Hymnology in the Service of the Church: Essays in Honor of Harry Eskew

USA

Introduction

Paul R. Powell

For some thirty-six years Harry Eskew taught music history and hymnology at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. During those years he gained recognition as one of the foremost hymnologists and hymnology teachers in the United States. That reputation was built not only on the breadth and depth of his own research, but also on the ability to encourage insightful inquiry among his students and others. Virtually all of his former students would attest to his never-flagging insistence on leaving no stone unturned in research. Yet this thoroughness was always tempered with a kindness of spirit and the gentle encouragement to incorporate the spiritual and liturgical aspects of hymnody, as well as the academic; hence, the title of this collection of essays in his honor.

The idea for this Festschrift originated during the planning of the annual church music symposium sponsored by the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in January 2001. Dr. Ken Gabrielse, chair of the Division of Church Music Ministries, and his faculty somehow managed to plan and keep secret from Eskew that the symposium was being dedicated to him. Several former students and fellow scholars were invited to give papers, all of which are included in this collection. It had been suggested that these papers be collected into a notebook for presentation to Eskew. However, Terry York and I felt that a published work was in order and set about exploring the possibility. As a result, the Festschrift was announced during the symposium. Originally intended to be a collection of essays by former students, it soon grew beyond that group to include many others, several of whom were suggested by Eskew himself.

No particular effort was made to limit the topics for the essays with the exception that they should have something to do with hymnody. With that as the only parameter, nearly everyone invited to submit an essay agreed, and a wide variety of topics emerged, ranging from Betty Pope’s delightful travel article on Discovering the Source of AMAZING GRACE to Franz Krautwurst’s evaluation of the tunes of Maria Lohuus in the Gesangbuch der Evangelisch-reformierten Kirchen der deutschsprachigen Schweiz (1998), translated by Hedda Durnbaugh. Not surprisingly, nearly half the essays are about Baptist, gospel and shape note hymnody, but five deal with tunes and the remainder with the biblical, spiritual, denominational and ethnic aspects of hymnody.

Among the twenty-five essays included are eight from Eskew’s former students, all of whom have had successful academic and church careers. Several of his former colleagues in New Orleans and elsewhere, all highly respected scholars, readily agreed to contribute to the collection. Although most of the writers are from Baptist circles, nearly a third are from other traditions, and three from other countries. I am deeply grateful to three well-known scholars, Nicholas Temperley, Brian Wren and Carlton Young, for their willingness to submit previously-published or revised essays.

As a former student of Eskew, I am deeply indebted to him and to each of these contributors for their essays, their enthusiasm for hymnody in general and this collection in particular, and their patience in awaiting publication. All of us acknowledge with heartfelt gratitude the contribution that Harry Eskew has made to our lives and the wider world of hymnology. In that spirit, all royalties from this book will be contributed to the McElrath-Eskew research fund of The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada.

Biographical Sketch of Harry Eskew

Harry Lee Eskew was born July 2, 1936, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. After graduating from high school, he attended Furman University in nearby Greenville where he received the B.A. in music in 1958, majoring in church music. Shortly thereafter, he entered the School of Sacred Music at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, graduating with the M.S.M. degree in 1960, and immediately beginning doctoral studies in musicology with a specialty in American music at Tulane University from which he received the Ph.D. in 1966. His master’s thesis was on The Life and Work of William Walker, 1809–1875 and his doctoral dissertation was on Shape-Note Hymnody in the Shenandoah Valley, 1816–1860. Both his work on Walker, compiler of the renowned Southern Harmony, and on shape-note hymnody, were among the earliest studies of shape-note singing; and, indeed, his influence on the continuing research into this American phenomenon is without equal.

It was during his doctoral studies at Tulane that he began teaching music history and hymnology at the New Orleans Seminary, and it was also there that he met and married Margaret Hodges, a student at the University of New Orleans who later earned master’s and doctoral degrees in German literature and language and has had a remarkable career of her own. Two children, Timothy Lee and Judith Elizabeth were born to the couple. Following his graduation from Tulane, Harry was elevated to the full-time faculty at the Seminary where he remained until his retirement. During the years there he worked very hard to create and build the Martin Music Library, assisted in the early stages of its creation by Betty Pope, one of the contributors to this book. That library eventually became one of the largest collections for the study of church music in the world. A few years before his retirement and upon assuming the dual position of professor and music librarian, Harry completed the M.L.I.S. degree at Louisiana State University.

