RICHARD CRAWFORD

Massachusetts Musicians and the Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody

THE first English-speaking settlers of New England were Calvinists whose tradition of sacred music was governed by a mistrust of musical elaboration and of singing nonscriptural words. Within a short time after their arrival in Massachusetts they had produced their own metrical psalter, the Bay Psalm Book (1640). During the rest of the seventeenth century the colonists’ preoccupation with survival seems to have left little time for the cultivation and development of sacred music. By the early eighteenth century the skill of note reading had become quite rare. To correct this situation singing schools were formed and books of British psalm tunes for use in these schools were published. Between 1760 and 1800 the singing-school movement bore rich fruit. Musical literacy increased. Tunebooks were issued in greater numbers. And during the last third of the century the music published in these books included an increasing proportion of native American musical compositions.

In the 1790s, however, there dawned the recognition that the music of American composers was very different from the music of their European contemporaries. It was then only a short step to the belief that American music was inferior. The vigorous folklike musical style the Americans had created more or less from intuition was gradually discredited by reformers who looked to Europe for their standards. By around 1810 many American tunebooks were carrying nothing but European tunes, often with prefaces denouncing American-composed music and claiming that European music better served the ends of “true religion.” After 1810 most congregations and singing societies in the urban East sang European and Europeanized music, while the indigenous New England repertory was gradually pushed westward and southward, where a number of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England pieces still survive today in Southern shape-note tunebooks.

Fig. 332. Four woodcut pages from the Bay Psalm Book, Boston, 1698, of the first musical notation printed on the North American continent.

From a bird’s-eye view the position of Massachusetts in this tradition appears preeminent. It was of course to Plymouth that the Pilgrims came, carrying Henry Ainsworth’s psalter with them. It was in Cambridge in 1640 that the Bay Psalm Book was published. Then in Boston in 1698 a supplement of tunes was added (fig. 332), apparently the first printing of music in the colonies. Complaints of Massachusetts clergymen such as Thomas Symmes and Thomas Walter spurred the formation of singing schools in the 1720s and instructional tunebooks compiled by Massachusetts minister-musicians issued from Boston presses.

The first real impact of American creativity upon American psalmody bore a made-in-Boston label. In 1770 William Billings, a twenty-four-year-old Boston tanner, brought out The New-England Psalm-Singer, with a frontispiece by Paul Revere (fig. 333), and in one stroke increased tenfold the amount of American sacred music in print.

Although Chester is now the best known of Billings’ tunes from The New-England Psalm-Singer, Brookfield (fig. 334) was favored by his contemporaries. Among American compositions, only Lewis Edson’s three fuging-tunes, Bridgewater, Greenfield, and Lenox, and Oliver Brownson’s Virginia received more printings. Although Revere signed the now famous frontispiece (fig. 333), the music was probably engraved by the Boston jeweler and bandmaster Josiah Flagg.

The Massachusetts printer Isaiah Thomas issued probably the most influential and widely circulated tunebook of the second half of the century. His Worcester Collection (eight editions between 1786 and 1803; the first two published in Worcester, the rest in Boston) was the first American sacred tunebook to reflect changing musical taste systematically, by changing content in successive editions. Moreover, it was the first post-Revolutionary tunebook to be printed typographically rather than engraved.1 Finally, perhaps the most important milestone in the effort to reform American musical taste according to a European standard was published in Boston in 1795, The Massachusetts Compiler by Hans Gram, Oliver Holden, and Samuel Holyoke. Two additional statistical points must be made: (1) more than half of the sacred music titles published in America before 1811 were published in Massachusetts; and (2) a majority of American-composed sacred music printed during the same period is attributed to Massachusetts composers.2 When one considers these landmarks and these statistics, the roles of Massachusetts in general and the city of Boston in particular appear paramount beyond dispute.

Fig. 333. Frontispiece engraved by Paul Revere, and title page (opposite) engraved by Josiah Flagg, from William Billings, The New-England Psalm Singer, Boston, 1770.

Fig. 334. Brookfield, a sacred tune by William Billings, Boston, 1770.

There is another perspective, however, which sheds a somewhat different light on Massachusetts musicians’ contribution to American psalmody. To establish this perspective it is necessary first to review the pattern in which the musical repertory of American psalmody grew. In 1698 the ninth edition of the Bay Psalm Book appeared with a supplement of 13 tunes. During the next sixty years, some thirty different issues of sacred music were published in the colonies. These tended to perpetuate the same musical repertory, so that by 1760 only about 75 different tunes had appeared in print on this side of the Atlantic.3 During the decade of the 1760s the repertory grew suddenly. By 1770 more than 400 different tunes were in print. And that growth, although briefly interrupted during the Revolution, continued until by the end of 1810 the repertory of sacred music included upwards of 7,000 different compositions.

From the 1760s on the repertory grew both in size and complexity. Prior to 1760 it had accrued slowly and had remained remarkably uniform in style. From the standpoint of performance difficulty there is hardly any difference between Thomas Walter’s Grounds and Rules of Musick (Boston, 1721) and Thomas Johnston’s tune supplement (Boston, 1755). In fact, not until the 1760s did American tunebooks begin to carry music more elaborate than the rather stolid psalm tunes from seventeenth-century British sources. Collections of the 1760s such as James Lyon’s Urania (Philadelphia, 1761), Josiah Flagg’s A Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes (Boston, 1764) and Sixteen Anthems (Boston, [1766]), and Daniel Bayley’s The American Harmony (Newburyport, 1769) increased the repertory’s stylistic diversity and its difficulty. Long contrapuntal anthems and set-pieces, fuging-tunes, and florid, arialike hymn tunes were introduced. The repertory prior to 1760 remained within the bounds of oral command for the most part and the tunebooks which survive suggest that Americans possessed a uniform, rather modest skill as singers. By 1770, however, musical diversity was fully established and was confirmed by most of the tunebooks issued during the rest of the century, which, incidentally, presupposed the ability to read notes. The growing tendency toward musical elaboration was recognized in statements in tunebook introductions. In The Chorister’s Companion of 1782 Simeon Jocelin wrote:

It is very obvious, that Psalmody hath undergone a considerable revolution . . . within the course of a few years, not only with respect to the method . . . of singing, but even the tunes formerly in common use, are now generally laid aside, instead of which, those of a more lively and airy turn are substituted.4

The “revolution” Jocelin described can be attributed mostly to the singing schools. Created in the 1710s to teach note reading, this institution by the 1760s led to a dramatic expansion of the amount of music available and to its musical diversity. The singing school eventually succeeded in transforming the repertory from a cluster of established favorites into a growing number of freshly composed novelties, and encouraged tunebook compilers to search for new music to publish. This situation seems to have stimulated the composition of sacred music locally, sometimes by the compilers themselves. It can be said then that the singing school was largely responsible for a most important musical result: the emergence of a group of native composers in the American colonies.

The contribution made by American composers in creating the repertory of sacred music can be determined exactly. Approximately 4,600 of the some 7,200, or two-thirds, of the sacred compositions published in the colonies and the United States through 1810 can be traced to musicians—mostly native along with a handful of immigrants—who lived and worked in America. However, a closer look at the catalogue of published psalmody which follows shows that only about one-third of the total repertory was reprinted during the period covered; of those 2,000-odd pieces only a fraction received more than three or four printings. As these figures prove, most of the music, especially from the 1770s on, was ephemeral. In so changeable a repertory, knowing precisely how many American tunes saw the light of print is of little value in determining the degree of acceptance those tunes achieved.

What are important, however, are the particular tunes identified by the tunebooks themselves: those pieces which were constantly reprinted, appearing in collection after collection and forming a substantial ballast or core in an eclectic and ever growing repertory of sacred music. Because they achieved the widest circulation and popularity these tunes are the most representative sample for study and the best means of judging the native contribution to American sacred music. This group of tunes is referred to here as the core repertory: the 101 sacred pieces most frequently printed in America between 1698 and 1810.

The core repertory could be studied from a number of viewpoints. Like most popular repertories which accrue over a long span of time, it is eclectic in its makeup. The oldest tunes date back to the original Anglo-Genevan Calvinist psalmody of the mid-sixteenth century; the newest were composed in New England during the 1790s. A study examining and contrasting the musical styles of the various layers would be welcome, especially if it could shed some theoretical light on the New England musical idiom as exemplified by its most widely circulated tunes.5 Attention might also be given to the settings of core repertory tunes. It is generally believed that in Northern psalmody, unlike the later Southern tradition, tunes passed from book to book in essentially the same settings, individual tunes circulating as polyphonic compositions for three or four voices rather than melodies with varying harmonizations. Core repertory tunes, all of which received many printings, would provide an excellent basis for testing that belief. A comparison of settings might confirm it or perhaps reveal that compilers made significant musical changes. At the very least such a study would help to trace tunes from one collection to another and to find out who borrowed what from whom.

Broader and certainly more elusive than these matters is the question of precisely what factors and circumstances beyond purely musical ones determine the content of any popular musical repertory. In American psalmody, for example, what roles did printing technology, book distribution, and copyright laws play? Why did the ideology of “good taste” begin to exert its influence when it did in the 1790s and what effect did it have on the makeup of the core repertory? What factors of tradition, education, and religious belief interacted to confer an almost canonical status on certain pieces of music? A study of the core repertory might reveal the answers to these and other questions. And, given the unusual character of psalmody as a genre—at once functional and aesthetic, sung both for recreation and worship, akin in some aspects of use and genesis to folk music, yet written and published—a study of its origin and development may help to illuminate how other popular repertories, either oral or written, have been formed.

“Early Music in Massachusetts,” however, was the topic of the conference which produced this study and which dictated the perspective set forth here. Perhaps the perspective can best be put in the form of a question: what does the core repertory reveal about the contributions of Massachusetts musicians?

A glance at the core repertory seems at first to support Massachusetts preeminence. Of the 38 core repertory tunes which can be definitely assigned to American origin, 28 were composed by the Massachusetts natives William Billings, Daniel Read, Oliver Holden, Justin Morgan, Timothy Swan, Lewis Edson, Abraham Wood, Jeremiah Ingalls, and Ezra Goff, while the remaining 10 can be traced to the Connecticut natives Oliver Brownson, Amos Bull, Solomon Chandler, Alexander Gillet, Oliver King, and two more composers who are identified only as Carpenter, and Deaolph.

Fig. 335. Worcester, a sacred tune by Abraham Wood, Cheshire, Connecticut, 1779.

At the head of the list of Massachusetts composers of core repertory tunes stands Billings of Boston, clearly the foremost native American musician of the century. Holden, born in Shirley, was active in Boston musical life as a composer and compiler from the 1790s into the early years of the next century. Apart from Billings and Holden, however, none of the other Massachusetts composers of core repertory tunes worked in the orbit of Boston. Abraham Wood, for example, plied his trade in his native town of Northborough, some forty miles to the west. Figure 335 shows Worcester, a sacred tune by Abraham Wood, one of many small-town New Englanders who took to composing during the eighteenth century.

The other core repertory composers are distinguished chiefly by their migration from the state of their birth. Daniel Read is solidly identified with Connecticut, having early left his home town of Attleboro and settled permanently in New Haven in his early twenties. Timothy Swan of Worcester lived in Sufifield, Connecticut, from the time he was twenty-two to the age of forty-nine, the years of his primary musical activity. Justin Morgan of West Springfield and Jeremiah Ingalls of Andover became Vermonters in the prime of life. Lewis Edson, born on a farm near Bridgewater, in his twenties moved to Lanesboro in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, but finished his days in New York State. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Ezra Goff was a Massachusetts man.

If any pattern can be detected in this list it is that, except for Billings and Holden, the Massachusetts natives who composed core repertory tunes were men born in villages who moved out of the state as young men and spent the rest of their lives in small cities and towns, or in rural areas. Rather than a particular Massachusetts heritage, these composers have in common a small-town or rural background. Moreover, when the distinction is made between those born in Massachusetts and those who remained there, the size of the Massachusetts contribution to the core repertory changes considerably. As noted above, of the 28 American tunes assigned to Massachusetts natives no more than 10 compositions—8 by Billings and 1 each by Holden and Wood—are the work of lifetime Massachusetts citizens.

As well as discovering the origin of the core repertory tunes, it is instructive to notice where they first appeared in print. Massachusetts compilers hold a wide statistical lead over those of other states; 51 or almost exactly half of the tunes in the repertory were introduced in Massachusetts publications. Only a small portion of the music Massachusetts compilers introduced, however, is of native origin. Of the 51, no more than 11 are definitely American: 8 by Billings and 1 each by Swan, Holden, and Amos Bull. One additional tune is possibly American; it appeared in John Tufts’ An Introduction to the Art of Singing Psalm Tunes, 3d ed. (Boston, 1723).6

Turning to Connecticut for comparison, one finds that although only about 12 percent of American tunebooks of the period were issued there, Connecticut collections ushered into print 33 core repertory tunes. A state that produced only one-eighth of the publications introduced one-third of the most popular tunes. Moreover, 24 of the 3 3 tunes were American, twice as many as Massachusetts can claim. And that total includes first printings of core repertory tunes by all the major Massachusetts natives except for Billings and Holden: Daniel Read, Lewis Edson, Timothy Swan, Justin Morgan, Abraham Wood. Setting aside Billings’ tunebooks, all but one of which were devoted entirely to his own music, it was the Connecticut tunebooks that opened up the field to American composers, most notably Andrew Law’s Select Harmony (Cheshire, 1779),7 Simeon Jocelin and Amos Doolittle’s The Chorister’s Companion (New Haven, 1782), and Oliver Brownson’s Select Harmony ([n.p.], 1783).

These works, the first two especially, did much to define the native component of the core repertory. The index to Andrew Law’s Select Harmony (fig. 336) names eight previously unpublished American composers: Babcock, Brownson, Carpenter, Deaolph, Gillet, Strong, West and Wood. Law’s mixing of British and American pieces helped to establish the pattern of eclecticism found in most successful American sacred tunebooks of the 1780s and early 1790s.

Massachusetts tunebooks of the 1780s strongly influenced the makeup of the core repertory. But they took their guidelines for format and repertory, and indeed much of their music as well, from their Connecticut predecessors. For example, in 1784 Daniel Bayley of Newburyport pirated the title, format, and some of the music of Andrew Law’s Select Harmony; John Norman’s Massachusetts Harmony (Boston) included nearly 20 American compositions, all but 1 of which had appeared either in Law’s Select Harmony or Jocelin’s The Chorister’s Companion. In 1785, under the title The Essex Harmony, which he had used from 1770 to 1772 for a tune supplement devoted mostly to English favorites, Bayley published an eclectic collection with roughly a third devoted to American pieces from Law and Jocelin. In 1786 Isaiah Thomas’ The Worcester Collection appeared. Not only does it reflect the growing popularity of the Law and Jocelin repertory, but a comparison of settings shows that the tunes by Billings in The Worcester Collection were taken mostly from Jocelin rather than from Billings’ own tunebooks. Apparently this was done in order to avoid violating a recently enacted Massachusetts copyright law which prohibited borrowing from other Massachusetts publications.

Fig. 336. Index to Andrew Law, Select Harmony, Cheshire, Connecticut, 1779.

It was by way of Connecticut that many of the most popular Massachusetts tunes were circulated in the most successful Massachusetts tunebooks. In 1787 or early 1788 Sacred Harmony (Boston: C. Cambridge) was published. This work was a close relative of The Massachusetts Harmony, having been printed from some of the same plates. Yet the repertory closely resembled The Worcester Collection: 80 percent of the tunes, including almost all of the American pieces, had appeared in Thomas’ work. The Federal Harmony (Boston: John Norman [1788]; five more issues by 1794), shared plates with both The Massachusetts Harmony and Sacred Harmony and contained more than two-thirds of the compositions which had appeared in The Worcester Collection. Boston’s most popular collections of the 1780s bear an unmistakable Connecticut pedigree.

Perhaps the strongest objection to the argument that the heart of eighteenth-century American psalmody reflects powerful influences operating outside Boston in particular and Massachusetts in general is the figure of William Billings. Born in Boston, Billings worked, composed, published, taught, and died there. Although the core repertory list shows that Daniel Read contributed one more tune than Billings, it in no way diminishes the high reputation Billings commands.8 Billings’ tune Jordan (fig. 337) appeared in the very successful tunebook The Village Harmony, of which 17 editions were made between 1795 and 1821. The Village Harmony carried the 1780s repertory into northern New England after it began to lose favor in Boston and environs. Jordan was the only tune by William Billings retained by the nineteenth-century reformers, who turned to Europe for their stylistic standard.

Singular in personality, talented and original as a writer as well as a musician, Billings was far more prolific than any other composer on the list. More than any of his contemporaries, he was attracted to the large musical forms of his day. He was a vigorous and dominant, if somewhat unkempt figure.

Billings’ fame has probably been the chief obstacle to a recognition that Boston composers made only a comparatively small contribution to the mainstream of eighteenth-century American psalmody. Now that the heart of the repertory has been isolated, it becomes clear that, rather than drawing from an established Boston creative tradition, Billings almost singlehandedly created whatever native tradition the city enjoyed. In this context Billings appears as a lone, talented composer living in Boston, not, as has sometimes been thought, as the chief representative of a group of composers centered there. Boston was an important center of tunebook publication from the beginning of the period, and so it remained. But all indications are that, except for Billings, Holden, Hans Gram, and perhaps the obscure Boston psalmodist William Cooper, the composers whose works were published there were outlanders who carried their newly printed works back to their native towns. The more closely one looks at the tradition, the more exceptional William Billings seems.

Fig. 337. Jordan, a sacred tune by William Billings, Exeter, New Hampshire, 1800.

When the composers, sources, and printing history of the tunes in the core repertory are examined, they offer powerful evidence that, for all the noteworthy contributions of Massachusetts composers and compilers, it was through Connecticut that the major impact of native American composers upon the heart of the repertory was made. The claim for the importance of Connecticut contributions supports a point made by Irving Lowens some years ago. Dealing with the fuging-tune, initially imported from Great Britain, Lowens wrote:

The type of fuging-tune which attained a quite remarkable vogue on this side of the Atlantic, which was written in a uniquely American style, made its appearance first in Connecticut early in the 1780s. Very shortly afterwards, it spread to central Massachusetts, upper New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. It was not notably popular, at least among composers, in the Boston area, where Billings held forth.9

Lowens might have gone on to mention that by the early nineteenth century Americans in regions to the south were singing New England music, fuging-tunes included, and were cultivating another indigenous musical idiom related to the one developed first in New England. Sutton (fig. 338), a fuging-tune by Ezra Goff, typifies the kind of fuging-tune Lowens writes about. It is cast in two sections: (1) a beginning in block chords, followed by (2) an imitative “fuging” section that resolves to a chordal close.

Fig. 338. Sutton, a fuging-tune by Ezra Goff, Albany, New York, 1806.

The significance of Lowens’ remark goes beyond the particular form of the fuging-tune or the relative weight of Massachusetts or Connecticut contributions. The distinction is deeper than the one established by state line; it extends to that between the country and the city. The distinction was crucial in the development of the fuging-tune, perhaps helping to explain its rise in popularity during the 1780s and its subsequent rejection in New England. Certainly the country/city distinction is helpful in interpreting the significance of the core repertory. For, seen in light of that distinction, the list reveals that the heart of the native musical repertory originated in rural and small-town New England with the exception of Billings’ output.

Fig. 339. Winter and Windham, two sacred tunes by Daniel Read, Philadelphia, 1860.

From this fact three suggestions follow. First, most of the American-composed sacred music of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries came from countryside and village rather than city. Second, the roots of the native American idiom of the period are to be found in rural practice. Third, the small-town/rural musical culture that Lowens identified in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, central Massachusetts, upper New York, and Connecticut transcended not only state lines in the North but regional boundaries between North and South, moved into western Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, and points south and west in the early nineteenth century, and became a major factor in determining the musical style of the essentially rural practice of shape-note psalmody which persists in parts of the South to this day. (Winter and Windham [fig. 339], two sacred tunes by Daniel Read, appeared in shape-note notation in The Sacred Harp compiled by B. F. White and E. J. King. The Sacred Harp was compiled in Harris County, Georgia, but bears a Philadelphia imprint because no musical type was to be found in Georgia in 1844, the date of its first appearance. It remains in print to the present day, and it includes some 33 core repertory tunes—proof of their continuing popularity.) Judging the validity of these hypotheses and examining their musical and cultural implications might be enough to keep someone busy for some time to come.

the core repertory

The statistical method employed here is empirical if not sophisticated. The core repertory consists of the 101 compositions most frequently printed in America from 1698 through 1810.10 The size, chosen arbitrarily, has turned out to be workable and convenient. It is large enough to provide a characteristic sample (nearly 1.5 percent of the entire repertory), small enough to be encompassed in a single, hefty tunebook. Admittedly, a claim that the list also represents the 101 most popular sacred pieces of the period might be disputed since a cumulative total arrived at through observation of more than a century of music will not necessarily reflect what music was popular at any given moment within that time. There is also a practical objection to equating “most frequently printed” with “most popular.” If one puts his trust in numbers he may well find himself making a distinction as decisive as that between the quick and the dead, between, for example, tunes printed 44 times and tunes printed 43 times, the former being canonized in the core repertory, the latter consigned to losers’ oblivion.

The present core repertory may be subject to slight changes. Collections and issues now undiscovered seem certain to turn up in the future, and when they do they may alter a tune or two on the list. Granting the likelihood of imperfections in the present list, the fact remains that similar difficulties and possible unfairness are part of any attempt to choose a sample. The advantages of identifying a central, representative core of tunes for observation, analysis, and interpretation should outweigh reservations about the way they have been chosen. In fact, it may be that the method of choice used here enjoys a certain advantage over one which accounts for more variables. Its very simple-mindedness will perhaps help to remind the user of precisely what the list represents, while a more sophisticated, more complicated method might beguile him into thinking he is working with a repertory of tunes scientifically proven most popular.11

One more problem should be mentioned: that of explaining what constitutes a tune printing. A printing is defined here as the appearance of a composition in one edition or state of one tunebook. That definition is not as simple as it may seem; precisely what constitutes a separate edition or state of a book is not always clear-cut. On the one hand, Andrew Law’s Select Harmony was printed more than fifteen different times from essentially the same copper plates, but without any separate edition numbers. Among all these printings, only three significant changes of musical content are found: Law published part of his work late in 1778, issued the complete version a few months later, in early 1779, and published an edition early in 1782 with small but noteworthy musical changes. He continued to print the last version into the 1790s, issuing it at least twelve times with no significant musical alterations. For the purpose of this study only the two printings for tunes appearing in the 1779 and 1782 issues were counted. Since the 1778 was so obviously makeshift it was not counted. And since only close bibliographical scrutiny can detect variations among the dozen issues of the 1782 version—Law gave no separate designation to any of them—they are treated in the count as a single edition. On the other hand, although Andrew Adgate’s Philadelphia Harmony was published eight times with Rudiments of Music, second through ninth editions, between 1789 and 1807 with the same music on the first fifty-six pages in all editions, each tune’s printing has been counted.

Law and Adgate represent extreme cases, but the tune count in both of these works reflects a basic rule of thumb: if there is evidence that a compiler has rethought the content of a collection, either by bringing out a new edition, or by bringing out an altered issue which amounts to a new edition even if it is not called one, the tunes in that issue are counted as new printings. Therefore, appearances of a tune in separately designated editions of a single tunebook are counted as printings. Likewise, appearances of a tune in a substantially altered issue not designated as a separate edition are also counted as printings.

