates reframing thoughts like "I don't like this" to "this is incorrect." And suddenly, what was once two peaceful coexisting styles of notation and song turns into a one-sided holy war with the moral fiber of society itself hanging in the balance.
William Little and William Smith never saw it coming. When they published new editions of The Easy Instructor, Mason and Hastings eviscerated them for it publicly. When shape notes started getting popular in Cincinnati, Lowell sends his brother to stamp them out with a round-note songbook all their own. In the end, Lowell Mason won. The Better Music Movement drove shape-note singing out of Boston, out of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York towards the Deep South and to the western frontiers. By the end of the Civil War, the tradition would almost entirely be cleaved from its geographical birthplace, and America's first generation of composers, the Yankee Tunesmiths of the First New England School, faded into obscurity.
Despite the Better Music boys' efforts, shape-note singing never disappeared entirely. In fact, it found fervent loyalty and success in the Appalachian South. The two most famous of the shape note books, The Southern Harmony and The Sacred Harp, are still used today and helped to cement a legacy for America's lost tonal tribe that continues in a small but growing way. Shape-note singing groups can now be found almost everywhere. During the 1990s, it established footholds in the United Kingdom. And today, regular local singings take place in Germany, Japan, Israel, and Greece. It's a tradition that, despite adversity, refuses to die because there's something undeniably special about it.
Little and Smith never responded to the Better Music Movement, at least not publicly. They didn't engage in the drama. In fact, they refused to defend themselves. When their detractors went to newspapers and civic institutions, they chose to sing instead of fight. In a way, singing was their way of fighting.
When you look at a shape-note group, you'll notice that they tend to arrange themselves in a square, person to person, face to face. At a shape-note session, there is no audience. No one claps after a song is sung. And that's because the philosophy behind shape notes is deeply communal. You and me and us sharing a moment of profound beauty together. William Little believed that music was something to be engaged in and not gawked at. He'd be there in the middle conducting the group, but he'd stand with everyone and happily pass the baton when the song was up. He believed in access, so he created the shape-note system because access, community, and connection is where he found a sense of God.
Lowell Mason preferred it the old way, the way it was done in Europe. Singers lined up shoulder to shoulder on a set of risers facing an audience of eager non-participants, Lowell standing between them making sure that everything is just right. These are musicians, skilled and dedicated, trained and well-versed in the theories of perfect scientific harmony. They're connected too, but less so to each other and more towards a common goal. This music is performance. It's exhibitionism. It provides; it doesn't share. He believed in perfection, so he sought to abolish the imperfect because perfection at the highest levels is how you honor the voice that was divinely gifted to you.
In many ways, both men sought the exact same thing. They both became champions of education in their own ways, archetypes of their respective musical philosophies. Rural versus urban, community versus exhibitionism, the common man versus the aristocracy. The war on shape notes reflected a deeper cultural divide in early America between urban reformers who believed taste should be standardized and taught, and rural communities who believed that music belonged to the people who sang it. And in a time when the United States was begging for its own cultural, artistic, musical, and national identity, only one could win in the end.
David Warren Steel
>>>>Regrettably, we know very little about Mr. Little. He likely lived in or around Philadelphia at the turn of the 19th century, but we don't know when or where he was born, how he died, if he was married, if he had kids. We don't even have a portrait of him. Other than being a compiler and presumably a singing master, we don't know his occupation. You see, in that time and in that place, it was very unlikely that someone could sustain themselves with a music career alone. Some things never change, I guess.
William Little was born 27 October 1760 in Litchield, Connecticut, son of Dr. Thomas Little (1722-1796) and Zerviah Cogswell (m. 1752). He may have served as a drummer in the Connecticut militia in 1778. William studied medicine with his father in Mount Carmel (part of Hamden, Connecticut) from 1782, then practiced with his father in Mount Carmel. Dr. Thomas Little died in 1796.
In 1798 William was in Philadelphia, where on 10 March he and William Smith purchased from John Connelly “the sole and exclusive right to publish” music in the shape notation. On 15 June he and Edward Stammers received copyright for a tunebook to be called The Easy Instructor; a (presumably manuscript) copy of the work, attributed to Little alone, was favorably reviewed by a committee appointed by the Uranian Society. The book finally appeared in print in August 1801 in Philadelphia, with a second printing in New York in November 1802.
