Music Ministry Matters #17

No.17 – “From Rote to Note (and Back!)”: The checkered history of hymnal development in America, Part 2.

As we have seen, for the first half of the nineteenth century, congregants in American churches – if they used any at all – used words-only songsters in worship. That did not mean, however, that collections with both sacred texts and musical settings of them were non-existent. Tunebooks, often published by a singing master and sold to those he taught, were designed for use in the singing school and usually contained a primer for teaching the fundamentals of music reading. While not intended for congregational singing, they were commonly found in churches were clergy and precentors used them as a resource. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the singing school movement was fading away in New England. Just as itinerant singing masters were moving south and to frontier Kentucky and Tennessee to set up schools and sell their tunebooks, a marvelous new teaching method arose – shape notes! Experiments with simplifying music reading by giving pitches unique shapes had been around for nearly a century, but William Smith’s and William Little’s The Easy Instructor or a New Method of Teaching Sacred Harmony (1801) changed everything. The shape note movement in the South and on the frontier helped to perpetuate a whole repertoire of American folk hymnody, but again, the tunebooks were generally not used in churches where much of the singing was still congregational singing of psalms led by a precentor.

I would cite two historically significant events in America which helped to power the development of the modern hymnal with music and text on the same page. The first was the publication in 1851 by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher of Temple Melodies for use at his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. It was a collection of two hundred hymns printed in three staves with the archaic practice of the tenor line on top. It was unique because a single stanza text was inserted below the soprano melody line. Other texts which fit the meter of the hymn were included below.

Three years later, Beecher collaborated with Plymouth organist, John Zundel, to publish the massive Plymouth Collection which contained over 1300 hymns in standard two stave, SATB voicing. That Beecher should devote this much effort to hymnal publication is not surprising. He was noted for prioritizing congregation singing at Plymouth. Dwight’s Journal commented on the excellence of singing at Plymouth Church during the early years of Beecher’s ministry. The writer said Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, was ’’one living, active, tangible example of what all will agree to be genuine church music.”[1] The inclusion of multiple texts used with the same tune was a problem which befuddled early compilers of hymnals and made collections like Temple Melodies unwieldy for congregational use. The hymntune EXETER as it appears in The Plymouth Collection (1855) has texts to multiple hymns in Common Meter (CM) printed below the four-voice harmonization. The arrangement worked for a church organist, but was hardly satisfactory for worshippers expected to navigate words and music simultaneously off the printed page.

The publication of Hymns, Ancient and Modern in England in 1861 was historic and quickly drew the attention of Americans. In 1869, Trinity Parish in New York City adopted Hymns A & M as its official hymnal. In the decades following scores of other Episcopal churches would follow suit.[2] The influence of Hymns Ancient and Modern was long standing and not just upon hymnals used by Episcopalians. It can be seen in a tendency to draw from Victorian era hymn repertoire long after that period had ended. By nineteen hundred America’s mainline Protestant denominations had embraced hymnals and hymn singing.

In the twentieth century a significant watershed was reached in 1940 with the publication of both the Hymnal 1940 of the Protestant Episcopal Church and the Broadman Hymnal which was conceived for Southern Baptists and other conservative evangelicals. The committee overseeing the publication of the Hymnal 1940 was headed up by Canon C. Winfred Douglas. The Hymnal 1940 was the first denominational hymnal in America to take a step back from the standard Victorian repertoire and to draw significantly on plainchant. Following the lead of the Hymnal 1940, other mainline denominations published significant collections in the 1950s and 60s.

But despite a wealth of new hymnody in these and other new hymnals, the quality of congregational singing in mainline Protestantism was slow to improve.

That was not true for American evangelicals. Beginning in the years after the Civil War, a whole new period of revivalism had taken hold. In Servanthood of Song, I refer to it as the “Great Urban Revival”. It began with the historic revivalist juggernaut of Dwight Moody and Ira David Sankey and a number of Moody followers, continued in the years around World War I with the Billy Sunday/Homer Rodeheaver team, and reached its apex with the Crusades of Bill Graham, George Beverly Shea, and Cliff Barrows. The Sankey/Bliss collection, Gospel Songs, 1-6, was so popular that it was only rivaled by the King James Bible in number of copies sold in the 1890s. Hundreds of Gospel song collections followed.

The Broadman Hymnal, conceived and edited by Baylus Benjamin McKinney of the Baptist Sunday School Board, was a major contribution to development of evangelical hymnody.

Surely no one in 1940 could have predicted how phenomenally successful The Broadman Hymnal would be in the years ahead, or the extent to which it would have a positive influence on the congregational singers in Southern Baptist churches. Even with its unusual inclusion of several choral works and a substantial number of solos and duets, it was largely because of the gospel songs and the standard hymns that the Board’s new product became a unifying force for congregational singing.^{^[3]}

The popularity of gospel hymnals, the gospel songs themselves, and the rise of Pentecostalism in America all heralded a new reality: Populist worship, unfettered by the rigid rules of musical appropriateness observed in most traditional worship, was on the rise. Also influential was a blurring of the lines between what had been thought of sacred and secular which began in the 1930s. All of this would merge together into the Contemporary Christian Music of 1980s and 90s. What we are seeing today in many, many churches is a shift away from printed hymnals and often away from printed music of any kind. Lyrics are commonly projected on a screen and the congregation is led by a songleader or “praise team”. The similarity to singing in the “Old Way” in the colonial meetinghouses is striking. Should that be seen as a regression? Is there hope for vital and engaged singing of hymns in the modern church? These are questions my book, Servanthood of Song, attempts to answer through the study of American church music history.

Best wishes and Peace,

Stan McDaniel

[1] ‘’Description of Music at Plymouth Church – H. W. Beecher (and) Choral Director Huntington” in Dwight’s Journal (March 6, 1858)

[2] Note: The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States would not authorize its own modern hymnal, with music and text on the same page, until 1916. That being said, special “musical editions” of word-only Episcopal hymnals then in use would be published by prominent church musicians including Horatio Parker and the Reverend John Ireland Tucker.

[3] Warren Fields, “Hymns and Gospel Songs in the Core Repertory of Southern Baptist Congregations as Reflected in Five Hymnals Published from 1940 to 2008” in Colloquium on Baptist Church Music (Dallas, TX: Baylor University, 2009) [https://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/98386.pdf]