Most of the tunes are listed here under the titles of their earliest American printings. A few, however, became more widely known in America under titles other than the ones they initially bore. In these cases the tune is listed under the more common title, and the title of the first printing appears in parentheses. No attempt has been made to give a comprehensive list of alternate titles.

In the following table, the first column gives the standard tune name, with alternatives in parentheses; the second reports only those composers whose identity is established beyond question; the third and fourth are self-explanatory; the fifth gives the date of the earliest discovered printing of each tune. For American tunes the date in the fifth column is the one appearing in the fourth. For non-American tunes the dates are not all definitive. Dates of non-American tunes are distinguished as follows:

1. Tunes known to have been printed first in a given year are given definite, unqualified dates, e.g., 1718.
2. Tunes whose first printings have been traced to a collection of uncertain date are dated approximately, e.g., ca. 1765.
3. Tunes whose first printings have not been established are dated by the earliest printing I have found through an extensive, though not systematic, search of English tunebooks; these dates are enclosed in brackets, e.g., [1741], or if the date of the collection is tentative, [ca. 1741]. If a tune of non-American origin has yet to be traced to a non-American source the fourth column is blank.

The first printings of most of the non-American tunes on the list are documented in hymnological works. For example, see: Maurice Frost, English & Scottish Psalm & Hymn Tunes c. 1543–1677 (London: Oxford University Press, 1953); Maurice Frost, ed., Historical Companion to Hymns Ancient & Modern (London: William Clowes, 1962); Hymns Ancient and Modern, historical edition (London: William Clowes, 1909); William Jensen Reynolds, Hymns of Our Faith: A Handbook for the Baptist Hymnal (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1964); Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parrish Church, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). I am also grateful to Professor Temperley for generously providing information from his files.

TABLE VII

The Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody

Tunes known to be American are marked with an asterisk (*). Tunes which have not been traced to a European source and thus may have been composed in America are designated with a dagger (†).12

Tune name	Composer	Number of printings	First American printing	Date of first known printing
Adeste Fideles	Wade	46	Shumway 1801	1782
(Lisbon, Oporto, Portugal New, Portuguese Hymn)
All Saints	Knapp	56	Johnston 1763 or Flagg 1764	1738
(Bolton, Knap’s 100, Wareham)
*Amherst	Billings	73	Billings 1770	1770
Amsterdam		48	Flagg 1764	1742
Angels Hymn	Gibbons	71	Lyon 1761	1623
(Angels Song, Angels Tune, Old Angels Hymn)
*Anthem for Easter:	Billings	45	Billings 1787	1787
“The Lord is risen indeed” (Easter Anthem)
Aylesbury		126	Lyon 1761	1718
(Aylesburg, Exeter, Gainsborough, St. Philips, Wirksworth)
Bangor	Tans’ur	108	Johnston 1763 or Flagg 1764	1735
Bath		90	Johnston 1755	1713
(Buckland)
Bedford	Wheale	82	Lyon 1761	ca. 1723
Bray		46	Flagg 1764	ca. 1760
(Danville, George’s, Leeds, St. George’s)
Bethesda		49	Williams 1769	ca. 1760
*Bridgewater	Edson	97	Jocelin 1782	1782
*Bristol	Swan	78	Brownson 1785	1785
Bromsgrove		61	Walter 1760	1724
*Brookfield	Billings	86	Billings 1770	1770
Buckingham		71	Williams 1769	ca. 1763
Burford		45	Walter 1760	1718
(Buford, Hexham, Norwich, Uxbridge)
*Calvary	Read	46	Read 1785	1785
Canterbury		90	Bay 1698	1592
(Low Dutch)
*Chester	Billings	57	Billings 1770	1770
Christmas	Madan	50	Law 1783	1769
(Bristol)
Colchester	Tans’ur	95	Walter 1760	1735
(Colchester New)
Coleshill		45	Dawson 1754	1644
(Dublin)
*Coronation	Holden	47	Holden 1793	1793
Dalston		71	Flagg 1764	1763
(Psalm 122)
Denmark	Madan	93	Law 1782	1769
(Anthem: Before Jehovah’s Hymn)
Dunstan	Madan	54	Law 1783	1769
Dying Christian	Harwood	46	Law 1786	ca. 1770
(New York, Vital Spark)
*Enfield	Chandler	56	Brownson 1785	1785
Funeral Thought		93	Flagg 1764 or Bayley 1764	1763
(Funeral Hymn, Radnor, Walden)
*Greenfield	Edson	102	Jocelin 1782	1782
*Greenwich	Read	81	Doolittle & Read 1786	1786
Habakkuk		54	Law 1783 or Stickney 1783	ca. 1760
(Bowden, Leominster)
“Hartford	Carpenter	47	Law 1779	1779
Hotham		59	Law 1783	1769
(Hymn)
Irish		81	Flagg 1764	1749
(Dublin, St. Patrick’s)
Isle of Wight		61	Tufts 1726	ca. 1720
*Jordan	Billings	71	Billings 1786	1786
*Judgment	Read	48	Read 1785	1785
Kingsbridge		49	Flagg 1764	ca. 1760
Landaff		85	Neu-vermehrt 1753	1558
(France, Kingston, Old 50, Psalm 50)
*Lebanon	Billings	48	Billings 1770	1770
*Lenox	Edson	102	Jocelin 1782	1782
*Lisbon	Read	68	Read 1785	1785
Little Marlborough		133	Bayley 1764	1763
London New		52	Walter 1721	1635
(London)
*Majesty	Billings	73	Billings 1778	1778
*Maryland	Billings	57	Billings 1778	1778
Mear		119	Bay 1737	ca. 1720
(New Meer)
*Middletown	Bull	63	Law 1779	1779
Milford	Stephenson	66	Law 1779	1760
*montague	Swan	58	Stickney 1783	1783
*Montgomery	Morgan	54	Benham 1790	1790
†Morning Hymn		48	Lyon 1761	ca. 1760
Newbury		54	Lyon 1761	1749
(Psalm 5)
*New Jerusalem	Ingalls	52	Village 1796	1796
(Jerusalem)
*Norwich		83	Law 1779	1779
(Psalm 24)
*Ocean		75	Law 1787	ca. 1787
Plymouth	Tans’ur	93	Johnston 1763 or Flagg 1764	1735
Portsmouth		54	Tufts 1726	1711
(Namure)
Portsmouth		46	Law 1783 or Jocelin 1783	ca. 1760
(Falmouth, Monmouth, Monvert, Portsmouth New, Trumpet)
Portugal	Thorley	54	Mass Comp 1795	1789
* Psalm 25	Gillet	46	Law 1779	1779
(Goshen)
†Psalm 33	Tuckey	45	Lyon 1761	1761
Psalm 34	Stephenson	114	Flagg 1766	1760
(Creation, Psalm 47, Thro’ all the changing, Wiltshire, Wisbeach)
*Psalm 46	Bull	44	Bayley 1784	1784
Psalm 100		223	Bay 1698	1551
(Old 100, Old Savoy, Psalm 134)
†Psalm 100 New		51	Tufts 1723	1723
(Anthem, Anthem to 100, Geneva, New Hundred)
*Psalm 136	Deaolph	47	Law 1779	1779
Psalm 148		53	Bay 1698	1558
Putney	Williams	71	Tans’ur 1767	1763
*Rainbow	Swan	49	Brownson 1785 or Bayley 1785	1785
Rochester	Holdroyd	84	Lyon 1761	ca. 1724
(St. Michael’s)
*Russia	Read	68	Doolittle & Read 1786	1786
St. Anne’s	Croft	88	Dawson 1754	1708
(Maiden, Preservation)
St. David’s		58	Bay 1698	1621
(St. David’s Old)
St. Hellen’s		72	Bayley 1764	ca. 1763
(Jennings, Sunderland)
St. Hellen’s		72	Bayley 1764	ca. 1763
(Jennings, Sunderland)
St. James	Courteville	57	Walter 1721	1697
St. Martin’s	Tans’ur	132	Walter 1760	1755
(Gainsborough, Norfolk)
St. Michael’s		117	Tufts 1726	1708
(Hanover, Psalm 149)
St. Thomas	Williams	51	Law 1779	1770
(Beverly)
*Sherburne	Read	74	Read 1785	1785
Silver Street	Smith	60	Jocelin 1788	ca. 1780
(Falcon Street, Hymn, Newton, Skeensborough)
Southwell		47	Bay 1698	1579
(Cambridge Short)
*Stafford	Read	81	Jocelin 1782	1782
Standish		56	Tufts 1723	ca. 1700
(Bedford, Wendover)
*Suffield	King	60	Law 1779	1779
Sutton		60	Flagg 1764	ca. 1760
(Old Sutton)
*Sutton	Goff	47	Shumway 1793	1793
(Sutton New)
*Virginia	Brownson	91	Jocelin 1782	1782
Walsall		57	Lyon 1761	ca. 1721
(Durham)
Wantage		68	Flagg 1764	ca. 1763
Wells	Holdroyd	160	Lyon 1761	ca. 1724
(Rugby)
Weston Favel	Knapp	45	Flagg 1764 or Bayley 1764	1738
(Weston Flavel)
Winchester		52	Williams 1769	1690
(Harlem)
*Windham	Read	66	Read 1785	1785
(Windsor)
Windsor		119	Bay 1698	1591
*Winter	Read	51	Read 1785	1785
*Worcester	Wood	59	Law 1779	1779
York		57	Bay 1698	1615

collections cited

Bay 1698	The Psalms Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Old & New Testament, 9th ed. (Boston: B. Green, and J. Allen, for Michael Perry, 1698).
Bay 1737	The Psalms Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Old & New Testament, 24th ed. (Boston: S. Kneeland & T. Green, 1737).
Bayley 1764	[Daniel Bayley], A New and Compleat Introduction to the Grounds and Rules of Musick (printed for Daniel Bayley of Newbury [port], 1764).
Bayley 1784	[Daniel Bayley], Select Harmony (Newburyport: Daniel Bayley, [1784]).
Bayley 1785	Daniel Bayley, The Essex Harmony (Newburyport: the Author and Son, 1785).
Benham 1790	Asahel Benham, Federal Harmony (New Haven: A. Morse, 1790).
Billings 1770	William Billings, The New-England Psalm-Singer (Boston: Edes and Gill, [1770]).
Billings 1778	William Billings, The Singing Master’s Assistant (Boston: Draper and Folsom, 1778).
Billings 1786	William Billings, The Suffolk Harmony (Boston: J. Norman, 1786).
Billings 1787	William Billings, An Anthem for Easter [Boston, 1787].
Brownson 1785	Oliver Brownson, Select Harmony [Connecticut, 1785].
Dawson 1754	William Dawson, The Youths Entertaining Amusement (Philadelphia: German Printing-Office, 1754).
Doolittle & Read 1786	[Amos Doolittle and Daniel Read], The American Musical Magazine (New Haven: Amos Doolittle & Daniel Read, [1786–1787]).
Flagg 1764	Josiah Flagg, A Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes (Boston: Paul Revere, 1764).
Flagg 1766	Josiah Flagg, Sixteen Anthems (Boston: Josiah Flagg, [1766]).
Holden 1793	Oliver Holden, The Union Harmony, vol. I (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1793).
Jocelin 1782	[Simeon Jocelin and Amos Doolittle], The Chorister’s Companion (New Haven: for Simeon Jocelin and Amos Doolittle, 1782).
Jocelin 1783	[Simeon Jocelin and Amos Doolittle], The Chorister’s Companion, pt. 3 (New Haven: T. and S. Green for Simeon Jocelin and Amos Doolittle, [1782–1783]).
Jocelin 1788	[Simeon Jocelin], The Chorister’s Companion, 2d ed. (New haven: Simeon Jocelin, 1788).
Johnston 1755	[Thomas Johnston, Tunes] (Boston: Thomas Johnston, 1755), 18 pp.
Johnston 1763	[Thomas Johnston, Tunes] (Boston, 1755 [i.e., 1763–1767]), 22 pp.
Law 1779	Andrew Law, Select Harmony ([Cheshire: William Law], 1779).
Law 1782	Andrew Law, Select Harmony [Cheshire: William Law, 1782].
Law 1783	Andrew Law, A Collection of Hymn Tunes (Cheshire: Wm. Law, [1783]).
Law 1786	Andrew Law, The Rudiments of Music, 2d ed. [Cheshire: William Law, 1786], 4, 48 pp.
Law 1787	Andrew Law, The Rudiments of Music, 2d ed. [Cheshire: William Law, ca. 1787], 4, [78] pp.
Lyon 1761	James Lyon, Urania (Philadelphia: [William Bradford], 1761).
Mass Comp 1795	[Hans Gram, Samuel Holyoke, and Oliver Holden], The Massachusetts Compiler (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1795).
Neu-vermehrt 1753	Reformed Dutch Church in the U.S., Neu-vermehrt- und vollständiges Gesang-Buch (Germantown, Pennsylvania: Christoph Saur, 1753).
Read 1785	Daniel Read, The American Singing Book (New Haven: for the author, 1785).
Shumway 1793		Nehemiah Shumway, The American Harmony (Philadelphia: John M’Culloch, 1793).
Shumway 1801		Nehemiah Shumway, The American Harmony, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: John M’Culloch, 1801).
Stickney 1783		John Stickney, The Gentleman and Lady’s Musical Companion (Newburyport: Daniel Bayley, [1783]).
Tans’ur 1767		William Tans’ur, The Royal Melody Complete, 3d ed. (Boston: W. M’Alpine, 1767).
Tufts 1723		John Tufts, An Introduction to the Art of Singing Psalm-Tunes, 3d ed. (Boston: T. Fleet for S. Gerrish, 1723).
Tufts 1726		John Tufts, An Introduction to the Singing of Psalm-Tunes, 5th ed. (Boston: for Samuel Gerrish, 1726).
Village Harmony 1796		The Village Harmony, 2d ed. (Exeter, N.H.: Henry Ranlet, 1796).
Walter 1721		Thomas Walter, The Grounds and Rules of Musick (Boston: J. Franklin for S. Gerrish, 1721).
Walter 1760		Thomas Walter, The Grounds and Rules of Musick (Boston: Benjamin Mecom, 1760).
Williams 1769		Aaron Williams, Universal Psalmodist (Newburyport: Daniel Bayley, 1769). Part 2 of Bayley’s The American Harmony, 5th ed. (Newburyport: Daniel Bayley, 1769).

composers of core repertory tunes

The biographical summaries below are consistent with each other only up to a point. All begin with the composer’s name, or as much of it as is known, the place and date of his birth and death if these are known (if they are not, an educated guess is offered as well as the years of active life). His occupations and activities follow. The rest of the entry focuses upon the publication history of the composer’s music. That information has been compiled from the index mentioned in footnote 2, above. Readers will find accounts of the better-known figures in DAB (Dictionary of American Bibliography), Metcalf (Frank J. Metcalf, American Writers and Compilers of Sacred Music [New York, 1925; repr. 1967]), or in specialized articles or studies whose titles are given in full at the end of the biographical sketch. Accounts of lesser known figures give as much detail as possible and are also documented at the end.

William BILLINGS (b. Boston, Massachusetts, October 7, 1746; d. Boston, September 26, 1800), tanner, writer, singing master, and compiler. He was a lifetime Bostonian, though he conducted a few singing schools in communities outside the city. Billings’ first publication, The New-England Psalm-Singer (Boston, 1770) (see figs. 333 and 334), contained 126 of his own compositions and increased tenfold the number of American sacred compositions published at that time. There followed The Singing Master’s Assistant (1778, with three more editions by ca. 1790), Music in Miniature (1779), The Psalm-Singer’s Amusement (1781), The Suffolk Harmony (1786), and The Continental Harmony (1794). At least half-a-dozen smaller occasional publications also appeared, all printed in Boston. Except for Music in Miniature all of the tunebooks were devoted entirely to Billings’ music. His published compositions number more than 300, including some 50 anthems. From late in the 1770s when American compilers began to print American tunes, Billings’ tunebooks, particularly the Singing Master’s Assistant, were prime sources. A vigorous, earthy writer in his tunebook instructions, Billings briefly edited The Boston Magazine (1783) and wrote at least one prose pamphlet, The Porcupine, alias the Hedge-Hog (Boston, 1784), under a pseudonym. His later years were marked by financial difficulties, and he died in poverty.

Bibl.—DAB; Metcalf; Carl E. Lindstrom, “William Billings and His Times,” Musical Quarterly, xxv, no. 4 (October 1939); J. Murray Barbour, The Church Music of William Billings (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972); David P. McKay and Richard Crawford, William Billings of Boston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Hans Nathan, William Billings: Data and Documents (Detroit: Information Coordinators, 1976); The Complete Works of William Billings, ed. Hans Nathan and Karl Kroeger, 4 vols. (American Musicological Society & Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1977–); New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan Publishers; Washington: Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, 1980), ii, 703–705.

Oliver BROWNSON (bapt. Bolton, Connecticut, July 8, 1746; d. Smithfield, New York, October 1815), singing master and compiler. He was mentioned as “Oliver Brunson, singing-master, Litchfield” in the Norwich Packet, February 16, 1775. Andrew Law’s Select Harmony (Cheshire, 1779) includes Jubilee, Brownson’s earliest printed composition. In 1783 Brownson published a tunebook, also called Select Harmony, which, according to Frank Metcalf, was printed in New Haven. Of the 70 compositions in the work 37 were new American pieces, including 22 by the compiler himself. Brownson revised the Select Harmony in 1785, replacing some familiar English tunes with new American pieces. According to Hartford’s Connecticut Courant for December 12, 1785, the revision was available at “Brownson and Benham’s New Hartford.” Brownson and Asahel Benham (1754–1803), composer and tunebook compiler born in New Hartford, were apparently partners in a brief business venture. Another issue of the Select Harmony, although still dated 1783 on the title page, came out around 1790. Brownson was married in Simsbury in 1774, lived in New Hartford from ca. 1779 to 1783 and again in 1786, and in Simsbury and West Simsbury from ca. 1783 to 1785 and 1787 to 1797. His second tunebook, A New Collection of Sacred Harmony (1797), “printed and sold, by the author at his dwelling house,” bears a Simsbury imprint. Roughly a third of A New Collection is devoted to original pieces, including 3 new tunes by Brownson himself, which brings to 33 the number of his published compositions. Brownson later moved with his family to Peterboro, New York, west of Utica, and he has not been traced between the time of the move and his death. He was a Baptist and the father of Greene Carrier Bronson (1789–1863), Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York from 1845 to 1851.

Bibl.—Metcalf; Connecticut Magazine, vii (1902), 3–4, 196; M. M. Bagg, The Pioneers of Utica (Utica: Curtiss & Childs, 1877), p. 604; death noted in Hartford, Connecticut Courant, June 4, 1816. Ruth Mack Wilson, with the assistance of Kate Van Winkle Keller, Connecticut’s Music in the Revolutionary Era (Hartford: American Revolution Bicentennial Commission of Connecticut, 1979), p. 54, dates Brownson’s birth May 13, 1746, but without documentation.

Amos BULL (b. Enfield, Connecticut, February 9, 1744; d. Hartford, August 28, 1825), storekeeper, school master, singing master, compiler. Bull was the first to propose the publication of sacred music in Connecticut. New Haven’s Connecticut Gazette, November 15, 1766, carried his advertisement for subscribers to the planned New Universal Psalmodist, which was to contain an introduction, a “Number of the most celebrated Psalm Tunes, collected from Arnold, Tans’ur, Lyon, Williams, etc. with some entirely new” and “a Number of Services, Chants, Hymns, Anthems, and Canons, suited to several occasions, never before printed.” The work apparently was never published. In 1774 Bull, who claimed he had “for many years taught psalmody in several parts of New England,” advertised for singing scholars in Holt’s New-York Journal for November 24, 1774. Apparently he had some success, for the Norwich Packet for February 16, 1775, lists a “Mr. Bull, Singing Master, New York.” In the meantime his Psalm 122 had appeared in John Stickney’s The Gentleman and Lady’s Musical Companion (Newburyport, 1774), though without attribution, and Andrew Law included 4 tunes by Bull in his Select Harmony (Cheshire, 1779). In 1795 Bull, then a storekeeper in his mid-fifties, compiled and had published in Worcester his only tunebook. The Responsary contained 65 pieces, 49 by Bull himself, 12 of which were anthems. In 1805, Bull advertised a “school for Reading, Writing and Arithmetick.” He seems to have remained active as a composer rather late in life. A previously unpublished tune, Immortality, was attributed to him in Griswold, Jenks, and Frisbie’s The Hartford Collection (Hartford: Lincoln and Gleason) in 1807; and three more new tunes were assigned to him in Little and Smith’s The Easy Instructor (Albany: Websters &; Skinner and Daniel Steele, [1808–1810]): Piermont, Psalm 23, and Psalm 29. When he died in Hartford, he had lived there for at least the last thirty years.

Bibl.—Metcalf; Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790, Connecticut volume (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1908), p. 46, col. 3; Amos Bull File, Connecticut Historical Commission, Hartford; Wilson, Connecticut’s Music, pp. 52–54.

[Elihu] CARPENTER (b. Rehoboth, Massachusetts, December 18, 1752; d. probably after 1804). A copy of Jocelin and Doolittle’s The Chorister’s Companion (New Haven, 1782) in Yale University’s Beinecke Library is inscribed “Elihu Carpenter of Rehoboth his Book given him by the authors. May 13, 1783,” suggesting the identity of the Carpenter to whom 8 different tunes in the repertory are attributed. All of Carpenter’s compositions appeared first in Connecticut tunebooks: one in Law’s Select Harmony (Cheshire, 1779); 2 in Jocelin & Doolittle’s The Chorister’s Companion, pt. 3 (New Haven, 1783); 2 more, including an anthem, in Langdon’s Beauties of Psalmody (New Haven, 1786); another in The American Musical Magazine (New Haven, 1786–1787), and 2 in Read’s The Columbian Harmonist, 2d ed., and its Supplement (Dedham, 1804; compiled in New Haven). In view of this printing history it seems likely that Carpenter was a Connecticut man by residence, if not by birth.

Bibl.—Wilson, Connecticut’s Music, pp. 106, 130.

Solomon CHANDLER (b. Enfield, Connecticut, January 17, 1756; d. probably in or after 1804, place unknown). In American tunebooks printed before 1811, 10 compositions were attributed to Chandler, identified in Andrew Law’s The Musical Primer (Cambridge, 1803) as S. Chandler. Most likely he was the Solomon Chandler who on October 23, 1780, was chosen “chorister” at a meeting of the First Ecclesiastical Society, Enfield, Connecticut. Solomon Chandler’s name appears in the Enfield town records over the next decade-and-a-half, being last mentioned on February 11, 1794. A memoir of the daughter of New England composer Timothy Swan fills in further details of Chandler’s life:

Father was well acquainted with Chandler who made several tunes tho’ he was no singer. He has the credit of making Enfield—The silver moon rolls clear—He lived in Enfield [Connecticut.] Tailor by trade[.] By some it is said that two others assisted Chandler in making the tune of Enfield[.] Tis a sweetly soft air.

