Some late twentieth-century singers from The Sacred Harp appreciated James’s historical notes for the humor that came from his mistakes, his idiosyncratic way with words, and the sometimes surprising stories he told about the figures included in the tunebook. This note on John Leland and the great cheese led some singers to adopt the name “cheese notes” for James’s annotations. Singers in the Boston area even established an annual “cheese notes singing” in the early 1980s, featuring dramatic readings of this and other choice historical notes from Original Sacred Harp. Undeniably comical, the propensity of the notes to encourage jokes at the tunebook’s expense, along with the uneven display of pages after seventy-five years of additions and substitutions, was embarrassing to the tunebook’s revisers, in whose cultural context Sacred Harp singing was often regarded as “old fogy.”

This note, and two other notes in which James touches on Leland’s character (106, 319), evince James’s awareness of Leland’s friendship with Thomas Jefferson, which began during the minister’s time in Virginia from 1776–1791. The notes also demonstrate James’s appreciation of the potential of the story of the great cheese to entertain readers through illustrating what Leland’s Baptist pastor contemporaries called his “peculiarities.” The story was a widely reported-upon political event in 1801 and was still well known in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries. Leland’s journey to Washington celebrated Jefferson’s election and also carried a political message. The “mammoth cheese” was an expression of the Connecticut Baptist’s support of Jefferson’s advocacy for separation of church and state as well a mark of the pastor’s opposition to slavery. The cheese was made only from the milk of owned by non-slaveholders and “federalist cows” were also excluded.