David Music is professor of church music and director of graduate studies in the school of music at Baylor University. Paul Richardson is professor of music in the school of the performing arts at Samford University. Both are members of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada and have a long and distinguished record of hymnological research and writing. They have teamed up in this book to trace hymnody among Baptists in North America from its British roots in the early seventeenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Organized as a narrative in ten chapters, it moves from the British roots through the beginnings of Baptist music or its absence in America, early hymnals, early regional nineteenth-century collections, mid-nineteenth-century sectional and denominational collections, the Civil War, Sunday School and Gospel songs, late nineteenth-century hymnals, “denominational” ones in the twentieth century, and the splintering at the end of the twentieth century viewed through grids like “reformers” and “revolutionaries.” In the process, Baptist leaders and groups are considered and their various views and conflicts described.

The treatment is encyclopedic, with 502 pages of text followed by 83 pages of bibliographical material and a 47-page index. For those who want a list of Baptist hymnals, the first bibliography alphabetizes them (503–548). It includes the page numbers on which the books are discussed in the text itself so that one can find them quickly without going through the general index. The general bibliography gives a page of unpublished materials. The general index covers hymns, tunes, people, and collections.

Each chapter includes general overviews as well as detailed descriptions of hymnals and attendant people, churches, and circumstances. Footnotes are ample and sometimes fill half a page. A brief page-long summary “conclusion” is given at the end of every chapter. The book lends itself to use in at least three ways. Readers can work through it meticulously from cover to cover, or scan the general descriptions and the conclusions, or work from the index or table of contents to find a hymnal, person, or some specific detail for which they may be looking.

Articles, companions, hymn and hymn tune studies, the journal of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada called The Hymn, John Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology (1907), Louis Benson's The English Hymn (1915), dissertations, indices, and numerous similar studies and listings get at the topic that Music and Richardson are treating here, but they are either more general or more restricted. Works that come close to this one are Henry S. Burrage's Baptist Writers and Their Hymns (Portland, Maine: Brown Thurston & Company, 1888) and Singing Baptists: Studies in Baptist Hymnody in America (Nashville, Tenn.: Church Street Press, 1994), which the authors published with Harry Eskew and which serves as an appetizer to this main course. This study stands alone in treating Baptist hymnody in North America from its beginnings to the present in this kind of detail and scope.

The book is well-researched and reliable, as one might expect from these writers. Readers can trace sources through the text and its footnotes to find the researchers' trails and where they might lead for further study and research. The book is also well-written and clear, though this is not an easy book to read from cover to cover. As for hymnological studies generally, the detail is too dense and multifaceted to be assimilated easily. The authors have done their best, however, to make it accessible. One does not have to be a hymnological expert to decipher its meaning. Only time, patience, and the ability to read are required.

One might expect a study of this kind to stop before, or have least perspective on, our current time and place, but the last chapter, “New Currents in Baptist Congregational Song,” is one of the most illuminating. After sorting out sociological, technological, and theological factors, it differentiates between reformers and revolutionaries and discusses collections and people as usual but then isolates themes like peace and civil rights, language revision, popular styles, “Contemporary Christian Music,” the “praise and worship” movement, and genres like global hymnody. Five patterns of diverging worship forms are also discussed: liturgical, traditional, seeker, contemporary, and blended. The Baptists' embrace of these in their own ways—like charismatic influences without speaking in tongues—suggests the struggles that virtually all traditions have faced along with an ecumenical consciousness that has both pulled together and driven apart. The irony of our present circumstances is further suggested by the list of hymns written by Baptists since 1975 (484–485), while in the previous chapter the authors had just acknowledged that The Hymnbook for Christian Worship (St. Louis: Bethany, 1970) “would be the last hymnal published by the American Baptist Churches” (460).

The earlier chapters are similar to the one just described in that they also get at the issues and give the detail that attends them—or, perhaps more accurately, let the details emerge to see how they form the historical narrative. The topic of the book is Baptist hymnody in North America, but such a topic invariably brings with it not only Baptist and hymnic themes, but more general historical, theological, and musical ones as well. Though written clearly and in a narrative fashion, it is nonetheless closer to encyclopedic grist than to story's scintillation. Anyone who is interested in the issues this study raises, however, will find it a valuable mine of information.