Chandler’s first appearance in print was in Brownson’s Select Harmony (n.p., 1783). He also contributed a newly published tune to Langdon’s Beauties of Psalmody (New Haven, 1786), which, like Brownson’s work, was devoted mostly to a Connecticut repertory. No new music of Chandler’s appeared again until 1795, when 2 collections were published in Lansingburgh, New York: Nathaniel Billings’ The Republican Harmony and Thomas Atwill’s The New-York Collection. These publications added 5 new pieces to the repertory, including the anthem “Hear O ye heavens.” The titles of 2 of the Chandler tunes in Atwill’s work, Poughkeepsie and Westpoint, suggest that Chandler was then living in New York State. This suggestion is strengthened by the disappearance of Chandler’s name from the Enfield records, and by the title of his last published composition, Hudson, printed in Atwill’s The New York & Vermont Collection, 2d ed. (Albany, 1804).

Bibl.—Francis Olcott Allen, The History of Enfield, Connecticut (Lancaster, Pa.: Wickersham Printing Co., 1900), pp. 1668, 2537, 1241 (see also pp. 458, 1016, 1038, 1040, 1044, 1046, 1198 for other references to Chandler); Emily Cordelia Swan, “Memoir of Timothy Swan, March–August, 1842” (Timothy Swan Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts).

DEAOLPH (fl. Connecticut, 1775–1793). The genealogical index at the Newberry Library lists a DeWolf family in Connecticut which sometimes used the variant spelling Deaolph. Three and possibly four men with the surname Deaolph and some tie to music were named in Connecticut newspapers of the 1770s. In the Norwich Packet, February 16, 1775, Oliver King included “Mr. Charles Deaolph, Singing Master, Brookline” and “Mr. Deaolph, Singing Master, Preston” in the list of agents taking subscriptions to his proposed Universal Harmony. And when Andrew Law advertised his forthcoming Select Harmony in New London’s Connecticut Gazetteer, July 10, 1778, “Mark Anthony Deaolph, at Chelsea in Norwich” and “Amasa Deaolph of Pomfret” were among those handling subscriptions. Charles (b. April 19, 1747), Amasa (b. December 26, 1748), and Mark Anthony were all sons of Simon DeWolf of Middletown, Connecticut. When Select Harmony (Cheshire, 1779) was published it included 2 tunes attributed to Deaolph. A third new composition, this one attributed to “Deolph,” appeared in Nehemiah Shumway’s The American Harmony (Philadelphia, 1793), a work which despite its place of publication introduced a large number of New England tunes into print.

Bibl.—Calbraith B. Perry, Charles D’Wolf of Guadeloups, his Ancestors and Descendants (New York, 1902), p. 122; Wilson, Connecticut’s Music, pp. 88, 126.

Lewis EDSON (b. Bridgewater, Massachusetts, January 22, 1748; d. Mink Hollow, New York, 1820), blacksmith and singing master. He served briefly in the British Army in the early 1760s, worked at his blacksmith’s trade, and from 1769 to 1776 taught singing in Halifax, Massachusetts. Shortly after the Revolutionary War broke out he moved to Lanesboro in the western part of the state. Simeon P. Cheney, in The American Singing Book (Boston, 1879), claims that Edson’s Tory politics dictated the move. Jocelin and Doolittle’s The Chorister’s Companion (New Haven, 1782) contains his earliest published compositions, including Bridgewater, Greenfield, and Lenox, the 3 American-composed fuging-tunes most frequently printed during the period. Other new tunes by Edson appeared in part 3 of The Chorister’s Companion (New Haven, 1783) and Asahel Benham’s Federal Harmony (New Haven, 1790). In 1791 Edson sold his land in Lanesboro and crossed the border into New York State. His whereabouts cannot be traced until 1806, when he settled in Mink Hollow for the rest of his life. However, new tunes by Edson appeared in the meantime: 1 in Andrew Law’s The Rudiments of Music, 4th ed. (Cheshire, 1792), 3 more in Thomas Atwill’s The New-York Collection (Lansingburgh, 1795), and 13 in Lewis Edson, Jr.’s The Social Harmonist, 2d ed. (New York, 1801), bringing the catalogue of Edson’s published compositions to 25.

Bibl.—Irving Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: Norton, 1964), ch. 9, “The Musical Edsons of Shady: Early American Tune-smiths.”

Alexander GILLET (b. Granby, Connecticut, August 14, 1749; d. Torrington, Connecticut, January 19, 1826), clergyman and musician, graduated from Yale in 1770, studied theology, was pastor in Wolcott, Connecticut, from 1773 to 1791, and from 1792 until his death served as minister of the First Congregational Church in Torrington. Gillet wrote both poetry and music, and he played the bass viol. Andrew Law published 4 of his psalm tunes in Select Harmony (Cheshire, 1779) and many more appeared in the various editions of Law’s The Rudiments of Music and The Christian Harmony. Thomas Atwill’s The New-York Collection (Lansingburgh, 1795) contained 10 new tunes by Gillet, and evidence of his continued activity as a composer during the nineteenth century is found in The Hartford Collection compiled by Elijah Griswold, Stephen Jenks, and John Frisbie (Hartford, 1807), which includes 3 previously unpublished psalm tunes by Gillet. In all, 35 of Gillet’s compositions appeared in print before 1810.

Bibl.—Arthur Goodenough, The Clergy of Litchfield County (n.p.: Litchfield University Club, 1909), pp. 77–80.

Ezra GOFF (b. Rehoboth, Massachusetts, May 26, 1760; d. after ca. 1807) was a fifer in the Continental Army, in which he served from 1776 to 1780. He first broke into print as a composer in The Worcester Collection, pt. 3 (Worcester, 1786). Goff contributed another new tune to Nehemiah Shumway’s The American Harmony (Philadelphia, 1793). After more than a decade without the appearance of a new piece, Daniel Read’s The Columbian Harmonist, 2d ed. (Dedham, 1804), introduced another new tune by Goff and the Supplement to the same work included 1 more. Later, 9 previously unpublished tunes appeared in Daniel Belknap’s The Village Compilation (Boston, 1806). Finally, Goff himself published Dedication Anthem (Boston, ca. 1807), an eight-page pamphlet with 2 more of his tunes, bringing to 14 the total number of his published compositions. Dedication Anthem, written for chorus and instruments, bears the inscription “Respectfully presented to the Musical Society in Dorchester, by the Author.”

Bibl.—Birth date from James Arnold, Vital Record of Rehoboth (Providence: Narragansett Historical Publishing Co., 1897), p. 620; Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, vi, 535–536.

Oliver HOLDEN (b. Shirley, Massachusetts, September 18, 1765; d. Charlestown, Massachusetts, September 4, 1844) (fig. 340), carpenter, storekeeper, member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1818–1833), was active as a composer and a compiler in Boston for two decades beginning late in the 1780s. The Federal Harmony (Boston, [1788]) was the earliest work to print any of his music. It contained Alstead, Hollis, and New Canaan, all without attribution but assigned to Holden in later works. Early in the 1790s Holden issued the first of his own tunebooks through the Boston press of Thomas and Andrews: the entirely original American Harmony (1792), and the eclectic Union Harmony, vols. i and ii (1793; later editions of vol. i, 1796, 1801). Together with Hans Gram and Samuel Holyoke, Holden brought out The Massachusetts Compiler (Boston, 1795), a powerful force in the movement toward musical reform. In 1797 he was made editor of The Worcester Collection, then in its sixth edition, and he supervised it through its eighth and final edition (1803). Holden compiled several more tunebooks, including The Modern Collection and Plain Psalmody (1800) and The Charlestown Collection (1803). His own catalogue of published compositions numbers at least 235, of which some 25 are anthems and set-pieces. See figure 361 for an illustration of the chamber organ he owned by “Astor & Comp^y,” London, 1796–1815.

Bibl.—DAB; Metcalf; David McCormick, “Oliver Holden, Composer and Anthologist” (Union Theological Seminary, S.M.D. diss., 1963); New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, viii, 643–644.

Jeremiah INGALLS (b. Andover, Massachusetts, March 1, 1764; d. Hancock, Vermont, April 6, 1838), cooper, tavernkeeper, singing master, and compiler. Ingalls came to Newbury, Vermont, in the 1780s. There he married, inheriting a farm from his wife’s parents. Financial difficulties forced him to leave Newbury around 1810, and he moved his large family westward to Hancock. His first published compositions appeared in The Village Harmony (Exeter, N.H.): 3 in the second edition (1796) and another in the fifth (1800). In 1805 Ingalls compiled and published his own tunebook, The Christian Harmony (Exeter, 1805). In the preface he wrote of the provenance of the music: “some being wholly, and some in part, the original composition of the Author, and others selected from various authors.” Ingalls left the matter there and did not bother to give the sources of individual tunes, so it is hard to determine precisely how many can be added to the 4 tunes he had composed earlier himself. Ingalls’ claim that some tunes are “in part” original points to the most unusual trait of The Christian Harmony: the melodies of some of the pieces are drawn from secular folk song. Ingalls was not the first New Englander to print folk hymns (secular folk tunes sung to sacred words), but he was the first to devote a large proportion of a tunebook to them. In doing so he anticipated many later southern compilers who were wont to make original settings of melodies from the oral tradition, rather than composing three- and four-voice polyphonic compositions from scratch, as was customary in the North. Ingalls’ The Christian Harmony proves that the folk song repertory circulating in Vermont around the turn of the century had tunes in common with an oral tradition that extended southward.

Fig. 340. Portrait of Oliver Holden (1765–1844) of Charlestown, Massachusetts, by Ethan Allen Greenwood, Hubbardstown, Massachusetts.

Bibl.—Simeon P. Cheney, American Singing Book (Boston: White, Smith and Co., 1879), pp. 177–178; Frederic P. Wells, History of Newbury, Vermont (St. Johnsbury: Caledonian Co., 1902), pp. 580–582; David Klocko, “Jeremiah Ingalls’ The Christian Harmony” (University of Michigan, Ph.D. diss., 1978).

Oliver KING (b. Bolton, Connecticut, February 22, 1748; d. Bolton, July 6, 1818), singing master. The Norwich Packet, February 16, 1775, carried a long and detailed proposal for the publication of a tunebook to be called The Universal Harmony. The proposal was signed by Oliver King of Bolton, Connecticut, who identified himself as having “for several years past been employed in teaching Psalmody.” King’s proposal named seven other singing masters commissioned to receive subscriptions for the collection, including Oliver Brownson, Jonathan Benjamin, Amos Bull, and Andrew Law, who were to publish their own tunebooks in due course. King’s The Universal Harmony was apparently never printed. The core repertory tune Suffield in Law’s Select Harmony (Cheshire, 1779), assigned to an “unknown” composer in the first edition, was attributed to “King” in the second [1782]. Another new tune by King was introduced in Brownson’s Select Harmony (1783); and more than two decades later Stephen Jenks’ The Delights of Harmony (Dedham, 1805) contained a new set-piece attributed to O. King. In the meantime, Law had assigned a new piece in A Collection of Hymn Tunes (Cheshire, [1783]) to “A. King,” and 2 more new pieces are attributed to A. King in Thomas Atwill’s The New-York Collection (Lansingburgh, 1795), which also contains an attribution to O. King. Law, who first mentioned A. King in 1783, continued in The Rudiments of Music, 3d ed. (Cheshire, [1791]), to attribute Suffield to King without first initial, and thus it can with some assurance be credited to Oliver King.

Bibl.—Birth and death dates from Vital Records of Bolton to 1854 and Vernon to 1852 (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1909), pp. 35, 178; Wilson, Connecticut’s Music, pp. 54–55.

Justin MORGAN (b. West Springfield, Massachusetts, February 28, 1747; d. Randolph, Vermont, March 22, 1798), horse trader, singing master. He moved to Vermont in 1788, and served from 1790 until 1793 as town clerk in Randolph. Asahel Benham’s Federal Harmony (New Haven, 1790) marks Morgan’s debut in print; 8 of his compositions are published there. Another tune appeared in Andrew Adgate’s Philadelphia Harmony, pt. 2 (Philadelphia, 1791), bringing the list of Morgan’s published compositions to 9. Harmony, published without attribution in Jacob French’s The Psalmodist’s Companion (Boston, 1793), is credited to Morgan in Jonathan Huntington’s The Albany Collection (Albany, 1800); likewise, Silver Spring is attributed to Morgan in Little and Smith’s The Easy Instructor (Philadelphia, [1801]). Since attributions in The Easy Instructor are unreliable, the latter is not likely; that Morgan composed Harmony, however, remains a good possibility.

Bibl.—DAB; Metcalf; Betty Bandel, Sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: The Life of Justin Morgan (Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981).

Daniel READ (b. Attleboro, Massachusetts, November 16, 1757; d. New Haven, Connecticut, December 4, 1836), storekeeper, singing master, and compiler, settled in New Haven before the end of the Revolutionary War and spent the rest of his life there. Read’s first published compositions appeared in Jocelin and Doolittle’s The Chorister’s Companion (New Haven, 1782; also pt. 3, 1783). With The American Singing Book (New Haven, 1785; five editions by 1795) Read became the first American after William Billings to offer a collection devoted entirely to his own compositions. From 1786 to 1787 he and Amos Doolittle of New Haven issued The American Musical Magazine in twelve numbers. This was the earliest musical periodical published in the English-speaking colonies. From 1793 until 1810 Read published a number of tunebooks under the general title The Columbian Harmonist. Eclectic in content, The Columbian Harmonist included new music by Read and other Americans, as well as established American and English favorites. Read’s involvement with psalmody continued to the end of his life. In his later years he came to agree in part with advocates of stylistic reform, even though his own earlier compositions were the target of some of the reformers’ criticism. Some 85 compositions by Read appeared in print.

Bibl.—DAB; Metcalf; Irving Lowens, “Daniel Read’s World,” Notes, ix, no. 2 (Mar. 1952), reprinted in altered form in Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (Norton, 1964); Vinson Clair Bushnell, “Daniel Read of New Haven (1757–1836): The Man and His Musical Activities” (Harvard University, Ph.D. diss., 1978); New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, xv, 631–632.

Timothy SWAN (b. Worcester, Massachusetts, July 23, 1758; d. Northfield, Massachusetts, July 23, 1842) (fig. 341), hatter, sometime poet, singing master, and compiler, spent most of his first two decades in Worcester, moved to Suffield, Connecticut, where he lived from 1780 to 1807, then settled for the rest of his life in Northfield, Massachusetts. Swan’s personal papers report that he received all of his musical training in singing schools while still in his teens. In 1783 a revised issue of John Stickney’s The Gentleman and Lady’s Musical Companion appeared in Newburyport. It included, though without attribution, Swan’s Montague. Law’s Rudiments of Music, 2d ed. (Cheshire, [1786]), contained another tune by Swan, this time credited to the composer. On December 5, 1785, the Connecticut Courant advertised a new issue of Oliver Brownson’s Select Harmony, to which “a number [7] of tune[s] . . . have been lately added by the ingenious Mr. Swan.” New tunes by Swan appeared during the 1790s in tunebooks of Connecticut provenance: Asahel Benham’s Federal Harmony (New Haven, 1790); Alexander Ely’s The Baltimore Collection (Baltimore, 1792) issued during a relatively brief sojourn in Baltimore; and Brownson’s A New Collection (Simsbury, 1797). Ely, a Connecticut native, engraved Swan’s The Songsters Assistant, a collection of secular songs. (See figure 412 for an illustration of its title page.) In 1801 Swan gathered together his unpublished sacred compositions, added them to the pieces he had already published, and brought out New England Harmony (Northampton), containing 63 of his own compositions. There is no record that he published any more psalmody, but he maintained interest in both sacred and secular music, and in poetry for the rest of his life.

Bibl.—DAB; Metcalf; Sterling E. Murray, “Timothy Swan and Yankee Psalmody,” Musical Quarterly, lxi, no. 3 (July 1975); Guy Bedford Webb, “Timothy Swan: Yankee Tunesmith” (University of Illinois, D.M.A. diss., 1972); for information on Alexander Ely see New England Historical and Genealogical Register, ii, 326, and Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, v, 335–336.

Abraham WOOD (b. Northborough, Massachusetts, July 30, 1752; d. North-borough, August 4, 1804), a fuller of cloth, singing master, and compiler, was a soldier in the American Revolution, served on the Committee of Correspondence, and was captain of a company of militia after the war. An obituary notice in Worcester’s Massachusetts Spy, August 15, 1804, reports that he had been “an author of Music, and leader of the singers” in Northborough for 32 years, or since 1772. Solomon Howe’s The Farmer’s Evening Entertainment (Northampton, 1804) confirms Wood’s early emergence as a composer: “Mr. Wm. Billings and Capt. Abrm. Wood were first Authors of Note in America, Anno. 1770, &c.” Wood’s earliest published compositions appeared in 1779 in Andrew Law’s Select Harmony (Cheshire, [1786]) which included his Worcester and Billings’ Music in Miniature (Boston, 1779) which contained Royalston. The latter is the only tune directly attributed to another composer in any of Billings’ collections. Wood himself put out an eight-page work, A Hymn on Peace (Boston, 1784). Boston’s Independent Chronicle, May 6, 1784, lists Billings as the local seller of this item. Wood later contributed several new tunes to The Worcester Collection (Worcester, 1786), published the secular “Ode on Spring” in The Massachusetts Magazine (May 1789), and brought out Divine Songs (Boston, 1789) containing 11 original compositions. In 1793 Wood and Joseph Stone of Ward, Massachusetts, compiled The Columbian Harmony, a large collection devoted mostly to their own music, but including as well pieces by other central Massachusetts composers. Wood issued A Funeral Elegy on the Death of General George Washington (Boston, 1800) and contributed some new tunes to Daniel Belknap’s The Evangelical Harmony (Boston, 1800). The former was republished many years later in “adapted” form for “the funeral solemnities of W. H. Harrison, 1844.” (See Abraham Wood, A Funeral Elegy, Originally Composed and Used on the Death of General G. Washington, 1799 [Boston: A. B. Kidder, 1859]; copy in the Massachusetts Historical Society.) In all, 48 printed compositions, including 2 secular pieces, can be traced to Wood.

Bibl.—Metcalf.

Fig. 341. Portrait of Timothy Swan (1758–1842) of Suffield, Connecticut, by an unknown artist, United States ca. 1790.

bibliography of composers of core repertory tunes

Adgate, Andrew. Philadelphia Harmony, pt. 2. [Philadelphia, 1791.]

Atwill, Thomas H. The New-York Collection of Sacred Harmony. Lasingburgh, New York: William W. Wands, 1795.

Atwill, Thomas H. The New York & Vermont Collection of Sacred Harmony. 2d ed. Albany: [B. Buckley, 1804].

[Bayley, Daniel.] The American Harmony. Containing William Tans’ur, Royal Melody Complete, and A. Williams, Universal Psalmodist. 5th ed., 2 vols. Newburyport: Daniel Bayley, 1769.

Belknap, Daniel. The Evangelical Harmony. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1800.

Belknap, Daniel. The Village Compilation. Boston: J. T. Buckingham, 1806.

Billings, Nathaniel. The Republican Harmony. Lasingburgh, New York: Silvester Tiffany, 1795.

[Billings, William, ed.] The Boston Magazine, vol. I, no. 1 (October 1783). Boston: Norman & White.

Billings, William. The Continental Harmony. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1794.

Billings, William. Music in Miniature. Boston: William Billings, 1779.

[Billings, William.] The Porcupine, alias the Hedge-Hog: or, Fox turned Preacher. Boston: Benjamin Edes & Sons, 1784.

Billings, William. The Psalm-Singer’s Amusement. Boston: the author, [1781].

Billings, William. The Singing Master’s Assistant. [2d ed.] Boston: Draper and Folsom, [1779–1780].

Billings, William. The Singing Master’s Assistant. 3d ed. Boston: Draper and Folsom, 1781.

Billings, William. The Singing Master’s Assistant. 4th ed. [Boston]: E. Russell, [1786–1789].

Brownson, Oliver. A New Collection of Sacred Harmony. Simsbury: the author, 1797.

Brownson, Oliver. Select Harmony. [4th issue.] N.p., 1783 [recte, 1789–1791].

Bull, Amos. The Responsary. Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, 1795.

Cheney, Simeon Pease. The American Singing Book. Boston: White, Smith and Company, 1879. Reprinted, with an introduction by Karl Kroeger, New York: Da Capo Press, 1980.

[Doolittle, Amos, and Daniel Read.] The American Musical Magazine, nos. 1–12. New Haven: Amos Doolittle & Daniel Read, [1786–1787].

Edson, Lewis, Jr. The Social Harmonist. 2d ed. New York, 1801.

Ely, Alexander. The Baltimore Collection of Church Music. Baltimore: John Hagerty, 1792.

The Federal Harmony. Boston: for the editor, and sold by John Norman, [1788].

[Flagg, Josiah.] Sixteen Anthems. Boston: Josiah Flagg, [1766].

French, Jacob. The Psalmodist’s Companion. Worcester: Leonard Worcester for Isaiah Thomas, 1793.

Goff, Ezra. Dedication Anthem. Boston: Manning & Loring, [ca. 1807].

[Gram, Hans, Samuel Holyoke, and Oliver Holden.] The Massachusetts Compiler of Theoretical and Practical Elements of Sacred Vocal Music. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, [1795].

Griswold, Elijah, Stephen Jenks, and John C. Frisbie. The Hartford Collection of Sacred Harmony. Hartford: Lincoln and Gleason, 1807.

Holden, Oliver. American Harmony. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1792.

Holden, Oliver. The Charlestown Collection of Sacred Songs. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1803.

[Holden, Oliver.] The Modern Collection of Sacred Music. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1800.

Holden, Oliver. Plain Psalmody, or Supplementary Music. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1800.

Holden, Oliver. The Union Harmony. 2d ed. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1796.

Holden, Oliver. The Union Harmony. 3d ed. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1801.

Holden, Oliver. The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony. 6th ed. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1797.

Holden, Oliver. The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony. 7th ed. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1800.

Holden, Oliver. The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony. 8th ed. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1803.

Holden, Oliver. See also Gram et al, The Massachusetts Compiler.

Ingalls, Jeremiah. The Christian Harmony. Exeter: Henry Ranlet, for the compiler, 1805.

[Jocelin, Simeon, and Amos Doolittle.] The Chorister’s Companion, pt. 3. New Haven: T. and S. Green, for Simeon Jocelin and Amos Doolittle, [1782–1783].

[Langdon, Chauncey.] Beauties of Psalmody. [New Haven, 1786.]

Law, Andrew. The Art of Singing, pt. 1: The Musical Primer. 4th ed. Cambridge: W. Hilliard, 1803.

Law, Andrew. The Rudiments of Music. 2d ed. N.p., [1786].

Little, William, and William Smith. The Easy Instructor. [Philadelphia, 1801.]

The Massachusetts Harmony. Boston: for John Norman, [1784].

Read, Daniel. The American Singing Book. 2d ed. New Haven: for the author, 1786.

Read, Daniel. The American Singing Book. 3d ed., with Supplement to the American Singing Book. New Haven: for the author, 1787.

Read, Daniel. The American Singing Book. 4th ed. New Haven: for the author, [1793].

Read, Daniel. The American Singing Book. 5th ed. New Haven: for the author, [1796].

Read, Daniel. The Columbian Harmonist, no. 1. New Haven: for the editor, [1793].

Read, Daniel. The Columbian Harmonist, no. 2. New Haven: for the editor, [1794].

Read, Daniel. The Columbian Harmonist, no. 3. New Haven: published by Daniel Read, [1795].

Read, Daniel. The Columbian Harmonist. 2d ed. Dedham: H. Mann, 1804 [recte, 1805].

Read, Daniel. The Columbian Harmonist. 3d ed. Dedham: H. Mann, 1806.