Throughout his long academic career, Harry continued to study at such schools as the University of New Orleans, Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, and the University of Erlangen. He served the Seminary as acting Dean of the School of Music and later Chair of the Division of Church Music Ministries. Additionally, he served a number of Baptist and United Methodist churches in several states as choir director either on a regular or interim basis, and also participated in a wide range of professional and denominational activities, including serving on the editorial committees of both the 1975 and 1991 editions of The Baptist Hymnal published by Southern Baptists.

Eskew also has written extensively in the fields of hymnology and American music, and there is an extensive listing of his works in Appendix A of this book. With long-time colleague and friend Hugh McElrath, also considered among the best of the best in the field of hymnology, he authored the widely used textbook Sing with Understanding. For several years he edited The Hymn, journal of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada. His interest in Baptist hymnody is exemplified in Singing Baptists: Studies in Baptist Hymnody in America, co-authored with David W. Music and Paul A. Richardson, both of whom contributed essays to this book. Harry’s research interests have extended beyond the field of hymnology to the broader context of American music. Among those interests has been the music of the city of New Orleans, particularly that of its early German settlers.

Many honors have been bestowed on Harry Eskew. For his contributions to church music, he was given the Hallelujah Award in 1999 by Carson Newman College, and the Hines Sims Award in 2002 by the Baptist Church Music Conference. Perhaps his highest honor, especially for his work as a hymnologist, was being named a Fellow of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada at its meeting in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2002. It was my very great joy to read the tribute to Harry at that presentation.

Perhaps his greatest impact in the study of American hymnology is his focus on shape note and gospel hymnody, fields largely ignored prior to his career in New Orleans. Indeed, his own dissertation on William Walker and The Southern Harmony was among the first on the shape note singing tradition. Likewise, his research on gospel hymnody, especially in its African American context, contributed significantly to this previously ignored field of hymnological inquiry. Furthermore, the encouragement of such research among his students and others gave impetus to an ever-widening body of literature in these fields. He likewise helped to establish the South Carolina State Singing in memory of William Walker, which meets annually on the Saturday before the second Sunday in April on the campus of Wofford College. Additionally, the substantial collection of hymnals he amassed during his career has now become a part of the library collections at Baylor University.

Shortly after retirement, Harry and Margaret moved to Macon, Georgia, where Margaret teaches in the English Department. In retirement, Harry continues to write and to encourage other scholars in their research, and those of us who know him well, expect that it will always be so.

The Music of American Sunday Schools before 1875

Virginia A. Cross

The Sunday school had a significant impact on many aspects of American society in the nineteenth century, not the least of which was music. A distinctive style of song emerged for the use of the Sunday school, influenced by several streams of American music. During the middle and latter part of the century, Sunday school songs became widely popular, and many were frequently used in revival meetings, prayer meetings, youth meetings, in homes, and even by some churches, for public worship. The Sunday school was the musical nursery in which the gospel hymn was born. It was also the first important laboratory for American music education. It was, in fact, a leading participant in the dynamic growth of the visibility and popularity of music throughout American society during the century of expansion for our country.

The modern Sunday school movement was born in England in about 1780. However, Sunday instruction for children took place as early as 1669 in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania.¹ Sunday schools were introduced around 1785 in Virginia. Sunday schools seemed to exist separately from individual churches in the early years. Far-sighted American Christians began forming organizations to promote Sunday schools soon after the close of the Revolutionary War. Bishop William White, an Episcopalian, formed the First-Day or Sunday-School Society in Philadelphia on January 11, 1791; this was probably the first Sunday school organization in the U.S.² Joanna Bethune established the Female Union Society for the Promotion of Sabbath Schools in New York City on January 24, 1816. By the end of their first year, this group was supervising twenty-one schools with 250 teachers and over 3,000 students. These industrious women published the first hymnbook in the United States especially for Sunday schools, and they established the first depository (bookstore) for Sunday school books the very same year (1816).³ (In this article, hymnbook means a collection of texts only, and hymnal means a book of texts and tunes.) The idea of Sunday schools spread rapidly and was welcomed more readily by poor families than some other philanthropic projects, and the number of Sunday school societies proliferated.

