Those who have taken part in shape-note singing using songbooks like The Sacred Harp have seen them: battered copies festooned with stickers, pages jammed with scraps of paper, inscriptions noting details about memorable renditions of particular songs. These books are deeply personal artifacts.
Saturated in personal and collective memory, shape-note songbooks are a throwback to the hymnbooks analyzed skillfully in Christopher N. Phillips's The Hymnal. Focusing on the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, from Isaac Watts's pathbreaking collection of 1707 to Emily Dickinson's artful significations on the hymn form, Phillips demonstrates the myriad ways in which American Protestants used hymnbooks, and establishes their centrality in the spheres of home, school, and church.
In a real sense this book is mistitled; The Hymnbook would be more fitting. The familiar modern church hymnal, verses interlined with musical notations, displays a format that was not affordable in mass-produced texts until the 1850s. Unlike hymnals, which typically reside permanently in churches, hymnbooks traveled regularly back and forth between home and church: “Their ability to inhabit spaces set aside for devotion, entertainment, worship, relaxation, education, and more made them one of the most lived with and the most reproduced of all print genres before the twentieth century,” Phillips writes (8).
Though the emphasis is on European-American Protestants, hymnbooks were created and adapted by African Methodists, Latter-day Saints, and Reform Jews, one sign of their acculturation. Then as now hymnbooks were a source of bitter strife within churches and denominations over a host of issues, a situation exacerbated by the regional antagonisms that culminated in the Civil War. Hymnbooks figured in the 1844 Philadelphia riots pitting nativist organizations against Catholics who resented assigned reading of the King James Bible and singing of Protestant hymns in supposedly nonsectarian public schools. Watts's Divine and Moral Songs for Children (1715) became a linchpin of American literacy efforts to many constituencies. Hymnbooks were used to great effect among enslaved African Americans and crucial for missionary work among the Ojibwe and Mohawk.
They also played a formative role in the development of the genre of children's literature, overlooked in favor of secular imaginative writing, like Goody Two-Shoes. Phillips offers a revisionist reading of Lewis Carroll's parodies of Watts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Likewise, hymns were an important ingredient in non-scriptural schoolbooks, from The New-England Primer of the late seventeenth century, through readers published by Noah Webster and Lindley Murray, to the ubiquitous McGuffey readers who first appeared in 1836. Hymns were central to music education in schools, and British hymn writers, particularly Watts, dominated two very different Sacred Harp collections that emerged in antebellum America: one a pioneering shape-note volume still widely sung from (1844) filled with folkish vernacular tunes, the other compiled by Lowell and Timothy Mason, stressing a more urbane, Eurocentric style.
Applying his forensic skills to hymnbooks accumulated by the American Antiquarian Society, Phillips shows us how congregants used them to write notes to fellow pew-mates or doodle to keep themselves entertained during boring sermons. Hymnbooks became centerpieces of the nineteenth-century gift economy, with sumptuously bound collections featuring a variety of design elements, illustrations, embossed covers, and gilt pages. They often contained multiple inscriptions, allowing conjectures both confident and tentative about how they were gifted and circulated. They served as compendia for the paper detritus of daily life, many still found in the ancient pages.
The distinction between hymns and poems could be slippery to pin down. To win a place in public worship, hymns first had to overcome Calvinist strictures against congregational singing of anything other than psalms. But were hymns primarily written to be sung or to be read? Part of oral culture or literate culture? Were hymns a form of poetry or something distinct, more elevated in some ways but less refined in others? Samuel Johnson argued that devotion and poetry were mutually exclusive, judging that “It is sufficient for Watts to have done better than others what no man has done well” (163).
This ambivalence was felt in the work of poets as different as William Cowper, who collaborated with John Newton, author of “Amazing Grace,” and Felicia Hemans, a popular antebellum poet, as well as poetry editors, like James Montgomery, T. S. Grimshawe, Robert Southey, and Rufus Griswold. In America the gap was bridged in 1846 in America with the publication and success of A Book of Hymns, compiled by two Harvard Divinity students, Samuel Longfellow (younger brother of the poet) and Samuel Johnson (no relation). In England, the increasing popularity of private hymnbooks were exemplified by collections published in the 1820s by James Montgomery, John Keble, and Reginald Heber.
Henry Ward Beecher made determined efforts to get his Plymouth Church singing, overcoming obstacles of printing technology and worship custom to publish in 1855 two versions of The Plymouth Collection of Hymns, one with musical notation, the other without. Beginning in the 1860s, as print technology made it possible to show notes and verses in close proximity, the place of hymnody shifted from home and school to churches, which began supplying hymnals and installing pew racks. The new books may have improved congregational singing but also led to greater uniformity of practice and clergy control over worship. Hymnology developed as a field of ministerial training.
Phillips's literary detective work culminates in a searching analysis of Emily Dickinson, whose connection to hymnody has long been recognized but never before as subtly examined. He finds an intriguing trace of hymnbooks’ lingering influence in the first-line indexes—invented centuries ago by Watts to tap into the oral memory engendered by hymns—adopted in recent decades for the collected poetry of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allan Poe.
This is not the book for readers interested in the performance practices or musical features of hymns, or of hymnody outside Anglo-Protestant circles. But it is a fine window into the social and material lives of well-used texts that have played such a major role in the development of American literature and religious experience.