Read, Daniel. The Columbian Harmonist. 3d ed. Boston: Manning and Loring, 1807.

Read, Daniel. The Columbian Harmonist. 4th ed. Boston: Manning and Loring, 1810.

Stickney, John. The Gentleman and Lady’s Musical Companion. Newburyport: Daniel Bayley, 1774.

Stickney, John. The Gentleman and Lady’s Musical Companion. Newburyport: Daniel Bayley, [1783].

Stone, Joseph, and Abraham Wood. The Columbian Harmony. N.p., [1793].

Swan, Timothy. New England Harmony. Northampton: Andrew Wright, 1801.

Swan, T[imothy]. The Songster’s Assistant. Suffield: Swan and Ely, n.d. [ca. 1800?].

Thomas, Isaiah. See The Worcester Collection.

[Tufts, John.] An Introduction to the Art of Singing Psalm-Tunes. Boston: T. Fleet, for Samuel Gerrish, 1723.

(N.B. The 5th ed., mentioned in the text, is entitled An Introduction to the Singing of Psalm-Tunes.)

White, Benjamin Franklin, and E. J. King. The Sacred Harp. Philadelphia: B. F. White and Joel King, 1844.

Wood, Abraham. Divine Songs. Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1789.

Wood, Abraham. A Funeral Elegy on the Death of General George Washington. Boston: Isaiah Thomas & Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1800.

Wood, Abraham. A Hymn on Peace. N.p., [1784].

The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony. Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, 1786.

The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony, pt. 3. Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, [1786].

The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony. 2d ed. Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, 1788.

The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony. 3d ed. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1791.

The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony. 4th ed. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1792.

The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony. 5th ed. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1794.

1 Oscar George Theodore Sonneck in his landmark volume Early Concert-Life in America (Leipzig, 1907; repr. Wiesbaden: Dr. Martin Sändig oHG, 1969), pp. 250–251, identified the earliest concert in America as the one advertised in the Boston News-Letter for December 16, 1731, under the direction of Peter Pelham. On pp. 1–9 he also discusses the advent of public concerts in England and Europe and cites a London tavern as the location for the first concert to which the audience had to pay an admission fee; he credits the initiative for it to John Banister in 1672.

2 The revisions were published in the Bay Psalm Book (Cambridge, 1640).

3 Among these music historians are George Hood, F. L. Ritter, L. C. Elson, Daniel Gregory Mason, Albert Stoessel, Deems Taylor, Paul Henry Lang, John Tasker Howard, and Cyclone Covey supported by Walter Muir Whitehill.

4 Although Sonneck’s book Early Concert-Life in America dealt with a later episode in the history of American music, he was the first major scholar to recognize that there had been a musical culture in the fledgling years of the colonies. Other authors who supported the counter-movement were Henry Davey, Gilbert Chase, Irving Lowens, Robert Stevenson, Irving Sablonsky, and H. Wiley Hitchcock.

5 Percy Scholes, The Puritans and Music in England and New England (Oxford, 1934; repr. 1969); Henry Wilder Foote, “Musical Life in Boston in the Eighteenth Century,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, New Ser., xlix (1939), 293–313.

6 The cutoff point of £200 was suggested by a colonial law of 1651 concerning apparel, amended in 1662, which specified that “no person within this Jurisdiction, . . . whose visible estates real and personal, shall . . . exceed the true and indifferent value of two hundred pounds, . . . shall exceed their ranks and abilities, in the costliness of fashion of their Apparel in any respect, especially in the wearing of Ribbonds or great Boots, (Leather being so scarce a commodity in this Country) Lace, Points, &c. Silk Hoods, or Scarfes . . .” (William H. Whitmore, The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts [Boston, 1890], pp. 5–6).

7 Scholes, Puritans and Music, p. 206.

8 Scholes, Puritans and Music, p. 291–292.

9 Scholes, Puritans and Music, p. 33, states that during his search of the Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 8 vols. (Salem: Essex Institute, 1911–1921), he found only one musical instrument, iii, 231; it belonged to Nathaniell Rogers of Rowley who died in 1654 [actually 1655]. Apparently Scholes did not search the Probate Records of Essex County, 1635–1681, 3 vols. (Salem: Essex Institute, 1916–1920), for among the many psalmbooks and bells, he could have located three citterns belonging to: Thomas Wells of Ipswich, d. 1666 (ii, 72); Samuel Winsley of Salisbury, d. 1667 (ii, 83); Jonathan Browne of Salem, d. 1667 (ii, 84); and “a drum & sticks” among the household items of Daniel Rolfe of Ipswich, d. 1654 (i, 176). These are included in Table I.

10 Scholes, Puritans and Music, pp. 36, 42–43.

11 This writer concurs with Abbott Lowell Cummings, Rural Household Inventories, (Boston, 1964), p. xiii, that the appraisers taking the inventory recorded items in the order they found them. This arrangement illuminates the colonists’ patterns of living.

12 In the case that a householder died intestate or with only a nuncupative will, the colonial Massachusetts law of 1641 regarding dowries allowed a wife one-third of her husband’s estate free and clear of any liens and incumbrances he might have incurred during his lifetime (Whitmore, Colonial Laws, p. 42). In this case the colonial laws of 1641 and 1649 concerning wills provided that the children’s inheritance be divided among them with a double portion for the eldest son. If both parents died intestate the county court of the jurisdiction in which they lived had the power to assign the portions among the children. If the children were all female they usually received equal shares (Whitmore, Colonial Laws, p. 158).

13 Thomas Bellows Wyman, Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown, in the County of Middlesex and Commonwealth of Massachusetts 1629–1818, 2 vols. (Boston, 1879), p. ix.

14 All existing household inventories for Suffolk and Middlesex Counties from 1630 to approximately 1730 were read (with occasional glances at wills) from the contemporary ledger copybooks on file in the two courthouses. When an instrument was located, the entry was checked against the original inventory taken in situ and preserved in the individual’s docket file. At that time all other papers found therein were searched as well. By this means, extant original wills for those individuals who owned instruments were read as well. Still there are instances where the original will has disappeared, but a record of it exists in the ledger books. Because the various documents were probated at different times, it is rare to find an individual’s inventory and will side-by-side in the ledgers. Although there are indexes for locating the records of an individual’s documents in the copy ledger books, those in the Suffolk County Probate Registry have a high incidence of inaccuracy.

For bibliography of the Essex records, see footnote 9.

15 Instead of assigning docket numbers in chronological order as the documents for each individual were filed, which was done for the Suffolk County Probate Court Records, the clerks for the Middlesex Court seem to have filed the dockets in alphabetical order without numbers until 1871. In this year, probably for the purpose of indexing the records, the clerks first numbered consecutively the dockets filed in alphabetical order, whereupon beginning with the year 1871 the docket numbering system was converted to a chronological one.

16 Reports of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, 39 vols. (Boston, 1876–1909), I, 5. Hereafter these Commissioners’ Reports will be abbreviated as BRC.

From John D. Cushing at the Massachusetts Historical Society it was learned that the clerks of probate often worked at home. Mr. Cushing also stated that in his extensive study of the incidence of fires in New England, 1630–1820 (a typescript is on deposit in the library at Sturbridge Village), there was virtually no building left standing by 1820 that had not burned at some time. This fact coupled with high tides and other natural disasters, and the scattered files of the clerks of courts for want of a single location in which to store the records, no doubt accounts in large part for the low percentage of records which have survived.

17 The Boston newspapers which have been searched for references to music and instruments from their inception through 1734 are: Boston News-Letter, beginning 1704; Boston Gazette, beginning 1719; New-England Corn ant, 1721–1726; and the New-England Journal, beginning 1727. All published Massachusetts diaries written prior to 1735 and listed in American Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of American Diaries Written Prior to the Year 1861, comp. William Matthews (Boston, 1959), have been read along with a number of unlisted ones both published and in manuscript.

18 Several entries are plural but do not specify exact numbers. See for example Increase Gatchell’s inventory (d. 1729) for number of flutes.

19 Excluded from the statistics are the listings of instruments in plural by Enstone and Hardcastle. The less familiar instruments will be described in detail later.

20 The phrase “with his music” in the seventeenth century commonly signified a musical ensemble. Sewall’s Diary entry for July 16, 1689, corroborates this usage of the word: “Saw London Artillery Company pass by about 2 aclock. . . . Had Musick besides the Drums” (The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. [New York, 1973], I, 228). Here “Musick” obviously refers to a band of music. See also OED, “music” entry.

21 See Table i for the inventories of John Paine, shopkeeper, and Robert Cutler, ironmonger, both deceased 1665.

22 See Table i for Increase Gatchell’s inventory, deceased 1729.

23 The Puritan and Separatist movements of Calvinists which came to the American continent held that each of its own congregations of believers was an autonomous body, but the movement was intolerant of other religious sects. Each Puritan congregation chose its own minister, and administered religious, moral, and sometimes civic discipline. In order to exploit the resources of the New World, the Crown gave the Puritan colonists full authority to govern all English subjects living in New England. Further, the Crown permitted the Massachusetts Bay Company to govern itself, and to locate both its headquarters and charter in New England. This freedom worked to the Company’s advantage, for the Crown had relinquished direct control over the Company’s charter and the activities of its servants, the colonists themselves. In his introduction to and compilation of The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, 1641–1691, 3 vols. (Wilmington, Del., 1976) 1, xiii–xiv, John D. Cushing compared the organization of the Company’s structure to a modern corporation: “the Governor had powers similar in many respects to those exercised by a modern chairman of the board; the eighteen Assistants might be compared roughly to a board of directors; while the Freemen, at least in the early days of the company, were actually the stockholders. These three elements, together with a Deputy Governor, were required to meet quarterly in a general court for the purpose of electing officers, admitting new members, and making necessary rules for the management of the company and the welfare of the people.”

24 In 1631 the second annual meeting of the General Court reelected John Winthrop as governor and unanimously approved an order of considerable consequence for the colony. Recorded in A Memorial History of Boston, ed. Justin Winsor, 4 vols. (Boston, 1880–1881), I, 118, it reads as follows: “And to the end that the body of the commons may be preserved of honest and good men, it was ordered and agreed that for time to come no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are members of some of the Churches within the limits of the same.” Controversy, protests, and conflict ensued, because the requirements of church membership for enfranchisement was not only in direct violation of the charter, but they created a religious elite which controlled the New England Commonwealth.

By the time Massachusetts Bay became a royal colony, the colonists had already established a firm social, political, and economic foothold for themselves. Winsor, Memorial History, I, 166, 199.

25 When an individual’s religious affiliation was not indicated the available original church records were searched. By this means a number of instrument owners’ religious connections were identified.

26 Cyclone Covey, “Puritanism and Music in Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3^rd Ser., viii (1951), 382.

27 Covey responded to the challenge and was supported by Walter Muir Whitehill. See letters to the editor of William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser., ix (1952), 129–133.

28 Mr. Whitehill read volumes iv–vii, covering graduates of the classes of 1690 through 1725, of Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College (Boston, 1933–1945), continued by Clifford K. Shipton and henceforth known as Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 17 vols. (Cambridge, C. W. Sever; Harvard University Press, 1873–1975). Mr. Whitehill’s participation in the controversy is to be found in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., ix (1952), 135.

29 Although one’s estate value is hardly a clear indication of one’s economic or social situation it is referred to here simply as another crumb of evidence in obtaining a clearer picture of the musical environment. In determining the owner’s social class, the writer has drawn the following monetary lines: below £200, lower middle class; £200–1,000, upper middle class; above £1,000, upper class.

30 The reader should be reminded that Table ii is based on literary references to musical instruments. This may tend to exaggerate the wealthier and/or better-educated component of owners, and, if so, it may create a class bias in the statistics.

31 The year he joined the Artillery Company.

32 The year he joined the Artillery Company.

33 The year he graduated from Harvard College.

34 The year he graduated from Harvard College.

35 The year he graduated from Harvard College.

36 The year he graduated from Harvard College.

37 The year he joined the Artillery Company.

38 The year he graduated from Harvard College.

39 The year he joined the Artillery Company.

40 The year he joined the Artillery Company.

41 The year he joined the Artillery Company.

42 The year he graduated from Harvard College.

43 The year he joined the Artillery Company.

44 Sonneck in Early Concert-Life in America, p. 251, and Henry Woodward in “February 18, 1729: A Neglected Date in Boston Concert Life,” Notes, xxxiii (December 1976), 250, both assume the February 1, 1733 concert was postponed until February 15.

45 The writer was tempted to include a fifteenth virginal, culled from the Suffolk County inventory (mis’l. docket) of Antipas Boyse (ca. 1640–1669), a wealthy Boston merchant, which included the following item: “. . . 1 virinall . . . In the closett.” However, other items in the list (it appeared among other effects of a gentleman’s toilet) and its location within the home, not to mention its unusual spelling (not only was the “g” missing, but it appeared in the singular), forced the writer to conclude that it was in fact a urinal.

46 James Savage, A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England. Showing Three Generations of Those who Came before May 1692, on the Basis of the Farmer’s Register, 4 vols. (Boston, 1860), iv, 101.

47 For Merry Mount, see Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, or New Canaan, containing an Abstract of New England (Amsterdam, 1637); William Bradford, The History of Plymouth Plantation, 1602 to 1648, ed. Alfred Seelye Roe (Boston, 1901); and Scholes, Puritans and Music, pp. 81–89. “Merry Mount” was a small heretical community established by Thomas Morton about 1625 in the colony of Plymouth. Over and above their moral and religious objections to Morton’s enclave, the Pilgrims found the pagan practice of setting up a maypole particularly offensive. But as Scholes points out the real charge against Morton and his followers was that they sold liquor and lead to the Indians.

For Gibbons, see Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, ii, 245; and Winsor, Memorial History, I, 282–293, 578.

48 Winsor, Memorial History, I, 578; Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, iii, 532.

49 Probably about one-third of the instrument owners’ wills survived and were read by the writer.

50 Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, iv, 210, reports that Mary’s husband, William Stone (1662–1730), died in Guilford. Perhaps an attempt to pick up the trail in Connecticut records would prove fruitful.

51 For Hammond’s Journal, see Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 2nd Ser., vii (1891–1892), 148–149. For Morton’s account of this experiment, see Charles Morton, Compendium Physicae, ed. with a biographical sketch of Morton by Samuel Eliot Morison, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, xxxiii (1940), 173.

52 Sarah Foster married Col. Thomas Hutchinson, Sr. (1675–1739), in a resplendent ceremony attended by Sewall (see his Diary, I, 493). Although no journals for Thomas Sr.’s generation are extant, their son Thomas Hutchinson, Jr., did leave diaries. (See Peter O. Hutchinson, Diaries and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Jr. [Boston, 1884–1886].) In his journals dancing was a subject learned by the youth. One can assume that this interest in dancing (and probably music, too) did not suddenly spring up in the younger generation.

53 The index to M. Halsey Thomas’ edition of The Diary of Samuel Sewall identifies Mr. Hiller as Joseph; Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, v, 263, states that Joseph Sr. “emigrated from England, kept a tavern, practiced some law in the interest of London clients, but was generally known as a tin-plate worker.” Hence Hiller could have brought with him or imported a virginal which he then sold to Sewall; or was he making wire strings and possibly stringing the virginals for the Sewalls?

54 Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, iv, 364, states that Valentine became a freeman in 1675. The following diarists comment on Valentine’s suicide: Sewall, Diary, ii, 1011–1012; Jeremiah Bumstead (1678–1729), diary published in New England Historical and Genealogical Register, xv (1861), 200; and Joshua Blanchard (1692–1748), diary published in Abraham English, “Builder of the Old South Meeting-House,” New England Magazine, New Ser., xiii (1895–1896), 397. Bumstead states: “Mr. Harris minister, & Mr. Auchmuty giving oath of his distraction, he had a funerall, and was buryed in y^e Church yard on y^e 4 day of y^e month.” According to a colonial law passed in 1660 regarding “self-murder,” any man “willfully guilty” of his own death was “denied the privilege of being Buried in the Common Burying place of Christians,” but should be buried along the highway with “a Cart-load of Stones laid upon the Grave as a Brand of Infamy . . .” (Whitmore, Colonial Laws, p. 137). In order for Valentine to have been buried in the churchyard, he first would have had to be judged non compos mentis.

55 Scholes, Puritans and Music, p. 255; Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, ii, 62; Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, iv, 536–537; Boston News-Letter, January 22, 1730.

56 Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, I, 396; ii, 468; Middlesex Probate Court Records, iii, 32, docket 10756; Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, I, 291; Middlesex Probate Court Records, I, 199, docket 3420 (although the docket contains no originals).

57 Anna Maria Fay, “Some Accounts of the Life and Times of the Rev. Peter Bulkeley (1583–1659),” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, xxxi (1877), 154. Hereafter abbreviated as NEHGR.

58 Bulkeley’s will specifically leaves “6. M. Aynsworth notes upon the 5 bookes of Moses & upon the psalmes” to his son Edward. This would indicate that Bulkeley was familiar with, if he did not possess, the Ainsworth Psalter.

The Concord Public Library has a repository of Bulkeley’s papers. Although the librarian could not specifically recall any musical references among them, the writer feels this material is worth perusal.

It might be mentioned here that neither Bulkeley’s original will and household inventory nor their contemporary copies in the court’s ledger book by the court clerk are extant. The surviving copy book is in a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century hand.

59 Thomas Mace, Mustek’s Monument; or, a Remembrancer Of the Best Practical Musick, Both Divine, and Civil, that has ever been known, to have been in the World (London: T. Ratcliffe, and N. Thompson, 1676; facsim. repr., Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1958), p. 62.

60 Foster purchased the press from Marmaduke Johnson who had brought it from England but had been forbidden by the colonial legislature to set it up. (See George Emery Littlefield, Early Boston Booksellers, 1642–1711 [New York, 1969], p. 89.)

61 Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, ii, 222–228.

62 Samuel Eliot Morison, “The Rev. Seaborn Cotton’s Commonplace Book,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, xxxii (1935), 320–352.

63 NEHGR, iv (1850), 263.

64 Ralph Day’s careful assignment in his will of his property to his heirs and his specification of their responsibilities reflect a prudent man. His wife, Abigail, was entitled to the free and full use of the parlor and cellar as well as the whole southerly end of the house. A new door into the yard was to be constructed for her; she was given free use of sundry furniture, although he specified the pots and kettle she was to have; and she was allowed free passage into the hall to use the oven and the said room [in which] to brew and wash.” She also received land and pasture and their two sons were directed to care for it for her at the expense of the estate. All this she was entitled to with the condition that she remayne in the state of widdowhood.” Should she marry, Day specified that she would be allowed £10 worth of the goods aforementioned and the sons were to be “discharged of getting firewood for her.” (Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, ii, 450.)

65 Hoar was a 1650 graduate of Harvard College who went to England where he took a doctorate in medicine. He returned to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and was president of Harvard College from 1672 to 1675. Soon after his resignation from that post he died.

66 Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, Ser. 1, vi (1799), 106.

67 William S. Pattee, “Quincy Inscriptions,” NEHGR, ix (1855), 151. See also The Diary of Tutor Henry Flynt of Harvard College 1675–1760, Edward T. Dunn, ed., 3 vols. (Buffalo, N.Y., 1978), ii: 1106–1107. The writer is indebted to the Rev. Edward T. Dunn, S.J., of Canisius College for bringing the epitaph to her attention.

68 Sewall, Diary, ii, 855; Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, v, 441–444.

69 Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (Middletown, Conn., 1963), pp. 41–42, 116–120. A portrait of Browne is said to have been the property of Henry A. Whitney of Boston in 1895. See Oliver Ayer Roberts, History of the Military Company of Massachusetts, 4 vols. (Boston, 1895), I, 283. The writer’s efforts to locate this portrait have proved unsuccessful thus far.

70 Peter Thacher’s manuscript journals (vol. I: 1679–1682; vol. II: 1682–1699) may be found at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

71 It is presently not known who occupied Hobby’s house after his death in 1715. The newspaper advertisement may be referring to balls that Hobby may have hosted in his house (he was noted as a “gay man, a free liver” [Winsor, Memorial History, ii, 540]), or perhaps Enstone (an Anglican as well as Grainger) briefly taught dance in the evenings in this house before removing to his “Large House in King Street” in September of 1720 (See Boston Gazette for September 12, 1720). Yet another although lesser possibility is that Grainger himself taught dancing in the evenings after regular school hours. If so, this endeavor was a brief one; this is the only hint that Grainger was ever directly involved with dancing.

Henry Wilder Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1882), I, 396, quoted Timothy Cutler’s opinion of Grainger from the King’s Chapel Church Documents of Massachusetts, p. 230: “There is also one Mr. Grainger, a Churchman, who is a private Writing School Master; has about 100 Scholars, and recommends himself by his distinguishing capacity for that business.” And Sewall entered in his diary for March 8, 1720 (ii, 942): “Went to the Town-house to meet Mr. Oliver &c. Col. Fitch express’d himself as much prizing Mr. Granger’s Accomplishments to Teach Writing; never such a person in Boston before. Resolves to send his Son to him; has told him he will do so. Professes himself of the Church of England. As far as I could gather, He and Capt Noyes would be glad he might Teach in the new South-School-house.” Obituary notices in both the Boston Gazette and the Boston News-Letter for January 10, 1734, considered Grainger’s death a public loss.

72 Benjamin Wadsworth’s interleaved almanac, account book, and diary (in pencil: p. 77), Massachusetts Historical Society.

73 Foote, Annals, I, 269; Boston Gazette, December 16, 1723.

Grainger, Sir Charles Hobby (ca. 1665–1715) (whose house Grainger occupied sometime after Hobby’s death), and Enstone were all Anglicans. Both Hobby and Grainger served King’s Chapel as vestrymen, while Enstone played the organ there from 1714 to 1723. Grainger ended his private teaching career in 1733 when he was chosen to take over the Episcopalian parochial school funded by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

74 Sewall, Diary, I, 124; Winsor, Memorial History, ii, 315; Dictionary of American Biography; Charles Morton, Compendium Physicae, ed. with a biographical sketch of Morton by Samuel Eliot Morison, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, xxxiii (1940). Morton, in his Compendium Physicae, Chapter 24, “Of Hearing,” p. 172, gives abstract reference to viols and violins: “Now Seeing there is Such an Agreement between the Eye and the Ear (as is before noted) the Same is the reason of Sounds in all other concords, and yet it must be confessed there are Some men have less regard to harmony in Eye, or Ear, than others tis Supposed they will not boast of it as their perfection. Some are also more pleased with the Sound than with the proportion, therefor [sic] the briskness of a trumpet or the [Squeale] of a Violin Soundly Rubb’d to make a noyse dos affect them more than the best compositions of Viol Consorts, but that is because they are more Sensuall than Rationall.”

75 Edmund Browne’s library, appraised in 1678 at thirty-eight pounds, contained 180 volumes among which were his “musicall bookes.”

76 Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, vii (1919), 251. Scholes, Puritans and Music, p. 376, abbreviated this entry.

77 Whitmore, Colonial Laws, p. 57.

78 Could the curious spelling of “Viall Inns” in Morton’s inventory refer to the association of the violin with inns?

79 BRC, xi, 49.

80 Annie Haven Thwing, The Crooked & Narrow Streets of the Town of Boston, 1630–1822 (Boston, 1925), pp. 88–89; BRC, xi, 48; Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, iv, 201.

81 “Letter from Leonard Hoar to Josiah Flynt,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 1st Ser., vi (1799), 106.