As the number of Sunday schools grew, the desire for stronger and broader unions also grew. A regional organization called the Sunday and Adult School Union was established in Philadelphia in May 1817 by delegates from eleven different bodies, all of whom were laypersons. This union grew at an impressive rate. It published several books including a hymnbook by 1819. It was renamed the American Sunday-School Union (ASSU) in 1824. Its two main areas of activity were publication and the establishment of new Sunday schools.⁴

The young nation was moving west and the Sunday school movement was spreading rapidly. The ASSU voted in 1830 to organize a Sunday school in every destitute place where it is practicable, throughout the Valley of the Mississippi within two years and in reliance on divine aid. They sent out around eighty missionaries to implement the resolution, and within a short period, about half of the settlements in the new territory were able to begin new Sunday schools.⁵ In many of these frontier towns, there were no regular schools yet, and Sunday schools were the only place where children could learn to read. The ASSU had just begun to consolidate the gains of the Mississippi Valley Enterprise when it launched the Southern Enterprise in 1834. This project was directed toward a smaller land area, but one with a larger population.⁶

Sunday schools flourished in several different social settings in the early nineteenth century. Three of these settings had especially important influence on the music of the Sunday school. Sunday schools on the western frontier brought Sunday school organizers and leaders into contact with the music of camp meetings, a type of music that contributed some of the most distinctive characteristics of what became the typical style of Sunday school song. Sunday schools in the Southeast among poorer people, both slaves and free, connected Sunday school teachers with two rich streams of folk music, that of lowland blacks and of upland whites. The influence of these two bodies of traditional music enriched the camp-meeting style of music. Sunday schools in the urban Northeast provided the laboratories for many of the important implications of Sunday school music in education and in the publishing business.

Sunday School Hymnbooks

In the early nineteenth century, most adults in the United States used words-only hymnbooks as their source of music for worship services. These adult hymnbooks were the model for the early Sunday school hymnbooks. All the Sunday school hymn collections published in the U.S. before 1826 had words but no music.⁷ Hymns written specifically for children (but not for Sunday schools) by Isaac Watts and Ann and Jane Taylor were prominent in many of the early collections, but hymns written for adults were also used freely. Hymns were not only used for singing during the early years of the American Sunday school movement, but also for memorizing. Some of the early Sunday school hymnbooks seemed to speak to or of children in a condescending tone. The prominence of memorizing may have contributed to this attitude: editors were sometimes looking for instructive hymns for the children to memorize rather than seeking texts that gave children an authentic voice with which to sing.

The leading center of publication for Sunday school hymnbooks during the first twenty-five years of American Sunday school hymnody was New York, but the center of activity soon shifted to Philadelphia. Sunday school hymnbooks were often very small. The typical size was eleven centimeters tall and seven centimeters wide. As in many contemporary adult hymnbooks, anonymity is an interesting characteristic of most of the early Sunday school hymnbooks: many of them name neither the authors of the hymns nor the compilers of the collections.

Social ideas regarding children and their place in society that were reflected in Sunday school hymnbooks and songbooks underwent gradual change during the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the Sunday school movement in the United States, social ideas about children were largely shaped by the Calvinistic theology that prevailed in the northeastern part of the country. At this time, public education was not generally available, and some states still had state-supported churches. Children were thought of as miniature adults. One of the most important ideas affecting Sunday school hymnody in the first half of the nineteenth century was the closeness of death. Most urban Sunday school students during this time watched a neighbor child, if not a brother or sister, die. Preparation for death was a significant theme in most early Sunday school hymnbooks.⁸ For example, consider the fourth stanza of the most famous Sunday school hymn:

Jesus loves me! He will stay

Close beside me all the way;

If I love Him, when I die

He will take me home on high.

Social themes such as temperance and patriotism were discussed in many hymnbooks. The following text from an 1852 collection was suggested for use with the tune of Twinkle, twinkle, little star:

Come, ye children, learn to sing,

Temperance songs are just the thing,

Tune your voices, loud and sweet,

While ye one another greet,

(Refrain)   Cheerily, readily, come along,

Sign the pledge and sing the song.⁹

The abolition of slavery was a social theme dear to the hearts of many Sunday school leaders in the Northeast, but this topic was banned from most Sunday school hymnbooks because of the officially neutral stance of many Sunday school organizations. There were some exceptions to this rule, and one of the most prominent was The Oberlin Social & Sabbath School Hymn Book, published in an important center of anti-slavery activism. The missionary section of this collection contains twelve hymns against slavery.¹⁰

