ALFRED —Should Alfred have a town song? And if the answer is in the affirmative, should it be “Simple Gifts,” which was written by an Alfred Shaker?

Voters who attend the annual Town Meeting March 28 will decide.

The decision to let the townspeople decide came last week, when The Friends of Alfred Shaker Museum asked selectmen to make the popular Shaker song “Simple Gifts” the official town song.

“Simple Gifts” was written by Shaker Elder Joseph Brackett in Alfred early in the summer of 1848.

The three selectmen decided on Tuesday that the residents should have a say on the issue and the proposal will be added to the agenda for next month’s Town Meeting.

Selectmen George Donovan said he believes it is a question that townspeople should decide.

“It would certainly be a good way to honor the Shakers who were a big part of Alfred’s history,” Donovan said.

The FASM proposal is not without precedent in the state, according to Mary Lee Dunn Maguire of the group. In December, for instance, Belfast named a locally written song as that city’s anthem.

FASM members believe that “Simple Gifts” has more than earned a similar designation for the town of Alfred and its approximately 3,000 inhabitants, said Maguire. Moreover, doing so would highlight Alfred’s early Shaker history as the “root place” of Shakerism in Maine and connect the town more firmly to the Shaker thread in the national culture, she said. The Shakers came to Alfred around 1793.

“Few songs so tied to local Maine history have earned the international status that ”˜Simple Gifts’ has achieved,” said Barbara Carlson, FASM’s president. “It has gone from here to the world over the last century and a half and made a name for itself.”

While increasingly popular in its early years, the Shaker song gained worldwide recognition when the composer Aaron Copland used it in the score of his ballet “Appalachian Spring.” “Simple Gifts” has been adapted and recorded many times; perhaps its most popular variation is its 1963 use for “Lord of the Dance.”

FASM hopes that naming “Simple Gifts” as Alfred’s town song would help people recognize the town’s Shaker heritage and draw visitors to its museum. For the last several years FASM also has hosted a Simple Gifts concert on Shaker Hill each July that has been organized by Andy Happel, a violinist, composer and music teacher in Scarborough. Happel grew fascinated with the song while growing up in the Southwest.

For more than a decade, FASM has been renovating a 19th-century Shaker carriage house in the former Shaker village as a museum and educational center and expects that work to be completed by the end of the year.

Alfred Shaker Museum will be open on Maple Sunday and its summer season will begin in mid-May. Check www.alfredshakermuseum.org for information.

— Senior Staff Writer Tammy Wells can be contacted at 324-4444 (local call in Sanford) or 282-1535, ext. 327 or twells@journaltribune.com.