82 The Diaries of Benjamin Lynde and of Benjamin Lynde, Jr., ed. F. E. Oliver (Boston: Houghton & Co., 1880), p. 134. For the numerous references Benjamin, Jr., made to dancing, see pp. 133, 135, 157.

83 See “The Jew’s Harp as Aerophone” by Frederick Crane in the Galpin Society Journal, xxi (1968), 66–69.

84 Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 1 (1911), 316.

85 Daniel C. Colesworthy, John Tilestons School (Boston: Antiquarian Book Store, 1887), p. 46.

86 Roberts, Artillery Company, I, 185–186.

87 Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, ii, 88–89; Roberts, Artillery Company, I, 284.

88 The writer has examined firsthand an early pewter fife in private ownership. The instrument’s design places it no later than the eighteenth century and it could be considerably earlier. Its known provenance points to a New England origin. That Dyer was a militiaman and an ironmonger and that his “flutes” were located in his shop suggest that he was either making and/or selling fifes. Was he a second fife maker?

89 The range of the mock trumpet was f′ chromatic to g″ or b″ depending on whether or not the instrument was equipped with keys which assisted in reaching the two highest notes. This range was the same as the clarino or highest register of the true four-octave trumpet; only in the clarino register or fourth octave could a “clarino” trumpet player produce a stepwise succession of notes necessary for playing melodies. It should also be noted that trumpeters were not required to be proficient in the entire harmonic series of their instruments; because the trumpet was so difficult a player specialized in one portion of the range. See: Thurston Dart, “The Mock Trumpet,” Galpin Society Journal, vi (1953), 35–40; Caldwell Titcomb, “Baroque Court and Military Trumpets and Kettledrums: Technique and Music,” Galpin Society Journal, ix (1956), 66–70; and Colin Lawson, “The Early Chalumeau Duets,” Galpin Society Journal, xxvii (1974), 125–129.

90 Other lip-vibrated instruments less demanding of the player were also used in the Bay Colony. Madam Sarah Knight made mention of a post horn sounded by the post rider she traveled with part way to New York. (The Journal of Madam Knight, intro. Malcolm Freiberg [Boston: David R. Godine, 1972], p. 9.) The Rev. Hugh Adams of Dover, N.H., in 1724 earnestly believed that by having his two sons blow “two silver trumpets” as Jehovah had commanded before the Israelites went to war, he could evoke God’s protection of his family against the Indians. Although silver trumpets were inaccessible to Adams in the wilderness, he found “horns of cattle” to be as effective. To the sounding of the horns, he attributed the preservation of his family as well as Capt. Lovewell and the volunteer company during their first two Indian expeditions. (Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, iv, 330. See also Carleton Sprague Smith’s article in volume I of this book.)

91 Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 1st Ser., iv (1852), 12; Sewall, Diary, I, 152; “The Diary of John Marshall,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 2nd Ser., 1 (1884–1885), 153; Sewall, Diary, I, 380, 383; Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans (New York, 1971), p. 30; and the New-England Courant, November 30, 1724.

92 Raoul F. Camus, Military Music of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1976), p. 27, reported that “On 22 March 1693/94 John Mawgridge, His Majesty’s drum major general, issued a warrant ‘to presse or cause to be impressed from time to time such numbers of Drums, Fifes and Hoboyes as shall be necessary for His Majesty’s Service either by sea or land’.” Camus in his article in volume I of this book also states that in 1768 the 14th Regiment of Foot had black drummers “whom the colonel of the regiment had bought and trained for that duty while the regiment was stationed in the West Indies.” If this indeed was the case with Charles Blow, then that he was employed by three ship captains means that in fact he had been at some time owned by the three.

93 Sewall, Diary, I, 441–442; 1, 367; 1, 516; ii, 631. The levet or fanfare to herald the year 1710 was no doubt played on January 2nd because the 1st fell on a Sunday.

94 Sewall, Diary, ii, 694; ii, 915.

95 Roberts, Artillery Company, I, 139–140.

The only extant seventeenth-century drum from New England is that by an unknown maker, which descended to its donor to the Connecticut Historical Society from his ancestor Samuel Porter, who was one of the town drummers of Farmington, Connecticut, in 1708 and 1709. Decorating the exterior in brass nail heads are the initials “L D”, perhaps those of its original owner. See below, fig. 374, in this volume.

96 The grand procession of Free Masons was described in detail in the Boston Gazette for June 25, 1739.

97 Dictionary of American Biography; Winsor, Memorial History, ii, 54.

98 For a detailed study of violones and violoncellos see Stephen Bonta, “From Violone to Violoncello: A Question of Strings?” Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, iii (1977), 64–99.

99 Sewall, Diary, I, 123–124. Although the instrument referred to in the quote is no doubt a bass viola da gamba, a family of bowed stringed instruments quite distinct from the violin or viola da braccio family, it is quoted here to suggest another use for Burnet’s “large bass Violine” outside that of chamber music.

100 Table i records the value of instruments from the harpsichord family. It will be noted that the harpsichord belonging to Increase Gatchell (d. 1729) was valued at £10. Burnet’s instrument is at least six times as expensive as any of the other keyboard instruments in the inventories.

101 “A large bass Violine” was written over an error which had been carefully erased.

102 Perhaps the term clepsicord derived from the word collapse, in the seventeenth century used to describe the state of being broken down (see OED); and the word used here referred to a “folding” harpsichord, or clavecin brisé. This instrument was invented in France by Jean Marius who took out a twenty-year patent on it in 1700. The instrument, made for traveling, was built in three independent sections hinged together, and folded into a long rectangular box convenient for transporting.

103 The manuscript diary of Benjamin Walker, Jr., 3 vols. (1726–1749), I, fol. 3 iv. Massachusetts Historical Society.

104 Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York, 1964), p. 18.

105 See volume marked cust 3/b, fols. 125–129v, in the Public Records Office, London. This and other custom records are classified as cust 3, volumes 1–8, and begin with the year 1697. For the tax on a variety of musical instruments being shipped in and out of England, see: Guy F. Oldham, “Import and Export Duties on Musical Instruments in 1660,” Galpin Society Journal, ix (1956), 97–98.

106 See Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness (New York: Oxford University Press paperback, 1971), pp. 188, 330–336, for further background information.

107 Made from sheep’s intestines, fiddle strings might have been produced domestically. The finest quality strings came from near Rome, however, where the intestines of sheep were the smoothest; hence the fascination with Italian strings which were advertised in newspapers throughout the eighteenth century. See David Boyden, The History of Violin Playing from Its Origins to 1761 (London, 1965), p. 111. New-England Corn ant, May 25, 1724.

108 Foote, Annals, I, 211–214.

109 BRC, xi, 222, 236; and ix, 2–3.

110 Foote, Annals, I, 269.

111 New-England Courant, December 2, 1723.

112 Boston Gazette, December 16, 1723.

113 New-England Courant, May 25, 1724.

114 Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, p. 464.

1 Recalled as an auction conducted by Mr. and Mrs. Charles Lincoln Ketchum who operated an antiques shop in Old Saybrook at the time.

2 For the period spanning the late 1920s and early 1930s the eighteenth-century English conversation piece was promoted in this country and enjoyed a considerable vogue. Among the larger exhibits were those held at the Minneapolis Art Institute in 1930 and the New York Union League Club in 1933.

3 I am grateful to David McKibben of the Boston Athenaeum who alerted me to the situation at an early date. Subsequent material from the National Portrait Collection and the Metropolitan Museum provided further illumination. I am also grateful to Emanuel Winternitz of the Metropolitan Museum who confirmed the identification of the dulcimer, and to the many persons whose kindness in offering valuable time during one or more of the investigative steps has been of great assistance. They include: Lee Aukamp, Mary Black, Miles Chapel, Louisa Dresser, Gerald Finley, Henry Grunder, Virginius C. Hall, John H. Jennings, John Kerslake, Paul Kiehard, Sara Lichtenstein, Annette Merlis, Sir Oliver Millar, John C. Moon, Pinkney Near, William S. Powell, Jules Prown, Claudia Rummel, Harriet Stryker-Rodda, Edward J. Smits, John Sunderland, Margaret Watherston, the owners of paintings used for comparison, and the staffs of the New York Public Library, Frick Art Reference Library, Swem Library, Virginia Historical Society, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Maritime Museum, and the Guildhall Archives, London.

4 William T. Whitley, Artists and Their Friends in England, 1700–1799, 2 vols. (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968), I, 109.

5 Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530 to 1790 (Baltimore, 1953), p. 118.

6 George Vertue, ms notes, 6 vols. (London: Walpole Society, 1930–1947), iii, in Walpole Society, xxii (1934), 14.

7 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (London: Ward Lock: The World Library of Standard Books, [1879]), pp. 299, 348.

8 The English check was made by the Royal College of Music.

9 Reports of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, 39 vols. (Boston. Rockwell and Churchill, 1876–1909), xxviii, 53, 277. This series, containing town records, acts of the selectmen, vital statistics as well as miscellaneous papers, is cited henceforth as BRC. BRC, xxiv, 138, 193, 222; BRC, xvii, 203; BRC, xxx, 217.

10 American Marriage Records before 1699, ed. William M. Clemens (Pompton Lakes, N.J.: The Biblio Co., 1926), p. 83; New England Historical and Genealogical Register, xxiv (1870), 15; BRC, viii, 53; The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. (New York, 1973), I, 181, 300, 328; The Notebook of John Smibert (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1969), p. 93; BRC, vii, 239.

11 George Groce and David Wallace, The New-York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists in America, 1564–1860 (New Haven, 1957), p. 356; Frederick W. Coburn, “The Johnstons of Boston,” Art in America, xxi, no. 1 (December 1932), 27–36, and xxi, no. 4 (October 1933), 132–138; William Arms Fisher, One Hundred Fifty Years of Music Publishing in the United States (Boston, 1933), p. 36.

12 See the study “Social Music, Musicians, and Their Musical Instruments in Colonial Boston” by Barbara Lambert in this volume, p. 422 ff.

13 Sewall, Diary, ii, 855.

14 The following is a more complete record of color: Rippingale’s once-green coat is trimmed with red, and he wears red hose. Elliston’s coat is a buff color, lined in red. Hale’s coat is light brown, and E. Low’s is blue with remnants of a salmon color for the trim. W. Low wears a rust-colored coat. Godbolt’s jacket, breeches, and hose are all dark grey. Jonathan Low’s coat is scarlet. The carpet is painted in strong tones of red against a blue field, with a few touches of yellow in the pattern. The design on the dulcimer soundboard is red.

15 Hugh Jones, The Present State of Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1956), p. 80.

16 Louis B. Wright, The Cultural Life of the American Colonies (New York, 1957), p. 13; John W. Molnar, “Art Music in Colonial Virginia,” Institute of Southern College Lectures 1960 (Farmville, Va.: Longwood College, 1961), pp. 66–68.

17 John W. Molnar, Songs from the Williamsburg Theatre (Charlottesville, 1972), p. viii (foreword by Carleton Sprague Smith).

18 Published as selection lviii, “Libraries in Colonial Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 1^st Ser., iii (1894–1895), 251–253.

19 The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover: 1709–1712, ed. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (Richmond, 1941), p. 85; p. 41n.

20 North Carolina Wills, 1663–1789, ed. J. Bryan Grimes, xix (North Carolina Secretary of State, 1912), 6; Primrose Watson Fisher, One Dozen Pre-Revolutionary War Families of Eastern North Carolina and Some of Their Descendants (New Bern, N.C., 1958), p. 126; North Carolina Historical and Genealogical Register, ii (1901), 153; i (1900), 58.

21 Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series: 1680–1720, ii (London: Public Record Office, 1910), 296; Lower Norfolk County Virginia Antiquary, ii (1897), 48; “Records of Hanover County Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 1st Ser., xxi (1912–1913), 58; Henings Statutes of Virginia: 1736–1763, vii (1820), 25, 197.

22 William Byrd of Virginia: The London Diary (1717–1721) and Other Writings, ed. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (New York, 1958), p. 455.

23 Jones, The Present State of Virginia, p. 221 (annotated note by Richard L. Morton); Louis Morton, Robert Carter of Nomini Hall (Williamsburg, 1945), p. 42n.

24 London and Its Environs Described, 6 vols. (London: printed for R. & J. Dodsley, 1761), vi, 99.

25 Mary Mann Page Stanard, Colonial Virginia: Its People and Customs (Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1970), p. 185.

26 Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, xxxiii (1925), 363.

27 The editors of Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739–1741 (Richmond, 1942), Maude Woodfin and Marion Tinling, identify him as Charles City County merchant, ca. 1737–1751, Thomas Wendy; p. 13n.

28 By coincidence, perhaps, this portrait, given to Colonial Williamsburg in 1952 by Mrs. Pickney W. Snelling of Hartford, a descendant of the sitter, had found its way to Connecticut, the last provenance for A Musical Gathering. Moreover, the portrait of Dering’s Williamsburg acquaintance, Nathaniel Walthoe, with whom he visited William Byrd (Byrd, Diary, 1739–1741, p. 139) also came to Colonial Williamsburg (in 1956) via a Connecticut source, Thomas Williams, a dealer in Litchfield (Frick Art Reference Library records).

29 Byrd, Diary, 1739–1741, pp. 82–83, 131, 139, 140–149, 160, 166–167, 171–179; all refer to the years 1740 and 1741.

30 Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial Ruling Class (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1940), p. 335.

31 References to indentured servants as musicians occur in the Virginia Gazette for January 13, 1738; May 19, 1738; September 26, 1745; August 21, 1752? October 20, 1752; and later. References to convict servants as musicians occur on July 4, 1751, and later in 1771 and 1772. References to slaves and musical instruments occur on May 5, 1738; March 27, 1746; and later. The subject is also treated in Molnar, “Art Music,” p. 69, and in Albert Stoutamire, Music of the Old South: Colony to Confederacy (Rutherford, Pa.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973), p. 27.

32 James Curtis Ballagh, “A History of Slavery in Virginia,” Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, xxiv (1895), 33–37.

33 Molnar, “Art Music,” p. 69.

34 Stanard, Colonial Virginia, p. 309.

35 Letters of Robert Carter 1720–1727: The Commercial Interests of a Virginia Gentleman (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), pp. 22–23.

36 Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vi (1898), 3–4.

37 William Byrd London Diary, pp. 456–464.

38 Robert “King” Carter Day Book for October 7, 1722, at the University of Virginia Library.

39 Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, xxxiii (1924), 41–42.

40 At least some of these portraits were likely commissioned to be painted from earlier likenesses.

41 It is also of interest here, with regard to the fate of oversize colonial art, to note that the Last Supper had been sold at auction in a Maryland junkshop for $50 in 1840.

42 J. Hall Pleasants, “William Dering: A Mid-Eighteenth Century Williamsburg Portrait Painter,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, lx (1952), 60; Documents Collection, Virginia Historical Society.

43 J. Hall Pleasants, “Biographical Notes, 2858,” Frick Art Reference Library (1957). Dering’s move from Virginia and his South Carolina activities are expanded upon by Graham Hood in “Charles Bridges and William Dering: Two Virginia Painters, 1735–1750,” Antiques, cxii (1977), 935.

44 His name had previously appeared in Waldron P. Belknap, American Colonial Painting: Materials for a History (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 222–223. There is evidence here that he had a number of American sitters in the early eighteenth century, including Jonathan Belcher, Governor of New Jersey, and Samuel Mather, brother of Massachusetts clergyman Cotton Mather.

45 Thomas Wharton Jones, “The Pedigree of Alliston or Elliston of Essex and Kent and of Philipps of Chesham, Bucks., with that of Jones, in continuation thereof,” Herald and Genealogist, v (1870), 401–426.

46 Philip Morant, History and Antiquities of the County of Essex (London, 1768), pp. 126, 133.

47 Surtees Society, Publications, cxxxiii (1920), 104; Sir William Musgrave, “A General Nomenclator and Obituary,” Harleian Society, Publications, xlviii (1900), 146.

48 Painters and Stainers Guild, Journal entry for October 1, 1746, at the Guildhall Library, London.

1 The earliest usage of the word songster in connection with song anthologies I have been able to trace is in the alternate title of The Universal Musician; or, Songster’s Delight (London, 1737), later editions of which appeared in 1738 and 1750. Similar titles followed soon after: The Merry Companion; or, Universal Songster (London, 1739); The Ladies Delight; or, The Merry Songster (London, 1741); The Vocal Medley; or, Universal Songster (York, ?1749); Vocal Melody; or, The Songster’s Magazine (London, 1751) in three volumes; The Goldfinch; or, New Modern Songster (Glasgow, 1753); Melpomene; or, The Songster’s Merry Companion (Waltham, ?1753); The Vocal Companion; or, The Delightful and Merry Songster (London, ?1757). The first usage of the word as part of the regular rather than the alternate title appears to have been in The Polite Songster (London, 1758). The earliest-known similar use of the word on this side of the Atlantic occurs in The Mock Bird; or, New American Songster (New York, 1761). Although the exact meaning of songster as used in these titles is not quite clear, the word gradually came to refer to the collection itself rather than to the singer of the songs it contains.

1 Prior to 1790 most American tunebooks were printed from engraved copper plates. The swift increase in typographical printing which occurred in the 1790s and 1800s signaled the increasingly important role of professional printers in the field of sacred music. See Richard Crawford, “Connecticut Sacred Music Imprints, 1778–1810,” Notes, xxvii, nos. 3 & 4 (March & June 1971).

2 Statistics given here and elsewhere in the article are drawn from my unpublished index of sacred music published in America through 1810, and from the bibliography of sacred American music through 1810 which I have compiled in collaboration with Allen P. Britton and Irving Lowens, to be published by the American Antiquarian Society. The bibliography includes roughly 440 issues of sacred music: approximately 390 tunebooks (collections of 4 or more pieces) and about 50 occasional publications and pamphlets (items containing 3 or fewer pieces). More than 30 additional sacred music editions were published during the period, but copies have yet to be located.

3 The figures given here cover only English-language publications. As early as 1752 there appeared in Philadelphia a two-part work containing Lobwasser’s metrical version of the German psalter and a collection of 700 hymns, reprinted from the German publication Kern alter und neuer (Marburg: Johann Henrich Stock, 1746). Both parts contained monophonic tunes. The Philadelphia work, Neu-vermehrt- und vollständiges Gesang-Buch (Germantown, Pennsylvania: Christopher Saur, 1753; also 3 later editions), served a tradition which by culture, language, and geography was separate from the English-language tradition described here. After 1800 in Pennsylvania and Maryland some interaction between English- and German-language sacred music took place, but that issue is peripheral to this paper.

4 [Simeon Jocelin and Amos Doolittle], The Chorister’s Companion (New Haven: Jocelin and Doolittle, 1782), p. [1].

5 A similar study has recently been completed by Professor John W. Worst of Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan: “New England Psalmody 1760–1810: Analysis of an American Idiom” (University of Michigan, Ph.D. diss., 1974).

6 The tune Psalm 100 New is discussed by Irving Lowens in Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: Norton, 1964), pp. 53–55. It is also mentioned in Theodore Finney, “The Third Edition of Tufts’ Introduction to the Art of Singing Psalm-Tunes,” Journal of Research in Music Education, xiv, no. 3 (Fall 1966), p. 169. Professor Nicholas Temperley of the University of Illinois, who is compiling an index of British psalm tunes to 1750, reported early in 1974 that he had yet to find Psalm 100 New in a British source.

7 Law’s career is covered and all of his publications enumerated and indexed in Richard Crawford, Andrew Law, American Psalmodist (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

8 The Complete Works of William Billings is being edited for publication by Hans Nathan and Karl Kroeger under the sponsorship of the American Musicological Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, making Billings the first American composer whose complete works will appear in a critical edition. Volume ii, the first volume to be published, was issued in 1977, followed by vol. I in 1981.

9 Lowens, Music and Musicians, p. 239.

10 At the beginning of this project I had some difficulty deciding what to tabulate, first choosing core repertory tunes on the basis of the number of different collections (i.e., titles) in which they appeared, and disregarding reprintings of the same tune in more than one edition of the same collection. The basis for that decision lay in the notion that one compiler’s inclusion of a tune in several editions of one tunebook should not count as heavily as several different compilers each including the tune in one edition of one tunebook. Gradually, however, this notion seemed more and more unsatisfactory, since, by appearing in several editions of a popular work, a tune probably achieved wider circulation than in single printings in several less successful works. Since the list was and is an attempt to measure popularity, however roughly, counting the total number of printings seemed preferable. (It might be noted in passing that the two methods produce remarkably similar lists.) An edition by Richard Crawford of the music in the core repertory is in preparation. It will be published by the Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College, in its Recent Researches in American Music series.

11 A statistical method which took into account the period of each tune’s popularity would have certain advantages over a mere tally of the printings of each tune and would certainly produce a different core repertory list. For example, tunes published in the Bay Psalm Book, 9th ed. (1698), Walter’s Grounds and Rules (1721), and Tufts’ Introduction, 3d ed. (1723), could achieve more than 20 printings from these 3 collections alone by 1765, since they were so often reprinted, usually with little or no change in the music. It might seem, then, that a tune popular early in the century could be included in the core repertory, even though it fell out of favor later on. Conversely, a tune appearing late but enjoying immediate popularity might replace on the core repertory list a tune with less spectacular but more persistent or enduring popularity because of the greater number of tunebooks published toward the end of the period covered here. As it happens, the present list contains one tune of the late-appearing type. Adeste Fidelis was not published in the United States until 1801; however, it enjoyed immediate and enormous popularity. There are no examples of the earlier situation, partly because musical reform after the turn of the century created a strong impetus toward reviving the earlier psalm tunes, and every tune on the core repertory list which was introduced between 1698 and 1725 either maintained consistent popularity through the whole period or regained a place in the repertory during the decade 1801–1810.

12 The compositions which most narrowly missed being chosen include 3 British items: Stephenson’s anthem “Behold I bring you glad tidings,” and the psalm tunes Castle Street and Islington; and 7 American tunes: Bethlehem by Billings, Complaint by Parmenter, Psalm 46 by Chandler, Symphony by Morgan, Victory by Read, Walpole by Wood, and Washington by Billings. None achieved more than 42 printings nor less than 40.

1 See chapter 3, “John Tufts’s An Introduction to The Singing of Psalm-Tunes (1721–1744),” in Irving Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York, 1964), pp. 39–57, for an explanation of dating the first edition of this work by Tufts.

2 Byron A. Wolverton, “Keyboard Music and Musicians in the Colonies and United States of America before 1830” (Indiana University, Ph.D. diss., 1966), pp. 146–150.

3 For a reproduction of Lewis Deblois’ trade card from which the musical stock is quoted, see this vol., fig. 434, and p. 104 of this writer’s article on Thomas Johnston in Boston Prints and Printmakers 1670–1775, ed. Sinclair Hitchings and Walter Muir Whitehill, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, xlvi (1973).

4 As James Bishop Peabody pointed out in a letter to the author, Price was, rather than is, buried in Trinity, since the original burials were all dug up and scattered in the nineteenth century at about the time when the third and present edifice was erected.

5 For quotations referring to Price, see the chronology “William Price as Churchman” as well as the list of sources at the end of this article.

6 Henry Wilder Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel, 2 vols. (Boston, 1882), I, 269.

7 Wolverton, “Keyboard Music and Musicians,” p. 49.

8 Mary Kent Davey Babcock, Christ Church, Salem Street, Boston (Boston, 1947), pp. 132–134. Babcock’s book is the source of other information in this article on Christ Church’s organists.