The theology of the earliest Sunday school hymnbooks ranged from orthodox Calvinism to evangelicalism or pietism, although the majority of them reflected a centrist theology. The orthodox Calvinism that prevailed in the northeastern U.S. at the beginning of the nineteenth century certainly influenced many Sunday school hymnbooks. The natural depravity of children was a common theme in some of them. The following couplet was published in an 1819 collection:

A sinful creature I was born

And from the birth I strayed.¹¹

During the 1840s and 1850s, the theology of the Yale leadership and the Unitarians softened the harshness of the Calvinistic theology in most Sunday school hymnbooks.¹² The Sunday school itself became the subject of many hymns during this time. The theology of Sunday school hymns was becoming increasingly democratic and evangelistic. The doctrine of limited atonement (the provision of salvation only for the elect) was becoming less prominent, and hymns of invitation and trust were becoming more common, based on the teaching of free grace and a general atonement. Childhood was viewed more sympathetically, and nature was given increased attention. Starting in the 1850s, sentimentalism became more prominent and childhood was sometimes exalted. During the 1860s, American Sunday school hymnody reached maturity. Hymns about Sunday school disappeared, and hymns about conversion became more prominent. Revivalism affected Sunday school music both in its themes and its style. Adults were more involved in Sunday schools than they had been in the first half of the century, and increasing prominence of songs of praise and devotion helped the collections to be more balanced in subject matter.

Sunday School Tunebooks in the 1820s

In the early nineteenth century, few Americans had any training in music. The first Sunday school hymnbooks did not include music. Gradually, music played an increasingly prominent role in American Sunday schools. This music originally grew from the tunebooks used in adult singing schools. A tunebook was an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century collection of psalm or hymn tunes, oblong in shape, having a didactic preface, and designed for use in singing schools.¹³ The music was printed in open score (one part per staff), in three or four parts. The texts were ordinarily hymns, but typically only one stanza of each hymn was provided. Each tune was identified by a tune name distinct from the first line or title of the hymn. Most tunebooks used note-heads printed in distinctive shapes corresponding with four solmization syllables. These shape-note tunebooks were significant preservers and transmitters of religious folk tunes. Most of the early itinerant singing-school teachers, such as William Billings, had little formal music training and propagated an indigenous style of music based on these religious folk tunes. By the early nineteenth century, however, more scientific (conforming to European practices) instructors in the Northeast, such as Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings, were successfully leading a reform movement that eliminated the use of shape notes and local styles and relied heavily on European tunes. In the South, however, the folk tunes and shape notes persisted much longer.

The first Sunday school tunebook published in the U.S. was The Sunday School Music Book published in Philadelphia in 1826 by E. Osborn.¹⁴ The book was a miniature version of the longboy shape popular for tunebooks, and its music was notated in the four-shape system. It was designed as a companion tunebook for The Sunday School Hymn Book published in Philadelphia by the Sunday and Adult School Union (predecessor of the ASSU) in about 1818. It included a twelve-page pedagogical introduction and sixty-four tunes. Even though the companion hymnbook had 288 hymns (at least in the 1821 edition), only one hymn was recommended for each tune, and only the first few words of that hymn were printed in the tunebook. The music was printed in open score. Most tunes were arranged in three-part harmony with the melody in the middle part. The tunes are mostly common psalm or hymn tunes, adaptations from music by European composers, or the work of Yankee tunesmiths. Osborn’s book was probably not very influential; apparently neither Lowell Mason nor Thomas Hastings was aware of it. Each of them thought he had published the first Sunday school tunebook, Hastings in 1827 and Mason in 1829.

Thomas Hastings (1784–1872) was one of America’s first professional church musicians. He compiled a number of collections of music, including Juvenile Psalmody in 1827.¹⁵ It was published in Utica, New York, by the Western Sunday Union, and was probably the second Sunday school tune-book published in the U.S. A small, upright, thirty-six page book, it utilized standard music notation. His collection provided forty hymns and only ten tunes, drawn from the old New England tradition of psalmody. These tunes were rhythmically restrained, often monotonous, and were written in two parts, treble and bass. At this early date it was unusual for both hymns and tunes to be provided in one book. This collection is one of the earliest hymnals published with both texts and tunes, and may in fact be the first children’s hymnal in the English language.

