The preceding article traced the outlines of the revivalist music tradition in both Europe and America. The following article looks more closely at the church music in the period of American colonization and revolution. Church music during this period was based on European models, especially the Psalm singing of the Calvinists. Later, the rise of singing schools and the presence of groups such as the Moravians and Shakers produced church music that was distinctively American.
A census of citizens of North America in 1790 revealed that only 5 percent professed any religious affiliation. Today that figure is 95 percent, of whom nearly half worship regularly in a Christian church. These simple statistics represent a growth that might be the envy of Christians in Western Europe, whose numbers have suffered a steady decline over the same period.
The story of the development of Christian music in the United States is a complex and colorful one, additionally important for the impact that it has had on the world at large. North Americans do not keep their faith to themselves. In 1985, Protestant Christian missionary societies alone spent more than $500 million in supporting overseas missions and that figure is rising yearly. The 20,000 missionaries that the sum sends out worldwide take the hymns and songs of America with them.
The American Heritage
Compared with Europe, Christianity in the United States has developed over a mere few hundred years, without the support of the wealth and traditions of an established church. These two facts may have some bearing on the present strength of faith in the United States.
The first Christian settlement, in Jamestown, Virginia, was established only in 1607. These English settlers and the immigrants who followed them from other parts of Europe arrived with none of the resources that those they had left behind could take for granted. Their life in the New World began with the poverty and hardship that had driven them there in the first place. There was no church wealth built up over centuries, no Christian traditions of worship. They had nothing except what they carried with them, probably no more than a Bible and a metrical psalter.
Christianity in North America has grown since those times as a fire grows from a spark. But a healthy suspicion of ecclesiastical power has remained. The style of worship still valued most highly is one of directness and simplicity, without undue ceremony.
Life in North America is too easily known by its urban side, the extraordinary blend of decadence and deprivation that is supported by the technology of instant communication. For between the huge cities, there are vast and sparsely populated areas of countryside in which small communities enjoy continuity of traditions in life and faith. Here the true Christian music of North America is to be found. It is folk art, which in its formative years had no chance of being influenced by music as an art form, for classical music remained undeveloped in North America until the mid-nineteenth century. Even today it remains largely untouched by the sophistication of European traditions.
Establishing a New Tradition
The Christian music sung by the early white settlers was that of the metrical psalms. Indeed, the pilgrims left their European homes with the psalm tunes ringing in their ears: They that stayed at Leyden feasted us that were to go at our pastor’s house, being large; where we refreshed ourselves, after tears, with singing of Psalms … and indeed it was the sweetest melody that ever mine ears heard. (Edward Winslow, “Hypocrisie Unmasked,” and quoted in W. S. Pratt, The Music of the Pilgrims [Boston, 1921], 6.)
For the French Huguenots in Florida or the English and Dutch Puritans of New England, psalm-singing was at the heart of their musical expression of faith. Its importance to the early Christian communities is evident from the first publication of any kind in America, the Bay Psalm Book. Remarkably, it was published in Boston as early as 1640 and its pioneering spirit is evident from the preface: God’s altar needs not our pollishings: for wee have respected rather a plaine translation … and so have attended Conscience rather than Elegance, fidelity rather than poetry … that soe wee may sing in Sion the Lords songs of prayse according to his own will; untill hee take us from hence, and wipe away all our tears, & bid us enter into our masters joye to sing eternall Halleluiahs.
The Bay Psalm Book did not contain any music, but recommended the tunes of Ravencroft’s Whole Book of Psalms “collected out of our chief musicians.”
The practice of “lining out” (described in some detail in Chapter 19) was established early in America, as the Rev. John Cotton made clear in 1647: For the present, where many in the congregation cannot read, it is convenient that the minister, or some other fit person … do read the psalm line by line before the singing thereof. (Cotton Mather, Singing of the Psalms a Gospel Ordinance [1647], and quoted in P. Scholes, The Puritans in Music [London, 1934], 265.)
The results for American psalmody were as extraordinary as for the Old World. The same person who sets the Tune, and guides the Congregation in Singing, commonly reads the Psalm, which is a task too few are capable of performing well, that in Singing two or three Staves, the congregation falls from a cheerful pitch to downright Grumbling, and then some to relive themselves mount an Eighth above the rest, others perhaps a Fourth or Fifth, by which Means the Singing appears to be rather a confused noise, made up of Reading, Squecking and Grumbling.