9 Price was followed as organist by Stephen Deblois, Lewis Deblois, Timothy Buck, and from 1750 to 1753 by Johnston’s son William.

10 Reproductions of the Bonner and Burgis maps appear in John W. Reps, “Plans and Views of Colonial Boston,” Boston Prints and Printmakers 1670–1775, pp. 22–31, 40–41.

11 For a listing of sources, and a reproduction of Johnston’s trade card and other prints, see this writer’s “Thomas Johnston” in Boston Prints and Printmakers 1670–1775, pp. 128–131, 87, and passim.

12 A copy of this book which has the imprint “Boston: Printed by Benjamin Mecom at the New Printing-Office near the Town-House, for Thomas Johnston, in Brattle-Street” may date from 1760 and would establish Johnston as publisher of another edition of Walter.

13 Found in the Lemuel Shaw Papers, 1648–1923, a microfilm series published by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

14 Office of the Clerk of the Superior Court of Suffolk County, Superior Court Record No. 172920 (writ of attachment, 1765, against Abraham Stickney of Tewksbury, yeoman).

15 The Records of Trinity Church, Boston, 1728–1830, ed. Andrew Oliver and James Bishop Peabody, 2 vols. Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, lv, lvi (1980–1982) 1, 84.

16 Babcock, Christ Church, Salem, Street, p. 133.

17 Wolverton refers to the June 1763 advertisement of the organ made by Johnston which had been “formerly made use of in Concert-Hall,” and Talmage Whitman Dean, in “The Organ in Eighteenth Century English Colonial America” (University of Southern California, Ph.D. diss., 1960), p. 201, says that the Johnston organ in Concert Hall “was replaced by an imported English instrument.” The Deblois family sold Concert Hall in 1769 to William Turner, and additional information will be needed to test the hypothesis put forth above, that an organ was brought in for Flagg’s concert in 1772.

18 The letter is printed in Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham 1739–1776, published in Boston in 1914 by the Massachusetts Historical Society, and by Lila Parrish Lyman on pp. 73–76 of “William Johnston (1732–1772),” New-York Historical Society Quarterly, xxxix (January 1955).

19 Charles Evans, American Bibliography, 14 vols. (Chicago, 1903–1934; Worcester, 1956–1959), vi, no. 16205.

1 Originally imported around the beginning of the eighteenth century, it contains: stopt diapason 8′ (wood), principal 4′ (wood), fifteenth 2′ (metal), and sesquialtera ii (metal).

2 The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas (New York, 1973), p. 602.

3 Henry W. Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel, 2 vols. (Boston, 1882 & 1896), i, 210. Foote cites as his source Essex Institute Proceedings, x, 96.

4 The organ can be seen and heard today in St. John’s Church (Episcopal), Portsmouth, N.H., formerly known as Queen’s Chapel.

5 Only the windchest and three of the four stops are original. The case and the other parts were made by an American builder around 1836. The fourth stop is a reconstruction of a missing original made at the time of the organ’s restoration in 1965 by Charles B. Fisk.

6 Records of the Brattle Square Church for July 24, 1713, quoted in Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel, i, 209.

7 Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel, i, 209.

8 Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel, I, 210.

9 George E. Ellis, History of the First Church in Boston (Boston, 1881), p. 216.

10 There is a tradition that the organ was originally offered to, and refused by, the town of Berkeley, Mass., named after the bishop. However, Berkeley’s strong connections with the Newport church, and the fact that his namesake town was not set off from Taunton and incorporated until 1735 (and that the only church there was of the Puritan persuasion), would seem to place this tradition in the realm of unsubstantiated legend. Mr. William King Covell of Newport has painstakingly documented the history of this organ in “The Organs of Trinity Church, Newport,” The Organ, xiv, no. 56 (London, April 1935), 245–256, and is also of the opinion that the Berkeley, Mass., legend has no substance.

11 Covell, “The Organs of Trinity Church, Newport,” p. 247.

12 Covell, “The Organs of Trinity Church, Newport,” p. 248.

13 Mary K. D. Babcock, Organs and Organ Builders of Christ Church, Boston (Boston, 1946), p. 1.

14 Babcock, Organs and Organ Builders, pp. 1–2.

15 Babcock, Organs and Organ Builders, p. 3.

16 Babcock, Organs and Organ Builders, p. 3.

17 Albert L. Partridge, “William Claggett of Newport, R.I., Clockmaker,” Old-Time New England, xxvii, no. 3 (1937), 110.

18 Partridge, “William Claggett of Newport, R.I., Clockmaker,” p. 110.

19 Covell, “The Organs of Trinity Church, Newport,” p. 248.

20 The records of Trinity Church edited by James B. Peabody and Andrew Oliver have been published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Information concerning the Jordan organ, including the letter from Jordan, will be found in the first appendix.

21 “Extracts from Capt. Francis Goelet’s Journal, Relative to Boston, Salem and Marblehead &c., 1746–1750,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, xxiv, no. 1 (January 1870), 55.

22 The letter of P. A. van Hagen was printed in Dwight’s Journal of Music for October 13, 1860 (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1861), p. 232.

23 “Biographical Memoir of William M. Goodrich, Organ-builder,” The New-England Magazine (Boston, January 1834), p. 29.

24 “Biographical Memoir of William M. Goodrich,” p. 38.

25 From the author’s personal correspondence.

26 Harriet S. Tapley, St. Peter’s Church in Salem, Massachusetts (Salem, 1944), p. 27.

27 Joseph B. Felt, Annals of Salem (Salem, 1827), p. 425.

28 “Organ-Building in New-England,” The New-England Magazine (Boston, March 1834), p. 207.

29 Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel, ii, 170.

30 Assuming the initials “P.F.” to be those of the subject, Nina Fletcher Little in her catalogue to the Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection (Williamsburg, 1957) identifies the subject of this painting as “Peter Farrington, said to have been a Boston organist.” Further attempts to identify positively such a person have thus far failed. A singing master identified only as “Farmington,” from Andover, is occasionally linked with Samuel Holyoke’s concerts around 1800, but nothing more is known of him.

The portrait would seem to be a personage of some importance, however, and were it not for the initials, which might as well refer to those of the painter, the subject could conceivably be William Selby, or George K. Jackson. At present this is mere speculation.

See also Sinclair Hitchings, “The Musical Pursuits of William Price and Thomas Johnston,” in this volume, p. 645.

31 For a detailed announcement of this concert, see the Massachusetts Gazette for January 2, 1786.

32 “Biographical Memoir of William M. Goodrich,” pp. 37–38.

33 Gardner M. Day, The Biography of a Church (Boston, 1951), p. 30. The pedalboard of this Snetzler organ is illustrated in figure 359.

34 The will with inventory of Addington Davenport iii was recorded in the Registry of Probate for Rockingham County, Exeter, New Hampshire, Liber 16, Folio 61. It was dated September 1, 1756; however, no location was given. It is probable that the will was made in England. According to the will of Davenport’s paternal grandmother, Elizabeth, which was dated September 15, 1756, Davenport was not in the country at the time her will was made. See New England Historical and Genealogical Register, iv, no. 1 (January 1850), 111–116, and iv, no. 4 (October 1850), 351.

35 The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, DD., LL.D., ed. F. B. Dexter, 3 vols. (New York, 1901), I, 57–58.

36 Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, iii, 162.

37 From uncatalogued manuscript at the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.

38 The “chicken wire” in the doors is for protection only. Otherwise the appearance of the organ is wholly original, and it stands as an excellent example of the type of unpretentious chamber organ found in many musical eighteenth-century homes such as that of Edward Wyer, also of Charlestown, who died in 1788.

39 This letter is quoted in full in Appendix C in the section on William Turner in this volume.

40 The photograph reproduced here is the only one known to exist of the Samuel Green organ of 1790 in the Brattle Square Church, Boston. It was probably taken shortly before the church was demolished in 1872.

41 Peter Thacher, Dr. Thacher’s Century Sermon. A Sermon Preached to the Church and Society in Brattle Street, Boston, Dec. 29, 1799 (Boston: Young and Minns, 1800), p. 16.

42 Samuel Kirkland Lothrop, A History of the Church in Brattle Street, Boston (Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1851), pp. 147–148.

43 This drawing, in which only half of the organ is shown in complete detail, is one of a set, now the property of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, which was made shortly before the old building was razed.

44 Boston Post for July 31, 1871.

45 A contemporary mention of its removal from the Brattle Square Church can be found in: Boston Choir Register and Music Directory (Boston: William H. Gerrish, June 1872); in the author’s collection.

46 From an uncatalogued manuscript at the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.

47 From an uncatalogued manuscript at the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.

48 Thomas Prince, Panoplist, ii, no. 5 (October 1806), 194.

49 Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, iii, 192.

50 Joyce Ellen Mangier, “The Deblois Concert Hall Organ,” The Tracker, iii (October 1958), 1.

51 This stereoscopic view of the Johnston organ in Christ Church, Boston, was taken before 1884 when the present additions were made to the sides of the organ case. This view shows the case as originally built. Although now painted flat black, there is evidence that the pine case was originally grained in imitation of Santo Domingo mahogany.

52 Babcock, Organs and Organ Builders, p. 10.

53 “Organ-Building in New-England,” p. 206.

54 Babcock, Organs and Organ Builders, p. 11.

55 Babcock, Organs and Organ Builders, pp. 12–13.

56 “Organ-Building in New-England,” p. 207.

57 From the records of St. John’s Church, Portsmouth.

58 “Organ-Building in New-England,” p. 208.

59 “Organ-Building in New-England,” p. 208.

60 “Organ-Building in New-England,” p. 209.

61 “Organ-Building in New-England,” p. 209.

62 W. J. Bruce, “A Chapter on Church Organs,” The American Historical Record, iii, no. 28 (April 1874), 161–171.

63 Maria Pratt Smith, “Henry Pratt, Organ Builder,” The American Organist (October 1933).p. 514.

64 “Organ-Building in New-England,” p. 208.

65 “Organ-Building in New-England,” p. 209.

66 Smith, “Henry Pratt,” p. 514.

67 “Organ-Building in New-England,” p. 210.

68 “Organ-Building in New-England,” p. 210.

69 “Organ-Building in New-England,” p. 210.

70 Frances Hall Johnson, Musical Memories of Hartford (Hardford: Witkower’s 1931), p. 39.

1 Mourt’s Relation; or A Relation or Journall of the beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation settled at Plimoth in New England (London, 1622; repr. in facsimile, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, Inc., 1966), pp. 36–38.

2 Johnson’s Wonder-Working providence, 1628–1651, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1910), p. 135.

3 For Plymouth, see Percy Scholes, The Puritans and Music in England and New England (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 23. For Manchester, see Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 8 vols. (Salem: Essex Institute, 1911–1921), iii, 292.

4 Samuel Sewall, Diary 1674–1729, in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 5th Ser., v–vii (1878–1882), v, 344, 444; vi, 27–28.

5 “William Adams, his book, Nov. 1670,” in F. M. Calkins, Memoir of the Rev. William Adams (Boston, 1849), p. 8.

6 John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, 17 vols. (Cambridge: Charles Wm. Sever; Harvard University Press; 1873–1975), iii, 281. Barbara Lambert brought both the Adams and Saltonstall references to my attention.

7 Mention of Benson cited by Eileen Southern in The Music of Black Americans (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 30. The Burnet inventory in the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Probate Registry, docket number 5849, is cited by Barbara Lambert in “The Musical Puritans,” Old-Time New England, lxii (Winter 1972), 71.

8 A bass viol bearing William Callender’s label reads: “Drums &c. sale at / William Callender’s / Music Shop / no. 62 Middle St.—Boston / Drums of all Sizes for the Artillery and Infantry, / small size d^o; Fifes of all tones & prices made / from the best Turkey Box—/ Wood and black Ebony—and with the above Drums are / warrented [sic] to purchasers for one year / ALSO / Trumpets and Bugle Horns for the Calvalry, / Rifle-men [torn] Clarionets; Hautboys; concert [torn and label pasted over] / KEWISE / Bass-viols: tenor-viols: Reeds, Books &c / with many other Articles [torn] urning and Gunnery Line—made from the best [paste over] auth [paste over] and Flutes or any other instruments purchased [paste over] repaired at short notice.” Barbara Lambert located this instrument in the collections at Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts.

9 Raoul F. Camus, “The Military Band in the United States prior to 1834” (New York University, Ph.D. diss., 1969), pp. 59–60. 379–383.

10 Kate Van Winkle Keller, ed., Giles Gibbs Fife Manuscript, 1777 (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1974). Robert Eliason pointed out the bugle horn by John Balthius Dash, and the Callender fife in “Early American Winds: Instruments, Makers, and Music,” an unpublished paper which he delivered at the 1972 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. Barbara Lambert located the Crossman drum and the Willig fife tutor. See also Oscar George Theodore Sonneck and William Treat Upton, Bibliography of Early Secular American Music (Washington: Library of Congress, 1945), pp. 84–85.

11 Kate van Winkle Keller provided the information about the Benjamin Clark drum book; and Barbara Lambert that about the Lovering drum tutor. Camus, “Military Band,” pp. 258–260.

12 Daniel McCurtin, “Journal of the Times at the Siege of Boston Since our Arrival at Cambridge, Near Boston,” in Thomas Balch, Papers Relating Chiefly to the Maryland Line During the Revolution (Philadelphia: The Seventy-Six Society, 1857), pp. 20–21. For more detail on military music, see the Camus monograph in volume I.

13 Oscar George Theodore Sonneck, Report on “The Star-Spangled Banner” “Hail Columbia, America,” “Yankee Doodle” (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), pp. 140–142. See also index to volume I for references to other discussions of “Yankee Doodle” in this work.

14 From F. S. Drake, Life and Correspondence of Henry Knox (Boston: S. G. Drake, 1873), p. 70. See also Camus, “Military Band,” pp. 328, 341.

15 Diary kept at the siege of Louisburg March 11–August 2, 1745, ed. Samuel A. Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), p. 6. I have Barbara Lambert to thank for drawing to my attention this reference as well as the Tisdale engraving and Simeon Snow’s violin.

16 Margaret Dean-Smith in her introduction to Play ford’s English Dancing Master 1651: A Facsimile Reprint with an Introduction, Bibliography and Notes (London: Schott & Co. Ltd., 1957) points out that the first edition (1651) is scored for treble viol. By the second edition (1652) the newly fashionable treble violin is introduced. In the third edition (1665) Playford includes an engraving of the treble violin, says it is preferred to the viol as “more airee and brisk,” and includes lessons for it. In the ninth edition, part ii (1696), there is a piece for trumpet-marine. The fifteenth edition (1713) through the eighteenth (ca. 1728) list the availability of “Basses to all the Dances contained in this Volume.”

17 [Increase Mather and others], An Arrow Against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing, Drawn out of the Quiver of the Scriptures (Boston: Printed by Samuel Green and sold by Joseph Brunning, 1684 [sic; probably 1686]), pp. 24–25. Thomas James Holmes in Increase Mather: A Bibliography of His Works (Cleveland, 1931), pp. 20–26, states that the date 1684 on An Arrow’s title page was a misprint; he believes the pamphlet to have been published initially in 1686, based on Sewall’s contemporary Diary entry. For John Locke, see Alice Morse Earle, Child Life in Colonial Days (New York: Macmillan, 1899), pp. 24–26.

18 From The Hutchinson Papers in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 2nd Ser., x (1823), 183–184.

19 A Treatise against Dicing, Dancing, &c., quoted by Scholes, The Puritans and Music, pp. 85–86.

20 Cited by Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), pp. 14–15. See Morton’s book, New English Canaan or New Canaan Containing an Abstract of New England (Amsterdam: Jacob Frederick Stam, 1637).

21 Sewall, Diary, v, 178–179.

22 Cotton referred to in An Arrow against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing, pp. 21–22. English wedding described in Dean-Smith, Playford’s English Dancing Master, p. xvii; ordinance in Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed„ Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1628–1688, 6 vols. (Boston: William White, 1853–1854), iv, 41.

23 Mather, An Arrow, pp. 1, 29. For a further discussion of this tract by Joy Van Cleef, see vol. I of this book, pp. 6–8.

24 Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1960), pp. 117–118.

25 Sewall, Diary, v, 103–104, 112, 120–122, 145. For Sewall’s activity as a printer, see George Emery Littlefield, Early Boston Booksellers 1642–1711 (Boston: Club of Odd Volumes, 1900; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), pp. 111–116.

26 Mather’s sermon Corderius Americanus: An Essay upon the Good Education of Children (Boston, August 1708), p. 19 (Evans 1361). Cotton Mather Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1728, ed. Worthington C. Ford, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 7th Ser., vii–viii (1911–1912), 146.

27 For a reproduction of Enstone’s notice and another discussion of it see fig. 276 and p. 511 in Barbara Lambert’s contribution in this volume. Sewall, Diary, VII, 111; Norman Benson, “The Itinerant Dancing and Music Masters of Eighteenth Century America” (University of Minnesota, Ph.D. diss., 1963), pp. 334–339.

28 I am indebted to Barbara Lambert for locating Brownell’s bill and clarifying his itinerary. (See also Appendix C.) Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, intro, by Carl Van Doren (New York: Heritage Press, 1951), p. 10. For Brownell, see also Robert Francis Seybolt, The Private Schools of Colonial Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935; repr. by the Greenwood Press, 1970), pp. 12–14.

29 See Andrew Oliver, “Peter Pelham (c. 1697–1751): Sometime Printmaker of Boston,” in Boston Prints and Printmakers 1670–1775, ed. Sinclair Hitchings and Walter Muir Whitehill, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, xlvi (1973), pp. 133–173.

30 The particular dance manual is ‘Wright’s Compleat Collection of Celebrated Country Dances both Old and New (Printed for I. Johnson, Musical Instrument Maker at y^e Harp & Crown in Cheapside, London, ca. 1742), a copy now located in the Essex Institute, Salem. Barbara Lambert provided the information about the Turners, Holyokes, and their relationship to one another. Information about the Holyoke-Turner marriage is from George Francis Dow, ed., The Holyoke Diaries, 1709–1856 (Salem: Essex Institute, 1911), p. xvii. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1955), p. 367, reports that the balls in New York were discontinued in 1768 when consorts of Gen. Gage and Governor Moore could not agree on who should stand first in a country dance.

31 For Richard Hall, see Earle, Child Life, pp. 87–88. Quote on dance from Elias Howe, Howe’s Complete Ball-Room Hand-Book (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1858), p. 23; John Adams, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), I, 172.

32 John Griffiths, A Collection of the Newest Cotillions and Country Dances (Northampton, 1794). See also S. Foster Damon, “A History of Square-Dancing,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, New Ser., lxii (1952), 74–78.

33 Earle, Child Life, pp. 101–104. For Wentworth letter, see Louis Pichierri, Music in New Hampshire 1623–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 56–57.

34 “Extracts from Captain Francis Goelet’s Journal,” England Historical and Genealogical Register, xxiv (1870), 57.

35 Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton (Williamsburg: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1948), p. 146.

36 Samuel Eliot Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, 1765–1848: The Urbane Federalist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), pp. 42–48.

37 John Adams, Diary, ii, 46–47.

38 John Adams, Diary, i, 172–173.

39 The Whyer notice was brought to my attention by Barbara Lambert. “Goelet’s Journal,” p. 53. For Newport reference, see George Champlin Mason, Reminiscences of Newport (Newport: Charles E. Hammett, Jr., 1884), pp. 101–103. For the actual dances, see figs. 8–13 in “Selected American Country Dances and Their English Sources” by Joy Van Cleef and Kate Van Winkle Keller in volume I of this book.

40 Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, p. 48. Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, pp. 243, 366.

41 John Rowe, Letters and Diary of John Rowe, ed. Anne Rowe Cunningham (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1903), p. 231. See also Malcolm Frieberg, Thomas Hutchinson of Milton (Milton: Milton Historical Society, 1971). Rowe also reported that Commencement Day, July 20, 1774, was not public because of the distressed situation of the town and province.

42 “Goelet’s Journal,” p. 53.

43 For Shirley Place, see W. W. Cordingley, “Shirley Place, Roxbury, Massachusetts, and Its Builder, Governor William Shirley,” Old-Time New England, xiii (1921), 51–63. The architectural drawings of the Shirley—Eustis House were kindly provided Barbara Lambert by Frederick C. Detwiller, architectural historian and executive director of the Shirley—Eustis House Association.

44 For Keeler Tavern, see Silvio A. Bedini, Ridgefield in Review (Ridgefield, Conn.: Ridgefield 250th Anniversary Committee, Inc., 1958), pp. 197–200. For sprung floors see John Mason and Virginia Palmer, “The Rise and Fall of the Spring Dance Floor,” Yankee Magazine, February (1973), pp. 124ff.

45 Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, pp. 167, 362.

46 Alice Morse Earle, Stage-coach and Tavern Days (New York: Macmillan, 1900), pp. 100–137. On page 116, a description of a minister’s ordination in New England in 1785 cites that 80 people had 30 bowls of punch before going to meeting in the morning, and 68 who at dinner drank 44 bowls of punch, 18 bottles of wine, 8 bowls of brandy, and a quantity of cherry rum.

47 Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, 39 vols. (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1876–1909), 11th Report, p. 49. This reference and Kendall’s inventory from Suffolk County Probate Registry, Boston, docket number 3293, was brought to my attention by Barbara Lambert. See also pp. 477–478 and Table I in her monograph in this volume for more information on Kendall.

48 Annie Haven Thwing, The Crooked & Narrow Streets of the Town of Boston 1630–1822 (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1920; repr. Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1970), pp. 79, 89. Georgia Bumgardner brought the drawing of the Green Dragon Tavern to my attention.

49 Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, iv, part ii, 100–101.

50 Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), I, 113–117, 124–130. Also, Morison, “The Reverend Seaborn Cotton’s Commonplace Book,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, xxxii (1937), 320–352.

51 John G. Whittier, Leaves from Margaret Smith’s Journal in the Province of Massachusetts 1678–1679 (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Field, 1849), p. 186, pointed out by Barbara Lambert. For examples of hanging ballads and “moral fakements” or confessional ballads, see vol. I of this book, pp. 332–341, and figs. 178, 180, 213, 216, 218, 220, 222.

52 Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 1709–1724, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 7th Ser. (1912), viii, 242. Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, p. 425.

53 “Goelet’s Journal,” pp. 53–61.

54 John Adams, Diary, I, 172.

55 John Adams, Diary, I, 341, quoted in full by Arthur Schrader on the first page of his study “Songs to Cultivate the Sensations of Freedom” in vol. I of this book. For the American prisoner, see George Carey, “Songs of Jack Tar in the Darbies,” Journal of American Folklore, lxxxv (April–June 1972), 167–180.

56 Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, p. 48. John Quincy Adams quoted in Life in a New England Town: 1787–1788 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1903), p. 79.

57 Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, trans. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Evangelical Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania and Adjacent States and The Muhlenberg Press, 1942), I, 320.

58 Benjamin Franklin, The Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. John Bigelow (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1887–1888), iii, 392. For a more detailed study of broadsides see the monographs by Carleton Sprague Smith and Arthur F. Schrader in vol. I of this work.

59 Rowe, Letters and Diary, pp. 171–172. For illustrations of a broadside of The Liberty Song, and Revere’s Liberty Bowl see the Smith monograph in vol. I of this book, figs. 169 and 170.

60 Sonneck and Upton, A Bibliography, pp. 227–228. For the advertisement and The Parody Parodized, see the Smith monograph in vol. I of this book, figs. 167 and 168, and for the Tory parody, see the Schrader monograph again in vol. I, fig. 110.