Juvenile Psalmody reflected Hastings’s sincere and lasting interest in the musical training of children. The entire practice of teaching music to children, at least in groups, was still very new to the United States in 1827. In 1824 Nathaniel Gould conducted what he thought at the time was the first children’s music class in the country, although he later learned that some German immigrants in Pennsylvania had provided systematic music training for their children fifty years earlier.¹⁶ Hastings had been conducting adult singing schools for a number of years, but he utilized a new method of instruction for use in the Sunday school children’s singing classes. This approach, the monitorial plan (described in his preface¹⁷), involved using more advanced students (monitors) to instruct small groups of younger students under the supervision of the teacher. The monitorial system, imported from England into the U.S. around 1806, was very popular in American schools until the 1830s.¹⁸ Hastings’s singing classes for children were usually held on weekday evenings (as were adult singing schools), and seemed to attract more students than his adult singing schools. Hastings expected his students to memorize the rules of music before he allowed them to sing anything!

The next Sunday school tunebook published in the U.S. was probably Sabbath School Psalmody, compiled by Ezra Barrett in 1828.¹⁹ It was larger in size than Osborn’s or Hastings’s book and had more pages (fifty-six compared to forty-two for Osborn and thirty-six for Hastings). Its medium size and upright shape (fifteen centimeters tall and twelve wide) was typical of many of the Sunday school tunebooks published in Boston during the next twenty-five years. This format was not so common for collections from other cities. The music is printed in standard (round) notation. The hymns of Sabbath School Psalmody are drawn from the pre-existing body of children’s and adults’ hymnody; none of them refers specifically to the Sunday school. Barrett’s book went through four editions by 1834. Its instructional section seems more practical than either of its predecessors. The nature of the hymns and tunes and didactic introduction suggest that Barrett had extensive experience in teaching children.

The next year another Sunday school tunebook was published, also in Boston, and this time by a better known musician: Lowell Mason (1792–1872).²⁰ Juvenile Psalmist is the same shape as Barrett’s book, although it does not have as many pages. It has a theoretical introduction, but it does not mention monitorial instruction. Mason offers the teacher the choice of solmization in seven syllables or four. He closes his discussion on rhythm with the comment, Compound time is so seldom used in Psalmody, that it was thought unnecessary to describe it in this introduction to singing.²¹ There are twenty-nine tunes in Juvenile Psalmist. Thirteen are scored for two parts on two staves, and ten are written for three parts on three staves. More significant is the scoring of six tunes for three parts on two staves. Open score (one part per staff) dominated tunebooks for several decades and continued to be prominent in Sunday school songbooks until the mid-1840s. The use of condensed score suggests the influence of keyboard music, in contrast to the unaccompanied vocal music which had dominated church music since the settlement of New England. Unlike the compilers before him, Mason did name the composers of some of the tunes. He claimed four of the tunes as his own; he was probably the first American composer of a Sunday school tune.

Mason’s prefatory Advertisement gives interesting directions for performance of the three-part tunes:

The upper part, or First Treble being the leading melody, should always be sung by girls, or female voices; the Second Treble or accompanying part may be sung by either girls or boys as is most convenient. Where there are men capable of singing, the bass may be also sung; but the voices of men should never be heard on either of the upper parts, except in cases where the children have not confidence to sing alone.²²

At the time Mason wrote these instructions, according to his contemporary Nathaniel Gould (1781–1864), most choirs and singing schools had men singing the melody.²³ It was typical of Mason’s bold leadership in church music that he was among the earliest to encourage women or girls to sing the leading part. Juvenile Psalmist was the first Sunday school tunebook to provide three-part harmonization, the first to utilize condensed score, the first to credit composers, and the first to express a preference for girls or women to sing the melody. Its theoretical introduction represented a refinement of the materials presented in its predecessors. It displayed many of the features utilized by Mason in later and more famous children’s music books.

Sunday School Tunebooks in the 1830s

The decade of the 1830s was a period of experimentation in Sunday school tunebooks. Tunebooks were published in a variety of shapes and sizes, with and without rudiments, and with different numbers of vocal parts and staves. The books generally had more pages than their predecessors. The collections compiled by Elam Ives, Jr. (1802–1864), George Kingsley (1811–1884), and Heinrich Zeuner (1795–1857) exhibit significant German or English influence. Edward L. White (1809–1851) and William Nutting (dates unknown) provided music of greater simplicity in their book called Sabbath School Choir, published in 1836. Their music pointed toward the characteristics of the Sunday school style of music that emerged several years later.