In many places, one Man is upon this Note, while another is a Note before him, which produces something so hideous and disorderly, as is beyond Expression bad … and besides, no two Men in the Congregation quaver [decorate the tune with extra notes] alike, or together; which sounds in the Ears of a good Judge, like Five Hundred different Tunes roared out at the same time … (T. Walter, The Grounds and Rules of Music Explained [Boston, 1721])
By the early eighteenth century, some ministers were beginning to clamor for a more “Regular” way of singing, causing “Heats, Animosities and Contentions” among the old guard. Typically, it was the country areas that resisted any suggestion of change: Tho’ in the polite city of Boston this design [the new way] met with general acceptance, in the country, where they have more of the rustic, some numbers of elder and angry people bore zealous testimonies against these wicked innovations, … not only … call the singing of these Christians a worshipping of the devil, but also they would run out of the meeting-house at the beginning of the exercise. (K. Silverman, Selected Letters of Cotton Mather [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971], 376)
In New England, new ways of singing eventually supplanted the old, but not in other parts of North America. Extraordinarily enough, there are still isolated parts of Appalachia and the Southeast where the old practice of lining-out is still practiced, particularly among remote Baptist churches. It is an oral tradition—just as it was 300 years ago—where the congregation relies on its memories of the tunes and sings in heterophony (“500 different tunes roared out at the same time”) and at an extremely slow pace.
The Singing Schools
The new way of singing was really only a return to what today’s church musicians would call normality; the Americans called it “singing by note.” But education had to be provided for such a change. As a minister observed as early as 1720: Would it not greatly tend to promote singing of psalms if singing schools were promoted? … Where would be the difficulty, or what the disadvantages, if people who want skill in singing, would procure a person to instruct them, and meet two or three evenings in the week, from five or six o’clock to eight, and spend their time in learning to sing? (Quoted in H. W. Hitchcock, Music in the United States [New Jersey, 1974], 7.)
These singing schools sometimes provided more than they were originally intended, as a student at Yale revealed in a letter to a friend: At present, I have no inclination for anything, for I am almost sick of the World & were it not for the Hopes of going to the singing-meeting tonight & indulging myself in some of the carnal Delights of the Flesh, such as kissing, squeezing &c. &c. I should willingly leave it now. (Quoted in I. Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America [New York, 1964], 282.)
These singing schools had their parallels in English country parishes. They were set up on a temporary basis in a schoolhouse or a tavern with the blessing of the local church, and worshipers were encouraged to enroll for a course of singing lessons (provided that they brought their own candles with them). The lessons were based on instruction in solmization, a system of pitching adapted from the invention of Guido d’Arezzo whereby the notes of a scale are identified by names. Where Guido used a different name for each note of the scale, the pioneers of the singing schools used a simplified system using only four: fa, sol, la, and mi. Thus an upward major scale would have been sung to the note names fa, sol, la, fa, sol, la, mi, fa. Such a system might seem oversimplified to the point of confusion, but the standard of singing in many churches improved noticeably. As Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary in the early 1720s: “House was full, and the Singing extraordinarily Excellent, such as has hardly been heard before in Boston” (M. H. Thomas, ed., The Diary of Samuel Sewall, New York, 1973, Vol. 3, p. 285).
Gradually, other systems to help people to read notation developed, from the crude system of the Rev. John Tufts, which placed letters indicating the sol-fa names in the appropriate positions on a five-line stave, to the shape-note systems of the turn of the eighteenth century, where shapes corresponded with the four sol-fa names—a triangle for fa, a circle for sol, a square, la, and a diamond, mi.
The many new tune-books appearing from the 1750s onward catered to the developing interest in part-singing: Youths Entertaining Amusement (1754), Urania (1761), Royal Melody Complete (Boston, 1767, containing music by the British composer William Tans’ur), and others. The music of some of these books contained pieces complicated enough to be called anthems rather than psalm tunes.
Such pieces testify to the musical ambitions and even the success of some of the singing masters who, when their course of lessons was complete, would move on to the next town to start again. Nonetheless, the instructors themselves were self-taught. There were no colleges teaching the rudiments of music, let alone the conventions of counterpoint and harmony. All that was picked up by the very imperfect example of oral tradition and through printed music.
Changing tastes in the expanding urban populations gradually ousted this rough-hewn music from city churches, but in the South and at the westward-advancing frontiers it remained popular. Nineteenth-century music collections continued to print the music of the singing-school pioneers of a century before: Virginia Harmony, Kentucky Harmony (1816), Knoxville Harmony (1838), Union Harmony (Tennessee, 1837), Southern Harmony (1835), and many others.