61 Swan’s portrait was given to the American Antiquarian Society in 1952 by descendants of Timothy Swan. Correspondence on file there between Nina Fletcher Little and Charles Bissell discusses these possible attributions for the painting. Barbara Lambert identified and provided the complete newspaper reference to Luther Allen.

62 For documents relating to dancing and music masters in Boston, see Appendix C. George Francis Dow, Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Boston, 1935; repr. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965), pp. 136–137. For the Androus reference, see Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County Massachusetts, ii, 40. The 1673 reference is quoted by George Chalmers in Political Annals of the Present Colonies from their Settlement to the Peace of 1763 (London, 1780; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), pp. 434–435.

63 Rowe, Letters and Diary, p. 213. The watercolor was found in New Hampshire in 1949 when its purchasers were told that it represented a piano recital at Count Rumford’s, Concord, New Hampshire. In addition to the fact that the “piano” is a double manual spinet (probably a confused representation of a wing-shaped harpsichord), the water-color’s nationality is also questioned. Is it English as the fashions and the setting suggest, or is it American? If it is associated with Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753–1814), he had removed from Concord, New Hampshire, to London in 1775, never to return to America. The Count, however, was a painter (see his biography in the Dictionary of Artists in America [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957]). It is possible that he painted the watercolor in London, ca. 1800—thus explaining the English appearance yet naïve “American” feeling of the work—and his daughter who lived with him in England and Europe may have subsequently brought it with her when she returned to Concord in 1844 to live out her days. This information was extracted by Barbara Lambert from various correspondence dating from July 7, 1966, to March 21, 1973, in the watercolor’s dossier on file in the office of the curator of American painting at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Helen Hollis brought the watercolor to my attention.

64 David McKay, “William Selby, Musical Emigré in Colonial Boston,” Musical Quarterly, lvii (October 1971), 609–627.

65 H. Earle Johnson, Musical Interludes In Boston (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), von Hagens, pp. 270–271, 285, 161–162; Mallet, p. 286; Graupner, pp. 173–174, 179–181.

66 Oscar George Theodore Sonneck, Early Concert-Life in America 1731–1800 (Leipzig, 1907; repr. Wiesbaden: Dr. Martin Sandig oHG, 1969), pp. 264–265. Johnson, Musical Interludes, pp. 269–273.

67 The Greenwood information was kindly supplied by Barbara Lambert. Pichierri, Music in New Hampshire, p. 23.

68 Robert Eliason pointed out the New-York Journal reference to Dash in his unpublished paper “Early American Winds” delivered at the American Musicological Society annual meeting in 1972. He has in preparation a directory entitled Early American Makers of Woodwind and Brass Musical Instruments.

69 Johnson, Musical Interludes, pp. 269–270. Sheridan Germann, the owner of the piano by Meinke, Meyer & Meyer, and herself an expert on stringed keyboard instrument decoration, pointed out to the writer the partnership between the von Hagens and Crehore. In a forthcoming article Mrs. Germann will support her theory here advanced in the text that Crehore made her piano’s Hepplewhite stand in Boston upon the instrument’s arrival, just as it is generally accepted that the stand for John Harris’s Boston-made spinet discussed below was not made until the instrument arrived at its first home in Newport.

The earliest extant harpsichord made in North America is a spinet inscribed “Johannes Clemm Fecit Philadelphia 1739” now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (along with that by John Harris mentioned in the text).

For more information on the harpsichord builders in London with the surname of Harris, see Donald H. Boalch, Makers of the Harpsichord and Clavichord, 1440–1840, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 58–60. Barbara Lambert pointed out the Harris bill in the Massachusetts Historical Society.

70 Samples of wood from the anonymous New England primitive square piano were analyzed in 1973 by the United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, in Madison, Wisconsin, and determined to be New England in origin.

71 Mary Kent Davey Babcock, Christ Church, Salem Street, Boston (Boston: Thomas Todd, 1947), pp. 153–157; Barbara Owen, The Organs and Music of King’s Chapel (Boston: King’s Chapel, 1966), pp. 22–23.

72 Thwing, Crooked & Narrow Streets, pp. 162–164.

73 Peter Pelham would not be occupying the house, for advertisements in the Boston Gazette list him progressively on Summer Street (Feb. 19, 1728), Cornhill and William’s Court, now Pie Alley (Aug. 18, 1729), and the “House of the Late Doctor Noyes near the Sun Tavern, Dock Square” (Boston News-Letter, Dec. 16, 1731). Cited by Oliver, “Peter Pelham,” pp. 136–139. See also the article “February 18, 1729: A Neglected Date in Boston Concert Life,” by Henry Woodward which appeared in Notes, xxxiii, no. 2 (Dec. 1976), 243–252, after my monograph was typeset.

74 Sonneck, Early Concert-Life, pp. 252–253.

75 Travels Through the Middle Settlements in North America in the Years 1759 to 1760 (London: T. Payne, 1775), p. 133.

76 John Adams, Diary, I, 54. Rowe, Letters and Diary, pp. 200, 211, 215; Thwing, Crooked & Narrow Streets, p. 86. In regard to the size of the audience, the bill to Josiah Flagg from Rea and Johnston in Sinclair Hitchings, fig. 348, in this volume includes an entry for Feb. 23, 1771: “To Print^g 150 Concert Ticketts.”

77 “Goelet’s Journal,” pp. 54, 56.

78 Sonneck, Early Concert-Life, pp. 254–309.

79 See monograph by Sinclair Hitchings, p. 642 in this volume.

80 Sonneck, Early Concert-Life, pp. 261–264.

81 Sonneck, Early Concert-Life, pp. 257–259, 273–274.

82 For a list of the regimental bands with music, see footnote 32 on pp. 91–92 in Raoul Camus’s contribution in vol. I of this publication. Rowe, Letters and Diary, p. 179.

83 Rowe, Letters and Diary, pp. 180, 184.

84 Camus, “Military Band,” pp. 322, 160. John Andrews, “Letters of John Andrews, Esq. of Boston, 1772–1776,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 1st Ser., viii (1866), 323–332.

85 Rowe, Letters and Diary, pp. 291–304.

86 Thwing, Crooked & Narrow Streets, p. 86.

87 Sonneck, Early Concert-Life, pp. 274–284; David McKay, “William Selby,” p. 622. For an account of Washington’s entry into Boston, see the Boston Gazette for October 26, 1789.

88 Scholes, The Puritans and Music, p. 202.

89 The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, 21 vols. (Boston: Albert J. Wright, 1869–1922), iii, 500–501.

90 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England (New York: New York University Press, 1956), p. 13.

91 Account of the two young Englishmen in George R. Minot, Continuation of the History of the Province of Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Boston: Manning and Loring, 1798–1803), i, 142–143.

92 From Evelyn’s Diary, October 18, 1666, quoted by Scholes, The Puritans and Music, pp. 210–211.

93 Increase Mather, A Testimony Against several Prophane and Superstitious Customs (London, 1687); Sewall, Diary, v, 103–104; Mather, An Arrow, pp. 25–26.

94 Sewall, Diary, v, 152, 154, 159–162, 169. Mather, Testimony, preface.

95 Sewall, Diary, v, 196.

96 Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, ii, 464, 504–509, 547.

97 Sewall, Diary, vi, 167–168; Letter Book of Samuel Sewall, in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 6th Ser., ii (1888), 29–30; Sewall, Diary, vi, 419–424.

98 Julius Herbert Tuttle, “Governor Burnet in the Diary of Benjamin Walker, Jr.,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, xxxviii (1935), 243. Italics in the quotation have been added for emphasis.

99 Quoted from “James Ralph (c. 1699–1762) of Philadelphia and London” in Church Music and Musical Life in Pennsylvania in the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1938), iii, part i, 174–175.

100 New-England Weekly Journal, February 14, 1732. For An Act, see footnotes 88 and 89.

101 Oscar G. T. Sonneck, Early Opera in America (New York, 1912; repr. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1963), p. 133. Gardner citation from “Interleaved Almanac-Diary of 1759” (unpublished manuscript in the papers of Dr. Henry Wheatland at the Essex Institute, Salem), I, 10. This could have been a private reading by Salem citizens, for certainly later on in the century it is clear that Salem school children acted in plays for school exhibitions. William Pynchon records such an event in his diary on January 1, 1789: “I go to the scholar’s exhibition, under Master Harris, and am highly entertained with parts of the ‘Haunted House’, acted there . . . ,” The Diary of William Pynchon, ed. Fitch Edward Oliver (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1890), p. 326. Both are cited by Milton Gerald Hehr, in “Musical Activities in Salem, Massachusetts: 1783–1823” (Boston University, Ph.D. diss., 1963), pp. 42, 49. Ames quotes from Charles Warren, Jacobin and Junto or Early American Politics as Viewed in the Diary of Nathaniel Ames 1758–1822 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), pp. 18ff. Harvard reference in Morison, Harvard in the Seventeenth Century, ii, 464, footnote 4. The full Harv ard College prohibition is found in “College Book” (bound manuscript in Harvard College Library Archives), vii (November 16, 1762), 101, and is quoted by Ruth Michael in “A History of the Professional Theatre in Boston from the Beginning to 1816” (Radcliffe College, Ph.D. diss., 1941), I, 4. For New Hampshire reference, see Pichierri, Music in New Hampshire, p. 81.

102 Samuel G. Drake, The History and Antiquities of Boston (Boston: Luther Stevens, 1856), pp. 622–623. The American Magazine and Historical Chronicle, vol. iii (August 1746), p. 356. According to Frank Luther Mott in A History of American Magazines, 3 vols. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1930), I, 78, this magazine was published from 1743 to 1746. The third magazine begun in America, it was edited by Jeremiah Gridley (Harvard, 1725). A large proportion of its contents was taken from British periodicals.

103 Minot, History of the Province, pp. 142–143; Sonneck, Early Opera, pp. 10, 14–19; George O. Seilhamer, History of the American Theatre, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1888; repr. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), I, 2–11. Sonneck cites evidence that George Washington saw this troupe in June 1752 during its Virginia tour.

104 Seilhamer, American Theatre, I, 122–128; Sonneck, Early Opera, pp. 31–33.

105 Pichierri, Music in New Hampshire, pp. 77–81; Hehr, “Musical Activities in Salem,” p. 93.

106 Oliver Morton Dickerson, comp., Boston under Military Rule (1768–1769) as revealed in the Journal of the Times (Boston, 1936; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), pp. 47, 55, 78; Drake, History and Antiquities of Boston, p. 756.

107 Rowe, Letters and Diary, pp. 200, 219, 221, 239–240, 264.

108 Pichierri, Music in New Hampshire, pp. 81–89.

109 William W. Clapp, Jr., A Record of the Boston Stage (Boston, 1853; repr. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968), pp. 3–4. Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 380–381.

110 Rowe, Letters and Diary, p. 298. Mrs. Warren (sister of James Otis, wife of James Warren, and close friend of John and Abigail Adams) had already published two earlier plays filled with political satire: The Adulateur (1773—Evans 13063), which pictured Thomas Hutchinson as a traitor, and The Group (1775—Evans 15213), which is directed against the Loyalist Party in Massachusetts. See Seilhamer, American Theatre, ii, 3–7. Mercy Otis Warren, The Blockheads (Boston, 1776) (Evans 15213).

111 Rowe, Letters and Diary, pp. 298–306.

112 Quoted by H. Earle Johnson, “The Adams Family and Good Listening,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, xi (Summer–Fall 1958), 167.

113 Sonneck, Early Opera, p. 134; Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, pp. 4–5; Ellen Susan Bulfinch, The Life and Letters of Charles Bulfinch, Architect (Boston, 1896), p. 77. Quoted by Harold and James Kirker, Bulfinch’s Boston 1787—1817 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 56–57.

114 Benson, “Itinerant Dancing and Music Masters,” pp. 360–361.

115 Records of the Boston Selectmen: 1784–1796 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1886), xxxi, 267–268; Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, pp. 5–6.

116 Philo Dramatis, The Rights of the Drama; or, an Inquiry into the Origin, Principles, and Consequences of Theatrical Entertainments (Boston: Printed for the Author, 1792), pp. 23, 43 (Evans 24691). William Haliburton, Effects of the Stage on the Manners (Boston: Young & Etheridge, 1792), p. 8 (Evans 24371).

117 Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, pp. 6–15; Horace Elisha Scudder, Recollections of Samuel Breck (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1877), p. 182; Frank Chouteau Brown, “The First Boston Theatre, on Federal Street,” Old-Time New England, xxxvi (July 1945), 1–7; William Dunlap, History of the American Theatre (New York, 1832; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1963), p. 247; Michael, “History of Professional Theatre,” 1, 26–40.

118 Columbian Centinel, September 8, 1792; Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, pp. 11–15; Michael, “History of Professional Theatre,” 1, 38–41. For more information about the specific productions of the seasons, see Seilhamer, American Theatre, iii, 20–22; Sonneck, Early Opera, pp. 135–137; and Michael, “History of Professional Theatre,” ii, 2–14.

119 Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, p. 19; Brown, “The First Boston Theatre,” pp. 2–4; John Alden, “A Season in Federal Street, J. B. Williamson and the Boston Theatre 1796–1797,” American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings, lxv (1955), 10–12.

120 A full description by Bulfinch of the theater is incorporated in Thomas Pemberton’s “A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, iii (1794), 255–256; Alden, “A Season,” pp. 11–12.

121 Kirker and Kirker, Bulfinch’s Boston, pp. 60–62, 282; Alden, “A Season,” p. 12.

122 Kirker and Kirker, Bulfinch’s Boston, pp. 61–62; Dunlap, History of American Theatre, pp. 252–258. Dunlap quotes Paine’s entire prologue (pp. 253–256). Paine, who in 1798 wrote the words to the song “Adams and Liberty,” later changed his name to that of his father: Robert Treat Paine.

123 Seilhamer, American Theatre, ii, 65–66; iii, 235–237.

124 Columbian Centinel, December 8, 1792; Benson, “Itinerant Dancing and Music Masters,” pp. 367–368; Sonneck, Early Opera, p. 137. The law officially expired on November 1, 1799.

125 Columbian Centinel, January 22, 1794. Julian Mates, The American Musical Stage before 1800 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1962), pp. 188–189. Fiske, English Theatre Music, p. 258. Royall Tyler, engaged briefly to John Adams’ daughter Abigail, was a lawyer who later became chief justice of the Supreme Court of Vermont.

126 The Journal of an Excursion to the United States of North America in the Summer of 1794 (Salisbury: J. Easton, 1796; repr. with an introduction by Peter A. Fritzell, New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1969), pp. 42–43.

127 Hehr, “Musical Activities in Salem,” p. 380. For a discussion of the political factions in theater audiences and the favorite tunes of each, see Irving Lowens, “Benjamin Carr’s Federal Overture (1794)” in his Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), pp. 89–114.

128 Seilhamer, American Theatre, ii, 228–243, gives a complete list of the performances and the casts for the first season. Sonneck, Early Opera, lists all of the musical presentations for the Federal Street seasons from 1794 to 1800 on Table D between pp. 144 and 145.

129 For more information about the specific productions of the first season (1794) of the Boston Theatre on Federal Street under the management of Charles Stuart Powell, see Seilhamer, American Theatre, iii, 228–231; Sonneck, Early Opera, Table D between pp. 144 and 145; and Michael, “History of Professional Theatre,” ii, 15–26.

130 Johnson, Musical Interludes in Boston, pp. 169–171. For more information about the specific performances of the second season (1794–1795) under the management of Charles Stuart Powell, see Seilhamer, American Theatre, iii, 243–247; Sonneck, Early Opera, Table D between pp. 144 and 145; and Michael, “History of Professional Theatre,” ii, 27–38.

131 For more information about the specific performances of the third season (1795–1796) of the Boston Theatre, see Seilhamer, American Theatre, iii, 271–273; Sonneck, Early Opera, Table D between pp. 144 and 145; and Michael, “History of Professional Theatre,” ii, 39–64.

132 Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, pp. 42, 36.

133 John Alden, “A Season,” pp. 12–13, 22; Johnson, Musical Interludes, pp. 172–175. For more information about the specific performances of the fourth season (1796–1797) of the Boston Theatre under the management of John Brown Williamson, see Seilhamer, American Theatre, iii, 332–353; Sonneck, Early Opera, Table D between pp. 144 and 145; Michael, “History of Professional Theatre,” ii, 64–91; and Alden, “A Season,” pp. 55–74.

134 For more information about the specific performances of the first season (1796–1797) of Haymarket Theatre under the management of Charles Stuart Powell, see Seilhamer, American Theatre, iii, 354–370; Sonneck, Early Opera, Table E between pp. 148 and 149; and Michael, “History of Professional Theatre,” ii, 485–500. Priest quote is from his Travels in the United States of America Commencing in the Year 1793, and Ending in 1797 (London: J. Johnson, 1802), pp. 165–166.

135 Sonneck, Early Opera, p. 147; Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, pp. 56–57; Brown, “The First Boston Theatre,” pp. 4–8; Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, p. 79.

136 Alden, “A Season,” pp. 32–35; Mates, The American Musical Stage, p. 77; Fiske, English Theatre Music, pp. 280–281. For Table x Graupner’s pay is calculated at half of the $30 paid to Mr. and Mrs. Graupner weekly.

137 Columbian Centinel, February 22, 1794; Philo Dramatis, The Rights of the Drama, p. 37.

1 See Sir Fernando Gorges, Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Savior in New-England (London, 1658), p. 103.

2 Arthur Perry was long known as town drummer. Among his duties were “drumming to the Company” and training younger drummers for the town. Perry owned a valuable estate in School St., between the corners of Washington and Common Sts. (now, Tremont) and died October 9, 1652. See Table II in Barbara Lambert’s contribution to this volume, and Z. G. Whitman, The History of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company [Boston, 1842], p. 77.

His son Seth joined The Company in 1662 and was also a drummer from 1662 to 1667. Seth’s name appears on a petition of handy-craftsmen presented to the town council in 1677. See Table II in Barbara Lambert’s contribution to this volume, Samuel G. Drake, The History and Antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), p. 427.

3 The Military Company was a voluntary association established in 1638 for the defense of the colony. It later became known as the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. The Company performed its training exercises once a month on the Boston Common until 1657. Thereafter the number of field days per month was reduced to five and later to two (Whitman, p. 445).

4 Thomas Fitch rose to the rank of regimental colonel in Boston and was a justice of the peace. Fitch is connected with another musical personality in Boston, Murat the trumpeter. See page 495 in Barbara Lambert’s study in this volume, or The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. (New York, 1973), II, 694.

5 The proclamation promised a reward for information leading to the capture of the ring-leaders of the riot and a pardon for any participants who would divulge such information. Lt. Gov. Phips took these measures in the absence of Gov. Belcher who was in New Hampshire at the time.

6 This letter was one of several which was circulated about town in defiance of the proclamation by Lt. Gov. Phips (see above).

7 Extracted from Governor Pownall’s speech before the Council Chamber, June 1, 1759. Before leaving for “Penobscot Country” to establish the site for a fort along the Penobscot River, Governor Pownall had given orders to raise troops for the expedition against Canada.

8 Previous to the “false report,” the city had been alarmed by a great number of men from the frontier marching under arms. The insurrection was aborted and the marchers left the city peacefully, leaving two emissaries behind to present their petition to the Governor.

9 See also “Bells,” Sept. 28, 1668. Joseph Gridley also served as hogreeve and wood-corder from 1678 to 1680 and scavenger and inspector of brickmaking in 1686.

10 Hill was also appointed watchman on May 5, 1736.

11 The word “meeting house” was first used in England to refer to the place of worship of dissenters from the Church of England. To the New England colonies the word was used less discriminately to refer to any public house of worship.

12 Elbridge H. Goss, Early Bells in Massachusetts (Boston, 1874), pp. 11 and 20–21.

13 Goss, Early Bells, p. 15.

14 The Memorial History of Boston, ed. Justin Winsor, 4 vols. (Boston, 1880), II, 482.

15 John Josselyn, Voyage to New-England (London, 1674), p. 162. This same passage, incidentally, is cited in the O.E.D. (1933, VI, 177) as a literary example of the term “marmalet,” i.e., “marmalade-madam,” which is defined therein as strumpet.

16 This passage has been cited as evidence that Boston’s First Church, rebuilt in 1639, had a bell tower. Caleb H. Snow, History of Boston (Boston, 1828), p. 91.

17 Crumwell, a gentleman pirate commissioned by the Earl of Warwick, shared his Spanish booty with Bostonians. In his will of 1649 “he gave six bells to the town, doubtless some of his plunder.” Editorial note in Winsor, Memorial History, I, 509.

18 These Bostonians were granted incorporation in order to build a conduit to provide their neighborhood with water for drinking and for use in case of fire.

19 The Bellman’s watch supplemented the constable or militia watch. Bellmen were elected in September, to patrol from October through April, the winter months when people were most likely to keep fires for heat, thereby increasing the threat of fire in town. The bellman’s principal duty was to watch for fire and alarm the inhabitants thereof (see below, folio 11 in BRC, 7th Report, p. 11, October 27, 1662).

20 Capt. Davenport had been appointed commander of the fort at Castle Island in 1645, at which time plans were made to rebuild the fort. In 1651 “the armament and military property of the fort consisted of six murtherers [cannon-like weapons], two boats and a drum, and a suitable number of pikes for each soldier . . . In October, 1654, a committee reported that one of the boats had been lost and the drum spoiled, but not owing to the neglect of the captain. On the twenty-eighth of January, 1655–6, the town of Boston lent the captain of the Castle a great bell, probably the mate to the one lent to the undertakers of the conduit in Union Street, the same having been given to the town by Captain Crumwell. This looks a little as though things were improving at the Castle, and the idea is confirmed by the record that another attempt to finish and equip the Castle was made the next May” Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston [Boston, 1891], p. 489.

21 Richard Taylor was serving as timekeeper for the watch. Robert F. Seybolt, The Town Officials of Colonial Boston 1634–1775, (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), p. 36, n. 88.

22 The following two verses from an old “New-England Ballad” could have been written during this time:

Now this cites New Dorchester as they told unto me,

A Town very famous in all that Country;

They said ’twas new Buildings, I grant it is true,

Yet methinks Old Dorchester’s as fine as the New.

Well, that night I slept till near Prayer time,

Next morning I wonder’d to hear no Bells chime;

At which I did ask, and the Reason I found,

’Twas because they had n’er a Bell in the Town.

—from Wit and Mirth; or, Pills to Purge Melancholy, ed. T. D’Urfey, 4 vols. (London, 1719), iv.

23 These extra measures were probably adopted as a result of the Great Fire of 1676.

24 Samuel Sewall noted in Diary (1:411) that Robert Williams “the Bell-Ringer, Publisher and Gravedigger died this morn [Aug. 25, 1695].”

25 Mrs. Margery Williams probably succeeded her husband, Robert Williams in 1695 as bellringer at Old South. Her son James was appointed to help his mother as gravedigger there in 1701. RRC, 11th Report, pp. 3–4.

26 The measures were taken as a result of the small-pox epidemic of 1721. In Charlestown the Selectmen ordered “that the Sexton do not on any account whatsoever, without order from them, toll above three bells in one day for the burial of any persons, it being represented to them a discouragement to those persons sick of the small-pox.” Winsor, Memorial History, II, 317.

27 Chambers also held the positions of clock keeper, watchman, and gravedigger at various times. He was paid as bellringer for September 1, 1773–March 1, 1742/43. Seybolt, Town Officials, p. 208.