This decade was also very important for experimentation and advances in methods of teaching music. An important leader in this field was Elam Ives, Jr., who met William Channing Woodbridge (1794–1845) in Hartford. Woodbridge had returned from touring Europe for four years in order to study the latest educational methods there, including those of Pestalozzi and Nägeli.²⁴ He found these new methods to be superior to American methods, and he was eager to disseminate these ideas. He enlisted Ives to conduct an experimental class with some Hartford children. Ives described his reaction to the new methods:

…I entered upon the…system with some prejudices; but the more I examined it, the more I was convinced of its superiority…especially in the simple manner in which the principles of music are presented to the mind of the child. The pupils…after a short period of instruction…surpassed…our ordinary choirs.²⁵

Ives developed two central new ideas in his educational methods in the course of this experiment. First, he divided the elements of music into separate units to be learned independently before being combined. This allowed the teacher to present smaller amounts of material at one time, reinforced by thorough practice and review. Second, and probably even more important, he decided to present ideas before words, letting the students experience the musical element before learning its technical name or symbol. Ives was probably the first American to advocate in writing (in the introduction to the second edition of American Psalmody, 1830) the application of Pestalozzian principles to the teaching of music. (American Psalmody was not a Sunday school book.)²⁶

In Ives’s didactic introduction to his American Sunday-School Psalmody, published in Philadelphia in 1832, he omitted much theoretical material not really essential to a basic presentation for children. He also incorporated specific suggestions for hymns and tunes to be sung as examples illustrating the various concepts being presented. This introduction presented the material to be learned in a smoother and more integrated way than in his earlier publications. He also experimented with a two-line and a four-line staff in presenting pitch notation. This book was based on the most progressive teaching system and was pedagogically far ahead of other Sunday school tunebooks of its time.

Lowell Mason issued Sabbath School Songs in 1833, The Sabbath School Harp in 1836, and Juvenile Music in 1839. Mason was very active as a composer, compiler, and promoter of church music, and his tunes for adult and children’s hymns were coming to have a characteristic style. His tunes in Sunday school collections were written in three or four parts on two staves. The music is in simple homophonic style with diatonic harmonies. Many of the tunes are harmonized in chorale style, with a change of chord for each note. Primary chords in root position dominate the harmony, although inversions are also used. No compound meters are used, but the time signature 3/2 is common. The rhythms are basic and only moderately varied, using quarters and eighths more than halves and sixteenths. Occasionally Mason used dotted rhythms, and the tunes employing them are less pretentious harmonically, changing chords less often. The melodies contain chordal skips, repeated notes, and stepwise motion. The Masonic style became increasingly influential on other American hymn-tune composers during the next two decades.

The Transitional Period

The middle of the nineteenth century was a time of expansion in Sunday school music. Music was becoming a more prominent part of American culture at several levels. Concerts by touring singers were a popular form of entertainment. Churches, especially in northeastern cities, were becoming interested in increasing participation in congregational singing, and often in choirs. Music instruction was introduced into many public school systems during this period. More Sunday school books were published and sold during these years than in preceding ones. More musical experimentation was taking place as more musicians were writing tunes particularly for the use of the Sunday school.

The influence of European music on Sunday school publications decreased in the 1840s. That seems somewhat surprising, because English and German influences were increasing in church music at the same time. One exception to this trend was the inclusion of some songs reflecting the young public school music movement. Compound meter, parallel thirds, and appoggiatura-like figures suggest the influence of the German songs brought to New England in the source material for the Pestalozzian system. This influence can be seen in The Sabbath School Lyre, published in Boston in 1848 by the New England Sabbath School Union, which was probably a Baptist organization.²⁷ The Lyre included five hymns and six tunes written to celebrate Sunday school anniversaries. The provision of new and more interesting songs for anniversary celebrations was a significant factor in the development of Sunday school hymns and tunes for at least the next decade and a half. Music for such occasions tended to represent the most progressive style.

