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A raging debate of the time was the "Controversie of Singing." A minority argued that singing and making melody "with the heart" meant that one was not to sing aloud. Besides, they argued, if everyone sings, there is no one to listen, hence no one is edified. The Reverend John Cotton defended vocal singing: "That singing of Psalms with a lively voice is an holy Duty of God's worship now in the days of the New Testament. … As we are to make melody in our hearts, so in our voices also." But some Puritans went so far as to stuff cotton in their ears so they could not hear the congregation!

Eventually, the controversy was settled, but as is so often the case, the damage already had been done. Much of the joy and enthusiasm in psalm singing had been effectively and permanently killed.

How the Pilgrims performed the Psalms depended on whether they were sung in church or at home. At church, they prohibited singing antiphonally ("We allow … not of tossing the psalm from one side to the other"), in harmony, or, eventually, with accompaniment (they derisively called the organ the "Devil's bagpipes"). They considered these practices too reminiscent of popery, and merely ceremonial.

The Bay Psalm Book. When the Congregational Puritans settled at Massachusetts Bay in 1630 (now Boston), they brought the 1562 Psalter of Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, and the 1621 Psalter of Thomas Ravenscroft. Ravenscroft's work contains settings in four-part harmony by some of the finest classical musicians of the day (Thomas Tallis, John Dowland, and Thomas Morley, for example), and the tune "Dundee," to which we sing "God Moves in a Mysterious Way."

Determining that they needed a more faithful translation from the Hebrew, in 1640, 30 "pious and learned ministers" produced the first book printed in the English North American colonies: The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Faithfully Translated into English Metre, popularly known as the Bay Psalm Book.

Although its translators were more accurate theologically, they were "long on piety and short on poetry." And whereas Ainsworth had used 15 meters in his Psalter, the Bay Psalm Book had only six. In fact, three-fourths of the Psalms were in Common Meter, the simplest rhythmic pattern. Since the book included no music (they had no facilities to engrave plates), the translators recommended the use of tunes from Ravenscroft's Psalter. It was not until the ninth edition of 1698 that a few tunes were finally included.

Although the first Puritan colonists read music skillfully, their descendents increasingly did not. As congregations knew fewer and fewer tunes and only a few simple meters, they adopted the English practice of "lining out." Having no accompaniment, they began to depend upon rudimentary choirs to help them respond to the leader. The results could be hilarious. In one recorded incident, possibly apocryphal, a deacon began to lead an unusually responsive choir. Discovering his eyesight to be failing, he apologized, saying, "My eyes, indeed, are very blind." As this was in the requisite eight syllables of the first line of a common-meter hymn, the choir repeated the phrase.

The deacon elaborated, "I cannot see at all," which fit the six syllables for the second line, and which the choir also repeated.

When the frustrated deacon exclaimed, "I really believe you are bewitched," that, too, was dutifully repeated by the choir.

"The mischief's in you all," he concluded, and sat down to the accompaniment of the choir completing his impromptu "hymn."

Some folk believed it was more spiritual not to read music. John Smyth, a General Baptist, said, "It is unlawful to have the book before the eye in time of singing a psalm." A certain Pastor Walker described the effect of the resulting individual extemporization: "Like five hundred tunes roared out at the same time," with people one and even two words apart, producing noises "so hideous and disorderly, as is beyond expression bad." Such practices so destroyed the heretofore lively, fast nature of the Pilgrims' singing that he said, "I myself have twice in one note paused to take breath."

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November (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52