Shaker worship went through several forms. The earliest was ecstatic and unstructured — the shaking, whirling, and speaking that got them their name, and which they took as the labour of shaking sin out of the body. From the 1780s Father Joseph Meacham introduced ordered dances performed in ranks: the square order shuffle, the circular march, the hollow square, all with specific steps and hand motions. The meeting houses were built for it, with a large clear floor, no fixed seating, and separate doors for brethren and sisters. Public meetings drew large crowds of the curious through the nineteenth century, and were periodically closed when the gawking became intolerable. Roughly ten thousand Shaker songs survive; the best known, Simple Gifts, was written by Elder Joseph Brackett at Alfred, Maine, in 1848 and reached the wider world through Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring in 1944, by which time almost no Shakers were left to hear it.