The influence of singing-school tunebooks is apparent in several collections of this period, including the Musical Repository published anonymously in Philadelphia in 1841, Sacred Songs by L. S. Everett (fl. 1823–43), published in Boston in 1843, and The Young Chorister by Minard W. Wilson (fl. 1846–61), published in Philadelphia in 1846. Songs of the camp-meeting style were beginning to appear in some books, such as the Musical Repository, Everett’s Sacred Songs, and The Sunday School Choir by Thomas Whittemore (1800–1861), published in Boston in about 1844. Sabbath School Gems of Music and Poetry by J. and A. Cruikshank, published in New York in 1847, was strongly influenced by the camp-meeting tradition.²⁸ This collection also contains several songs whose texts refer to the Sunday school. Refrains were occasionally used in some collections during this time.

The most important influence on the Sunday school tunebooks of this period was the music of Lowell Mason. His tunes were included in almost every collection published during this period, and a number of other editors imitated his musical style. Mason’s influence is particularly evident in the music of Hymns for Sunday-School Worship, compiled by John F. W. Ware and published in Boston in 1854.²⁹ On the other hand, The Sunday-School Harmonist, published by the Sunday-School Union of the Methodist Episcopal Church in New York in 1849 contained few of Mason’s tunes.³⁰ Charles Dingley, the musical editor, printed most of the music on three staves in four parts. The musical arrangements in this book display a little more contrapuntal and harmonic sophistication than is found in most earlier Sunday school music.

By the later 1840s, books of music for Sunday schools were becoming more like songbooks and less like traditional tunebooks. There were still some old-fashioned elements present in some collections, but the more progressive books were proving to be more popular. The omission of the didactic introduction was one of the features marking the transition to the songbook style. Another was the inclusion of the complete text of the hymns. The growing influence of keyboard instruments was evidenced in the use of condensed scores with two staves and the gradual decline of contrapuntal interest in the supporting voice parts, with a corresponding increase in simple homophony.

The process of change in the format of the books and the style of the music is exemplified in The Sabbath School Melodist, compiled by William M. Byrnes (fl. 1839–50) and published in Boston by the Massachusetts Sabbath School Society in 1850.³¹ The following characteristics of this book represent the earlier tunebook style: (1) there are 179 hymns and only 46 tunes; (2) none of the authors or composers are named; (3) the hymns generally reflect the strict Calvinist tradition to an extent unusual by this date; (4) several of the old standard New England psalm tunes are included, as well as a fuging tune from the singing school tradition (fuging tunes were not common in Sunday school music books of any era, at least partly because of a lack of enough men singing in most Sunday schools to balance the bass with the other parts) (5) refrains were not used in this collection; (6) no compound meters were used. As Lowell Mason pointed out in 1829, compound meter was seldom used in psalmody. Some other factors relate this book to the transitional stage of Sunday school music: (1) its size and shape were typical of Boston tunebooks in the 1820s to the mid-1850s; (2) the text is displayed with one stanza between the two staves of music and other stanzas beneath the music; (3) complete hymns are provided, although several hymns are offered for each tune; (4) the music is printed in closed score; (5) several musical characteristics [double dots, appoggiaturas, weak-beat cadences, the prominence of the third, temporary modulation to a related key] reflect the influence of German and English art music. The editor of this collection, William Byrnes, was a member of the Handel and Haydn Society for many years,³² and his work as an arranger shows the effect of the music he encountered there. Finally, the Melodist also included features of the budding songbook style: (1) it had no didactic introduction; (2) it avoided the use of minor keys [they were fairly common in New England psalmody]; (3) the tunes are harmonized in four parts. Two parts were typical of the early Sunday school tunebooks and three were common during the transitional stage of Sunday school music.

During this transitional period in the development of Sunday school music, composers and arrangers incorporated influences from several different sources in the search for the style of songs that would be most appealing to children. Hymns about the Sunday school were fairly common during this period. The most progressive music was often written for hymns about the Sunday school or for Sunday school anniversaries. The most significant stylistic streams feeding the Sunday school music movement were camp-meeting songs, adult church music, singing-school tunes, English and German art music, popular American music, and public school children’s music. Major keys were used much more often than minor keys, with sharp and flat keys occurring in similar numbers. Harmonies were not complex, but were based on primary triads. Harmonic rhythm was moderately slow; the harmony changed less frequently than in Masonic-style hymn tunes but somewhat more often than in many later Sunday school tunes. Modest contrapuntal interest was usually provided in the bass lines through occasional use of inversions. Time signatures used shorter note values, quarter and eighth notes, than earlier hymn tunes, in which half notes were often the unit of the beat. Compound time, especially 6/8, was used more often than in Masonic-style hymn tunes. Rhythm was only of moderate importance, no more important than harmony; limited rhythmic variety was achieved through moderate use of dotted figures and occasional use of compound meter. Refrains were used infrequently.