Dr. Little married at some time and lived in New Jersey, where he may have practiced medicine. He then moved to New York, where he was licensed to practice on 19 April 1804. His first wife died in New Jersey after February 1805. On 25 December 1807 in New York Dr. William Little married Jane Warner, a woman of color, in a ceremony performed by June Scott, “an African preacher.” In early 1808 he was imprisoned for beating her, and wrote her a letter from prison that included a poem set in The Easy Instructor. His trial was cut short when he and Jane reconciled. His later life is unknown.
>>>>>William Little and William Smith never saw it coming. When they published new editions of The Easy Instructor, Mason and Hastings eviscerated them for it publicly.
Little and Smith never published "new editions" of the Easy Instructor. They sold the copyright before 1805 to Charles and George Webster and Daniel Steele of Albany, New York, where subsequent editions were published.
rl_v...@yahoo.com
Sincerely,
Robert Vaughn
Mount Enterprise, TX
http://baptistsearch.blogspot.com
Ask for the old paths, where is the good way
http://mtcarmelbaptist.blogspot.com
For ask now of the days that are past...
http://oldredland.blogspot.com
Give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land.
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Annie Grieshop
On Mar 9, 2026, at 12:55 PM, rl_vaughn via Fasola Discussions <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
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Mark Banschbach, OFS
Good day all !
I have been a lurker on this list for a number of years. I dont post because I dont feel I have anything (yet) to add to the conversations although I love the history and the discussions here.
I am a classically trained musician. I studied at Berklee ( and a few other colleges with classical vents). My parents were both classically trained musicians ( in the traditional sense).
I suppose my first question for this person might be why he could not simply appreciate this music for the beauty it posseses, and those who participate in it. It is clear, at least to me that this person has not experienced Shape Note singing past possibly one session, or did so with a closed mind. Or I suppose that I would really need to ask the question of the intent of the in formation provided or what their viewpoint was.
My personal journey in shapenote singing was something that began because I heard about it in some folk circles, and I wanted to know more. After learning more I wanted to try my hand at writing some songs
There were some gentle souls who suggested that I wait and understand more. Those were wise words I believe. I have now sung with other shapenote groups for a little over 25 years. This pales in comparison to the aged wisdom on this list from which I have happily gleaned insights for which I am thankful .
I hope that person can go back and spend some time not only gathering more historical perspectives, but spends time in the square until he finds the same joy others have.
I wish you all a fruitful Lenten season
Peace,
Mark
But I don’t think much of his argument as stated. It strikes me as conspiratorial.
Annie
-- Mark R. Banschbach, OFS Author of "Canticle Reflections" https://www.amazon.com/Canticle-Reflections-OFS-Mark-Banschbach/dp/1523756268/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476048324&sr=1-1&keywords=Canticle+reflections Secular Franciscan Way of the Cross: https://www.amazon.com/Secular-Franciscan-Cross-Mark-Banschbach/dp/B095WCZ59S/ref=sr_1_11?dchild=1&keywords=banschbach&qid=1627038614&sr=8-11 Reflections of a Secular Franciscan : https://brotherbearsfo.wordpress.com
j frankel
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Tim Cook
Thanks, Will, for the discussion. I never tire of talking about shape notes. In fact, I’ve pestered y’all in the past about it, as I did in a comment on this documentary posted in the Sacred Harp Friends Facebook group. But it bothers me that much.
The inaccuracies in the video are annoying, but I’m still glad it was made. The credits list “fact checkers,” but I don’t think they’re anyone with any background like Warren’s or a host of other people they could have consulted.
My issue is with Lowell Mason’s role in stamping out shape notes, something I first learned from Warren when I hitched a ride with him to a singing in the late 90s. I know that was a foundational decision in the whole creation of the field of music education, but it’s something they need to rethink. In that that field went on to influence the music curriculum of many other countries, dropping shape notes has to an extent deprived the world of its voice. I imagine that music education wouldn’t be relegated to its niche position if it were more successful, and if they taught shape notes, they would be wildly successful. Saying you can’t read music would be about as common as saying you can’t read English. Whether they taught four shapes or seven wouldn’t matter to me. I think seven would be a much easier sell to a world already familiar with doremi, but both systems have their advantages. If everyone could read music, they’d be more inclined to sing together, and a world that sings together would have a lot harder time warring on each other. Add to that all our democratic norms in shape-note singing and we could save the world. This is something I think the whole shape-note community should demand of music education in the schools.