These collections also show quite clearly how folk tunes, originally wedded to secular words, came to be accepted in church worship with Christian texts. From these sources come a number of folk hymns whose tunes have penetrated the consciousness of the English-speaking world. In Southern Harmony, for instance, can be found Wondrous Love and a hymn by Isaac Watts put to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” The best-loved of all, perhaps, is Amazing Grace, originally set to “There is a land of pure delight” in Virginia Harmony.
A collection of 1844 called The Sacred Harp has a special significance, having given its name to the annual Sacred Harp Conventions which still meet today to celebrate this Christian folk-music—clear evidence that it is still known and well-loved in the Southern states.
Moravians and Shakers
Two traditions of worship established in North America in the eighteenth century created Christian music of particular richness. The cultures from which they sprang were opposites, but both for a while chose isolation rather than integration with the societies around them. Such insularity was necessary for something exceptional to grow, but it also prevented such Christian music from finding its way into the worship of other denominations.
As they traveled to North America on an evangelistic mission in 1737, John and Charles Wesley found that they were sailing with a group of Moravian Brethren with the same intentions. These Moravians had come from Herrnhut, a settlement in north Germany, but the origins of their movement, the Unitas Fratrum, lay in the reforming zeal of Jan Hus in sixteenth-century Bohemia. The revival of the Moravian Church in 1722 sent missionary expeditions to the Virgin Islands, then to Greenland, South Africa, Jamaica, and North America. Communities of Moravians were founded in Bethlehem in Pennsylvania and in parts of North Carolina.
For the German-speaking Moravians, as for the Lutherans, music generally held a treasured place in life. They brought instruments with them from north Germany, and there were instrument-makers among them. Thus bands were available for ceremonial occasions of all kinds—weddings, christenings, and so on.
The Moravians had knowledge of the European music they left behind them, a knowledge that was rare in eighteenth-century America. Their Christian music lay at the center of this activity and only quite recently has the true extent of this music been uncovered. Not only did they have their own hymn writers, but they also boasted choirs which, judging by the music composed for them, must have possessed skills quite beyond those of the New Englanders.
The Shakers, “The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing,” started life as a small English sect to which Ann Lee had been attracted at the age of twenty-two in 1758. She was a humble woman from the slums of Manchester who became convinced that she was “Ann the Word” and “the Bride of the Lamb.” Some of her converts emigrated to North America, where, in the early years of the nineteenth century, the Society’s membership grew to about 6,000, settling mostly in areas of the Northeast such as New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. One of her converts described Mother Ann Lee: Mother Ann Lee was sitting in a chair, and singing very melodiously, with her hands in motion; and her whole soul and body seemed to be in exercise. I felt, as it were, a stream of divine power and love flow into my soul, and was convinced at once that it came from Heaven, the source and fountain of all good. I immediately acknowledged my faith, and went and confessed my sins. (S. Y. Wells, ed., Testimonies Concerning the Character and Ministry of Mother Ann Lee and the First Witnesses of the Gospel [Albany, 1827], 101, and quoted in D. W. Patterson, The Shaker Spiritual [Princeton, 1979], 18.)
The believers lived in small, exclusive, and self-sustaining villages. Their very strict moral sense kept the sexes apart, even by providing separate entrances and staircases in homes and meetinghouses—though women and men had equal status. They built their own dwellings and churches, grew their own food, made their own furniture (now highly prized and much copied), everyone covenanting their wealth to a central fund.
Most Shaker songs were created as a spontaneous act of praise and under the control of the Holy Spirit, whether in a worship meeting or outside. A Shaker pamphlet of 1782 described the spontaneity of their worship, clearly related to charismatic meetings today: One will begin to sing some odd tune, without words or rule; after a while another will strike in; and then another; and after a while they all fall in, and make a strange charm—some singing without words, and some with an unknown tongue or mutter, and some with a mixture of English … (Some Brief Hints, of a Religious Scheme, Taught and Propagated by a Number of Europeans, Living in a Place called Nisqueunia, in the State of New York [Salem, Mass., 1782], quoted in E. D. Andrews, The Gift to Be Simple [New York, 1940], 10.)
In the earlier days, these songs were passed down in oral tradition, as the Shakers initially resisted the idea of notating their music. The first printed collections of Shaker tunes did not appear till the 1830s, but surviving manuscripts and notebooks show the true scale of their creativity and contain as many as 10,000 tunes.
Shaker music is a uniquely refreshing reminder of the simplicity of much Christian music in America. In country areas around and beyond the Shaker communities, where education was even harder to come by and illiteracy was high, music was still being handed down orally from one generation to the next. It was largely a folk art, recalled as much as read, each performer adding a new flavor to an old song.