Sunday School Songs Reach Maturity

The latter 1850s was a time of significant development for Sunday school songs and for their songbooks. One of the books that led the way was the Plymouth Sabbath School Collection of Hymns and Tunes, compiled by H. E. Mathews (1820– at least 1867) and John Zundel (1815–82) and published in New York in 1858.³³ This collection grew out of the ministry of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, where Zundel was the organist and Henry Ward Beecher was the pastor for forty years. Many of the hymns dealt with nature, but not as many discussed the Sunday school as in other collections of the time. Praise and love were emphasized; sin and death were not. This was one of the first Sunday school songbooks that had a significant number of refrains. There were almost as many tunes as hymns in this book. Its size and shape, thirteen centimeters high and seventeen centimeters wide, were more typical of Sunday school song-books published in New York than in Boston. The tunes were consistently dominated by the melody. More tunes were written in 6/8 than was common at that time. Most of the tunes were arranged in three parts. The soprano and alto often form a pleasing duet, but the bass was usually the simplest possible accompaniment. This was the most progressive Sunday school songbook published to this time.

The growth in popularity of Sunday school songbooks during this time was significantly impacted by the prayer meeting revival of 1857–58.³⁴ This unplanned, lay-led revival began in New York and spread to other cities across the country within months. The large crowds at the noonday prayer meetings sang hymns with new enthusiasm, and the songbooks most often used were those of the Sunday school. This revival had at least three effects on Sunday school hymnody: (1) it increased the use and sales of Sunday school song-books, enhancing the image of a Sunday school songbook as a leading resource for popular religious music; (2) it formed a practical bond between revivals and Sunday schools in terms of shared music; (3) it firmly established the Sunday school songbook as a practical provision for adults’ musical needs as well as children’s.³⁵

The next year, 1859, was a pivotal year in the development of Sunday school hymnody. This year saw the culmination of the developmental phase and the beginning of the mature stage. William B. Bradbury brought the transitional period of Sunday school hymnody to fulfillment in Oriola.³⁶ This collection reveals his skill as an arranger and compiler, but does not show him to be an innovator. The songs in Oriola fall into three categories: old standard hymns and tunes, revival music, and Sunday school songs. Bradbury intended to provide a complete collection of music for Sunday schools, and he included a number of eighteenth-century hymns. These hymns are set to esteemed old psalm and hymn tunes such as OLD HUNDRED (this form of the tune name OLD HUNDREDTH was ubiquitous in the songbooks of this era), AMSTERDAM, CORONATION, DUKE STREET, PORTUGUESE HYMN, and ST. THOMAS. Revival music, both folk songs still living at that time in oral tradition and recently composed songs, constituted a significant portion of Oriola. Some of the folk songs seem to have been camp-meeting spirituals. The most important weakness of Oriola was the newly-written texts. They tended to be repetitive and soft, lacking reference to God or Christ, use of scriptural language, or exposition of meaningful doctrine. Refrains were used in only fifteen percent of the songs. Many of the Sunday school songs had texts about the Sunday school; these were generally not of lasting value. Bradbury wrote several new tunes for this book. SWEET STORY (for I think when I read that sweet story of old) and BRADBURY (Savior, like a shepherd lead us) were both first published in Oriola. The musical style of the Sunday school songs in this book epitomized the progress of the genre to this point: they had graceful and predominating melodies, simple smooth harmonies, and flowing rhythms. Oriola was a very popular book. It reached at least thirty editions and continued in print for at least ten years.

The book that initiated the mature phase of Sunday school hymnody was The Sabbath-School Bell, compiled by Horace Waters (1812–1893) in New York, also in 1859. The New York Observer hailed the Bell as effecting a great revolution in Sabbath School music.³⁷ There were several innovative features in the Bell. One of the most influential features was the use of refrains. This was a conscious strategy by Waters: Choruses are proverbially contagious; and many a boy and girl who can hardly be persuaded to sing an entire tune, will join in the sweep of a full chorus with zest and advantage.³⁸ Of the 183 hymns in the Bell, twenty-seven percent have refrains. Others of the newer hymns used different types of textual repetition. Topics of the hymns included heaven, the Christian life, the Sunday school, and praise. There were two temperance hymns and two