Tim Cook
Iwaki, Fukushima, Japan
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Annie Grieshop
On Mar 9, 2026, at 8:38 PM, Annie Grieshop <annie.g...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks for that info, which is contrary to what I had heard. Then again, my printing experience is Linotype, so I’m fairly clueless about the ins and outs of music!
AnnieSent from my iPhone
On Mar 9, 2026, at 4:29 PM, Barbara Rose Lange <sor...@gmail.com> wrote:Hello,Greetings from beautiful Laramie, WY. I drive town into Colorado to sing when the weather allows, and I happen to have taught some basics of musicological research before I retired. Just in case it's of interest, lithography became the chief means of printing music by the early 1800s. It was pretty easy to create a lithographic plate of musical score. Movable musical type with multiple passes through a printing press no longer had to be used, although I am surmising that hymnbooks probably took two passes through the press, one for notation and one for text. Perhaps Esther or Warren will enlighten us!With best wishesRose LangeLaramie, WY
On Mon, Mar 9, 2026 at 1:27 PM Annie Grieshop <annie.g...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks so much for opening this discussion and for providing the transcript. From a purely technological perspective, shape notes were very expensive and bothersome to print — all music was, but shape notes were even worse, as they required four or seven times as many notehead characters — so my guess is that they were doomed purely from that standpoint.
I appreciate his effort and the research that went into it. But I don’t think much of his argument as stated. It strikes me as conspiratorial.Annie
Sent from my iPhoneOn Mar 9, 2026, at 12:55 PM, rl_vaughn via Fasola Discussions <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Thanks, Will. Overall I found the video interesting. To me the one thing that stood out as a big error was conflating shape notes as a certain “style” of music.
Sincerely,
Robert Vaughn
Mount Enterprise, TX
http://baptistsearch.blogspot.com
Ask for the old paths, where is the good way
http://mtcarmelbaptist.blogspot.com
For ask now of the days that are past...
http://oldredland.blogspot.com
Give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/fasola-discussions/254151032.68218.1773078876536%40mail.yahoo.com.
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Fulton, Erin
Sent: Monday, March 9, 2026 9:57 PM
To: Discussions Fasola <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [fasola-discussions] The War on Shape Notes (documentary)
Annie Grieshop
On Mar 10, 2026, at 6:35 AM, 'Fulton, Erin' via Fasola Discussions <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Annie and Rose, you're both right ( ; Lithography did indeed come to prominence in the early nineteenth century, but specifically for small-scale publications (especially sheet music). If you've ever held a lithography stone, you'll know that they're big, at least a couple of inches thick so that they can withstand the pressure of the press. They withstand repeated use extremely well, so lithography was a sensible choice for a four-page piece of sheet music, whose front illustration would look much sharper than with typical engraving methods of the time and the stones of which could be stored in a publisher's catalog for decades to be reused whenever there was renewed demand for a song.
For a large project like a tunebook of 100+ pages, it's a much worse fit; I'm not personally aware of any examples that were lithographed. Instead, early nineteenth century tunebooks variously use music type or punched engraving on pewter plates (with a few straggling examples on copperplate). Both of these materials could be reused, the type by resetting the formes and the plates by shaving them down. Probably more influential on reducing the relative cost of tunebooks over the course of the century was the introduction of sterotyping/electrotyping to cheaply reproduce printing plates for long-term use or storage, rather than any particular means of initially creating the plate. Both punching and typesetting have the problem that Annie pointed out, since printers could not rely on mass-manufactured type/punches (mostly sourced from England or Germany) if they wanted to use shaped noteheads.
As far as I am aware, the best resource on these techniques is still Richard J. Wolfe's Early American Music Engraving and Printing.
Best,
E. Fulton.
From: fasola-di...@googlegroups.com <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Annie Grieshop <annie.g...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, March 9, 2026 9:57 PM
To: Discussions Fasola <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [fasola-discussions] The War on Shape Notes (documentary)
CAUTION: External Sender
Thank you, Warren - and everyone else - for thoughtful comments.
My time could have been spent more usefully than in opining on something I had apparently misunderstood. 😉
So, here’s his Biography, if you haven’t googled him. And now his claims in the documentary make far more sense, after a fashion.
<IMG_9994.jpeg>