Christian History Home > Issue 31 > America's Hesitation Over Hymns
America's Hesitation Over Hymns
Why did colonial churches resist the first British musical invasion?
Dr. David W. Music is Associate Professor of Church Music at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas, and editor of The Hymn, the quarterly journal of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada. | posted 7/01/1991 12:00AM
In England in 1707, Isaac Watts published his classic collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs.
In the New England colonies in 1707, no church organ had yet been installed. The first singing-instruction book would not be written for fourteen more years. And Hymns and Spiritual Songs would not be reprinted until about 1720.
While the new hymns were being written and sung throughout England, many American churches and ministers opposed them. Not until well after the middle of the eighteenth century did English hymns achieve a significant place in American worship.
Why? Here is the story of hymns’ rocky introduction to American churches.
Hymns “Of Human Composure”?
In early colonial America, congregational singing consisted almost exclusively of metrical psalms. In this, as in most other matters, the colonies followed the lead of the Mother Country.
The two psalters most widely used were the Bay Psalm Book (1640) and Sternhold and Hopkins’s Whole Book of Psalms (the “Old Version,” 1562). The Bay ... To view this item, you must be a member of ChristianHistory.net.
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