150 years ago is the right span. It’s before the motor car disrupted family life. It’s before cinema, radio, records and video disrupted cultural life. It was a time when most people counted themselves fortunate to be born in a large family with scores of first cousins, when most people were mostly acquainted with extended relations, when, prior to the McCormack Reaper and the automation of agriculture, 97% of the population were rural and engaged in some occupation related to agriculture. And, for me, it’s the time before radio, when, if you wanted music, you made it — sheet music sales in the 1910s were in the million count, and there were 300 piano manufacturies in the United States alone — long before consumeristic obession with the transistor radio made us prone to the hijacking of our liturgical music.
My husband (don-o) and I do traditional Southern Appalachian a-Capella Christian music called Shape Note Singing. He's a kind of local Shape Note impresario, and knows a lot of the history.
He says that after its heyday as a hugely popular community/social activity in the late 19th century, it was basically killed off by the professional church organist/choir director and the radio.