28 Pierce was also appointed clockkeeper, gravedigger and watchman. Seybolt, Town Officials, 186, 195.

29 This was essentially a vote against the three markets which had been established the previous year by a slight majority. The strong opposition to public marketplaces finally closed the markets in 1738. The town nearly refused to accept the gift of Peter Faneuil in 1740, and in fact Faneuil Flail was temporarily abandoned five years after it opened in 1742. Samuel G. Drake, The History and Antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), pp. 596 and 611.

30 Sendall Williams had been appointed gravedigger in 1734. He was paid as bellringer for June 1, 1734–September 1, 1736 and as a clock keeper for June 1, 1734–June 1, 1735. He later held the positions of constable and caller of staves. Seybolt, Town Officials, 204.

31 Andrew Coffin was paid as bellringer for September 1, 1737–December 1, 1740. He also worked as watchman between June 1, 1738 and May 1, 1740, and was dismissed from this office for negligence in 1740. Seybolt, Town Officials, pp. 208, 211, 217.

32 West Church, founded in 1737, was the ninth Congregational church in Boston. Its first minister the Rev. Hooper, joined the Church of England some years later and became minister of Trinity Church, Boston.

33 Thomas Moulin had been appointed watchman in 1723, gravedigger in 1734. He rang bells for the town intermittently between 1734 and 1744. Seybolt, Town Officials, passim.

34 Nathaniel Band also served as hogreeve in 1740, as watchman from 1740 to 1745, and hayward from 1745 to 1750. Seybolt, Town Officials, passim.

35 Faneuil Hall was completed in September, 1742 and Mr. Thomas Jackson was appointed clerk at that time. The allotment of sixty pounds would have covered his salary and expenses, i.e., bell ringer for half a year.

36 Goss in Early Bells, pp. 16–17 writes: “In 1744, Christ’s Church was furnished with a ‘Peal of eight Bells,’ the first chime in America.”

fn. 1. “The aggregate weight of these bells is 7272 pounds; the smallest weighing 620 pounds, the largest 1545, and they cost £560 in England. Each one has an inscription, containing its own and much contemporary history, as follows:—

1st Bell. ‘This peal of eight bells is the gift of a number of generous persons to Christ Church, in Boston, N.E. Anno 1744. A.R.’

2nd Bell. ‘This Church was founded in the year 1723. Timothy Cutler, D.D., the first Rector. A.R. 1723.’

3rd Bell. ‘We are the first ring of bells cast for the British Empire in North America. A.R. 1744’

4th Bell. ‘God preserve the Church of England. 1744.’

5th Bell. ‘William Shirley, Esq., Governor of the Massachusetts Bay, in New-England. Anno 1744.’

6th Bell. ‘The subscription for these bells was begun by Iohn Hammock and Robert Temple, Church Wardens, Anno 1743; completed by Robert Ienkins and Iohn Gould, Church Wardens, Anno 1744.’

7th Bell. ‘Since generosity has opened our mouths, our tongues shall ring aloud its praise. 1744.’

8th Bell. ‘Abel Rundall, of Gloucester, cast us all, Anno 1744.’”

37 The Victory at Louisbourg was first celebrated in Boston when the news reached the town in July. The Victory was celebrated again with even more extravagance upon the return of Gov. Shirley and his Lady who had been at the scene of action.

“About twelve o’clock they landed at the end of Long Wharf, amidst a crowd of people, who gave repeated shouts of acclamations. Here they were received by his Majesty’s Council, the Speaker of the House, Magistrates, Gentlemen and Merchants of the Town. The regiment of militia under Col. Jacob Wendell, with a foot company belonging to Chelsea, were drawn up . . . as were also the Troop of Guards, with another Troop of the regiment of Horse under Col. Estes Hatch, and the Company of Cadets under Col. Benjamin Pollard, who paid the proper salutes. The new set of bells, with all the other bells in the Town, continued ringing the greater part of the day.’” Drake, Boston, p. 621.

38 In 1765 the Marquis of Rockingham succeeded Grenville as prime minister of England, a change which facilitated the Repeal of the Stamp Act supported by William Pitt.

39 It was Aaron Hobart who taught Paul Revere how to mould and cast bells in 1792. Edward and Evelyn Stickney, The Bells of Paul Revere, his Sons & Grandsons, rev. ed. ([Bedford, Massachusetts], 1976), p. 4.

40 On certain mournful occasions, it was the custom to cover the clapper of a bell with leather to reduce or “muffle” its sound.

41 Gov. Thomas Hutchinson had obtained tea consignments from the East India Company for his sons, Elisha and Thomas in 1773. It was this shipment of tea which was thrown into Boston harbor under the instigation of Samuel Adams, an event which is now referred to as “The Boston Tea Party.”

1 This appendix and that which precedes it are dedicated to the devoted efforts of a force of assistants and volunteers who helped me systematically search and collect, from the early Boston newspapers cited below and the Reports of the Boston Record Commissioners., all references to musical sounds. They include: Karen Baseman, Robert Blanchard, Deborah Crimmins, Ellen Cornell, Diane DiSalvo, Marjory Frankel, Rebecca Greenleaf, Naomi Harris, Elaine Greenstein, Laura Hodge, Virginia Hooper, Pamela Howell, Genevieve Jennings, Cathy Kent, Christie Kenyon, Elizabeth Layton, Sarah Lehrman, Ruth Levitsky, Jennifer McGregor, Jean Moreno, Roberta Oppenheim, Betty Press, Barbara Russell, Kathy Schwarts, Edith Schmidt, Lindsay Davidson Shea, and Stephanie Welch.

Those to whom special thanks are due for their extensive efforts are: Carole Greenleaf, Frances Knight, Ruth Piken, Juliette Rogers, and most especially M. Sue Ladr.

1 There possibly were two other dancing instructors in the seventeenth-century Boston area. The first is cited by Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 117: “A dancing school, opened in Boston in 1672, was shortly suppressed by the authorities, and we know that in 1676 there were no musicians by trade.” The compiler of this Appendix searched Mr. Bridenbaugh’s references and read the microfilm of the Boston Town Records in ms at the Boston Public Library, but could locate no primary source for this school.

The second was Margery Hoar Flynt (d. 1687) of Braintree. For details, see p. 465 of Barbara Lambert’s contribution to this volume.

2 NYG, July 12, 1731

The Noble Science of Fencing with Small Sword is taught by Charles Malone at his School-House in Smith-Street next door to the Three Pideons [sic] in New York, at the usual Prices given to neighbouring Professors.

His Hours during the Sultry-Season are from Five to Six in the Morning and likewise in the Evening.

3 Perhaps George Brownell, who had earlier established a good reputation in Boston, returned briefly after an absence of fourteen years, in order to pave the way for Thomas Brownell (? his son) to follow in his footsteps. See also the section on Thomas Brownell in this Appendix.

4 Sewall Diary, ii, 840:

Dec^r 24 [1716] . . . . heard of a Ship from England Confirming the Death of Mr. David Jeffries, Mr. Banister, Redknap, and all his Company saving Beard, the 2^d Mate, who swam ashore; the others lost out of the Boat. . . .

Note: “The Amity had been driven aground on the Kent coast, and the passengers and crew took to the longboat which was upset.”

5 The house of Sir Charles Hobby (d. 1715) stood on the north corner of Rawson’s Lane (now Bromfield Street) and Marlborough (now Washington Street).

6 After regular hours, some of the more spacious schoolrooms were sometimes used as the location for dancing classes taught by approved masters with the tacit approbation of the selectmen.

7 According to Seybolt, Private Schools, p. 190, Grainger’s was the earliest evening school in Boston.

8 Thomas Grainger was in the Harvard College class of 1737, but left in January of 1734 because of the death of his father. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, x, 185–186.

9 Andrew LeMercier was minister of the French Protestant Church in Boston.

10 As a boy Benjamin Franklin lived at the Sign of the Ball, on the south-east corner of Union and Hanover Streets.

11 One of the most valuable sources to date for information on Peter Pelham is Oliver, “Peter Pelham,” cited in the introduction to this Appendix.

12 Oliver, “Peter Pelham,” p. 135. This print “bears the distinction of being the first mezzotint known to have been made in America.” It is American in feeling because it does not flatter, but rather is simply a good likeness of the sitter.

13 Dr. or Capt. Oliver Noyes (d. 1721), a Selectman in 1708, 1711, 1719–1720 and a citizen of prominence, conceived of and built Long Wharf in 1710, a major development for Boston. Long Wharf extended King or State Street 1000 feet or more into the sea, and when one side was built up with shops and warehouses it had the effect of a continuous street. Noyes’ house was located on the corner of Pierce’s Lane which was on the opposite side of Dock Square from Wing’s Lane where Deblois held his concerts. Justin Winsor. The Memorial History of Boston, including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630–1880, 4 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1880–1881), II: xx, 502, 535.

14 Dumaresq’s house was located on the east corner of the present Hawley and Summer Streets. (Seybolt, Private Schools, p. 26.) Oliver, “Peter Pelham,” p. 149 said: “Dumaresq the merchant, vestryman of Trinity Church of which Pelham was a member . . . was doubtless delighted not only to aid Pelham, but to open his house to the ladies and gentlemen of Boston for such gaiety and social intercourse as Pelham’s talents promised.” Philip Dumaresq’s enjoyment of the polite social arts was conveyed to his granddaughter Ann, who in 1667 married the dancing master and impresario William Turner, Sr.

15 Oliver, “Peter Pelham,” p. 159. “It was early in 1750 or at the end of 1749 that John Greenwood painted the Rev. Thomas Prince, pastor of the Old South Church and well-known historian. Prince was an obvious subject for a mezzotint and subscriptions must have been come by readily. Pelham set to work and by May 24, 1750 the News-Letter could advise [of its availability]. In all likelihood [it was] a second venture between Pelham and [James] Buck [a Boston printseller].”

16 Oliver, “Peter Pelham,” p. 165. “Pelham’s painting of Moorhead from which the print was taken is lost, but it may well have been influenced by that done by Greenwood which is signed and dated 1749 and is not unlike the print. The Rev. Mr. Moorhead was the minister of what was known as the ‘Church of Presbyterian Strangers at Boston in New-England’.”

17 Arthur W. H. Eaton. The DeBlois Family (repr. from: New England Historical and Genealogical Register, LXVII, January, 1913).

18 In 1720 Edward Enstone moved to a “Large House in King-Street, Boston” where he taught dancing and other polite arts (BG, September 12, 1720). Enstone sold this house two years later, in December of 1723 (BG, December 2, 16, 1723). Was this the same property from which Stephen Deblois first offered dancing instruction?

19 The concert location in Wing’s Lane had to be large enough for an audience. Already by 1687 Samuel Sewell noted in his Diary that the evening of December 4 he and some friends.

. . . . Treat with Brother Wing about his Letting a Room in his House for a man to shew Tricks in. He saith, seeing ’tis offensive, he will remedy it. It seems the Room is fitted with Seats. I read what Dr. Ames saith of Callings, and Spake as I could, from this Principle, That the Man’s Practice was unlawfull, and therefore Capt. Wing could not lawfully give him an accomodation for it. Sung the 90^th Ps. from the 12^th v. to the end. Broke up.

Annie Haven Thwing. The Crooked & Narrow Streets of the Town of Boston (1630–1822), id ed. (Boston: Charles E. Lauriat Co., 1925), p. 129, said of Wing’s Lane: “There were several taverns near the Dock. The Castle was on the west corner of Elm Street. In the Book of Possessions, William Hudson, Jr., inkeeper, is credited with a house and garden here. In 1674 he conveyed to John Wing his house and buildings commonly called “Castle Tavern”. The estate was mortgaged and forfeited, and came into the possession of Benjamin Pemberton in 1694, “a mansion hitherto called Castle Tavern, then George Tavern.” Exactly when it ceased to be a tavern is difficult to say.

20 Stephen Deblois tuned the Christ Church organ, by an unknown maker, possibly William Claggett of Newport, Rhode Island, 1736, before this first public recital on it probably by William Price. The recital raised a total of forty-eight pounds towards the purchase of this organ. Mary Kent Davey Babcock, “Organs and Organ Builders of Christ Church, Boston, 1726–1945,” Historical Magazine of the Episcopal Church, XIV, 247.

21 Sonneck. Early Concert Life in America, pp. 260, 174, 75, suggests the possibility that if the 29th Regiment were militia, the civilian Mr. McLean, watchmaker, from whom tickets could be purchased to the concert in Boston on March 16, 1769, might be identical with the fife-major featured. On January 24, 1771, in New York, and later in the same year on December 5 in Philadelphia, a John M Lean or McLane, a fife-major and German flute player gave two concerts. However back in Boston a “McLane, Watchmaker” sold tickets to a concert for the benefit of William S. Morgan originally scheduled for January 25, 1771 but postponed to February 8 (BWNL, January 17, 1771; BPB, January 28, 1771. For the complete quotes, see these two sources in the section on William Sampson Morgan in this Appendix). Nothing more with regard to music is heard of McLean, Watchmaker, in Boston after this date. A possible explanation for assuming Sonneck correct might be that John M Lean or McLane, fife-major and German flute player, and the Boston Watchmaker McLean or McLane were related with the same surname, giving the latter reason for helping the former. Perhaps, though, the association is nothing more than military. W. S. Morgan had ties to the Navy.

22 Charleston County Wills, 1747–1752, Book VI, pp. 402–403. The spinet was valued at ten pounds, the clavichord at four pounds.

23 There are some interesting family connections in relation to the succession of Ephraim Turner to Thomas Brownell’s dancing school. Marriage intentions between Thomas Brownell’s widow Hannah and William Sheafe were published in 1738 (BRC, XXVIII, 230). William Sheafe (1706–1771) was a prominent musical figure in the city. He was a member of the “Consort”, a musical ensemble of gentlemen performers, and its spokesman when the group petitioned the Selectmen in 1744 and 1747 for the use of Faneuil Hall for the purpose of presenting two concerts (BRC, XVII, 89, 90, 159–160; for the full citations, see these sources in the section on Stephen Deblois in this Appendix). In 1750 William Sheafe is mentioned in the Diary of Capt. Francis Goelet, a mariner from New York, as one who invited Goelet to attend the “Consort of which he was a Member. . . . it Consisted on One Indifrent, Small Oargon, One Base Violin, One German Flute and Four small Violins” (New England Historical and Genealogical Society Register, XXIV (1870), 54). It is not known whether the couple actually married; on October 1, 1752, Sheafe married Susanna Child (Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, VII: 254). However, Sheafe’s first wife was Elizabeth Foye, daughter of John and Sarah (Belcher Lynde) Foye. Ephraim Turner in 1748/1749 took Dorothy Foye as his wife.

24 Ebenezer Swan was licensed to teach business subjects, and, as the advertisement stated, taught them during the “usual School Hours,” August 16, 1738 (BRC, XV, 129). Ephraim Turner could have occupied the same premises after hours. The head of Queen (now Court Street) was at the intersection of Hanover and Tremont, which jutted off at an accute angle to Queen. Swan’s ad identifies the location as the head of Queen Street, while the Selectmen specify Tremont as the same former address for Thomas Brownell. The building was therefore probably in the island where Queen and Tremont met, or possibly on the north-west side of the intersection. Concert Hall, opened in 1754 was on the east corner of Queen and Hanover Streets.

25 Norman A. Benson, Itinerant Dancing and Music Masters, pp. 82–94; and Maurer Maurer, “Peter Pelham,” pp. 6–13.

26 Seybolt, Public Schools, p. 54; Nash, American Writing Masters, pp. 15, 19. References to Holbrook not quoted in full here and which exclusively pertain to his work in the public school are: BRC, XV, 292, 349; BRC, XIV, 16, 26, 33–34, 39, 46, 51, 62, 65, 76, 77, 82, 177–178, 195–196, 199, 212, 230–231, 233–234, 243, 255, 256, 259–260, 274, 290, 307; BRC, XVII, 176, 186, 240, 292, 299; BRC, XVI, 11–12, 24, 42, 53, 59, 75, 94. 116, 141–142, 146, 185, 186, 207, 211–213, 216, 245–246, 247. Seybolt, Public Schools, pp. 22n, 23n, 24, 26, 27n, 32n, 47n, 48, 56n, 80, 82, 85, 86.

27 BRC, XIV, 26, 36–37. Deshon served the town in various offices.

28 Rowe’s Lane is now Bedford Street.

29 It would appear from this and similar instances (including those of William Turner, Sr. and Jr.) that there was an unwritten code of ethics which regulated the rights and succession of family trades.

30 Whitmore, “Early Painters and Engravers of New England,” pp. 206–208, 204.

31 Raoul F. Camus. Military Music of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, [1976]), p. 48. “The musicians may have been from the 29th Foot or from the band of the 64th Regiment, as Flagg later gave many concerts with their assistance. The men in one or both cases may even have been local musicians who were attempting to form a musical organization, for Flagg in an advertisement of 1773 claimed that he was the ‘First Founder, and had at great Expense of Time, Trouble, etc., instructed a Band of Music to perform before the Regiment of Militia in this Town.’

“Information about this first militia band has not yet surfaced, other than Flagg’s statement, but the concert of 1769 may have been performed by this band. Flagg had seen the example of the British regimental bands and wished to organize the same for his own militia regiment. The band may not have been very large at first, or may not have had a permanent organization but could still have been called a band.”

32 Flagg’s duet partner could either be James Joan (see fn. 45 below) who most recently to Flagg’s June 7, 1770 concert had “sung and read” on May 28, 1770 (see BEP, March 26, 1770 in the section on James Joan in this Appendix); or a Mr. Asby who advertised in the BWNL, March 29, 1770:

“For the Benefit of Mr. Asby, on Friday the 6th of April, Will be performed at Concert-Hall, A Grand Concert of Vocal and Instrumental Music, to which will be added a Cantata, called Cymon and siphigenia [in BG, April 2, 1770 the latter is spelled iphigenia], in the character of a Clown, by Mr. Asby.——Tickets (at Half-a-Dollar each) to be had of the Printers, Messirs. cox & berry’s opposite the Post Office, Mr. sharwin, Saddler in King-street, and of Mr. Asby in King-street. N.B. To begin at 7 o’Clock P.M.”

BG, April 9, 16, 1770 repeated this ad with the change of performance date to April 20. Either it was postponed or it was so successful it had to be repeated.

33 The performer of the organ concerto, “a Gentleman lately arrived from London, Organist of the Chapel”, was William Selby. See the section on William Selby in this Appendix.

34 Rowe Diary, p. 246. “June 4 [1773]. King’s Birthday aged 35. Colo. Hancock & Company of Cadets, Major Paddock & Artillery, Colo. Erving & the Regiment, Colo. Phipps & Company all made their appearance in the Common—Such a Quantity or Rather Multitude of People as Spectators I never saw before, they behaved very well.

35 Earlier on October 21, 1773, the day originally planned for the Flagg benefit with his “Band of Music” which performed “before the Regiment of Militia in this Town”, Levi Ames was made an example of and hanged for burglery. See Rowe Diary, p. 257 and the section on five “moral fakement” ballads ostensibly by Levi Ames in the article by Carlton Sprague Smith in this book, vol. I, 330–341.

36 David P. McKay, “William Selby,” 613. The writer/compiler of this Appendix has not yet systematically searched the Newport newspapers and primary city documents for evidence of Flagg and music in that area.

37 Participating in the “Vocal entertainment of June 13, 1770,” the last night of the run, could have been James Joan, Mr. Asby (see fn. 32 above), or possibly David Douglass, an actor from New York and Philadelphia who had been in New England (Newport and Providence) in 1761, and had placed the following advertisement in MG (BWNL, for August 3, 1769:

to-morrow (being Friday 4th of August mr. DOUGLASS Will deliver his lecture on heads &c. &c. [To begin at Eight o’Clock.]

Mr Wardwell, an itinerant English actor, was in Salem in 1769 and is thought to have presented an entertainment which consisted of recitations from the ballad opera of Damon and Phillida with songs from the opera of Artaxerxes between the acts (EG, October 3, 1769; Milton Gerald Hehr, “Musical Activities in Salem, Massachusetts, 1783–1823,” Boston University, PhD. diss., 1963, p. 93).

British soldiers provide yet another possibility. In March of 1769 they had advertised their intentions of presenting plays in Boston, which they succeeded in doing throughout the first half of the 1770s. The following quotes illuminate the heated discussions about plays which ensued the announcement.

BWNL, March 16, 1769

Mr. draper,

Please to insert the following, and you’ll oblige Your’s, &c.

I am credibly inform’d, and it is with no small surprise, that a number of the soldiers now here, intend shortly to exhibit a Play in this town, in open violation of an act of the province for preventing stage plays and other theatrical entertainments. I would take the freedom to acquaint these subverters, rather than supporters of peace and good order, that should they, at any time, have the presumption to act in the capacity of Commedians in any part of this government, proper and legal measures will undoubtedly be taken by the civil power to prosecute the offenders.—’Tis to be hoped, that if this friendly hint, should not prove an effectual warning to prevent their intended exhibition, that the gentlemen officers will forbid their acting, till such time as entertainment of this kind, become more acceptable to the inhabitants of the town, than they are at present.

BEP, March 20, 1769

Boston, March 16, 1769.

Messrs, fleets.

Please to insert the following in your impartial Paper and you’ll oblige your constant Reader.

A Writer in last Thursday’s Paper says that he is “credibly informed and with no small surprize, that a number of the Soldiers now here intend shortly to exhibit a Play in this Town, in open violation of an Act of this Province for preventing Stage Plays and other Theatrical Entertainments.” I would inform this Writer and all other intermedledlers, that there is an Act of Parliament licensing Theatrical Performances throughout the King’s dominions, which I take upon me to say (and no one can contradict) intirely supercedes the Act of this Province for preventing the same : And besides, according to the little knowledge I have of the constitution of this Province, the Assembly are restricted to the making Laws not contrary to the Laws of England, and if so, certainly the Act of this Province abovementioned can be of no force.—That Plays are disagreable, as no person is obliged to attend that has not leisure, ability &c inclination, there cannot be any reasonable objection in that respect. I am told that a few years ago some Bunglers, as the means of making assignations, took upon themselves to exhibit Plays at unseasonable hours, which highly incensed the sober part of the Town, as well it might; but as the present Performers have very different and strictly upright motives, it is to be hoped, and may really be expected, they will meet with the approbation of the public, instead of a prosecution, which this Writer’s ignorance of the Law led him to insinuate would take place—which is the sincere wish of one that purposes in the intended Exhibition to be a spectator.

MG (BWNL), March 23, 1769

Mr. DRAPER,

boston, March 21. 1769.

Please to publish the following in your next, and you’l oblige your’s &c.

An Advocate for Theatrical Entertainments has made his appearance in last Monday’s Evening-Post, who endeavours to invalidate the good Effects my publication in your last, relative to Plays, was calculated to propose.—He asserts that, “there is an Act of Parliament licensing Theatrical performances throughout the King’s Dominions, which entirely supercedes the Act of this Province for preventing the same If there is such an Act in being, I readily agree with him that it does; however I know of none, neither did I ever hear, till now, that there was such an Act of Parliament extant; ’tis a matter of doubt to me whether he can produce it, if he can, it will undoubtedly be a satisfaction to the public to be made acquainted with it, as ’tis requisite they should know of it in order to prevent any prosecutions consequent upon a Breach of the Act of this Province for preventing such Entertainments.—His “knowledge of the Constitution of this Province,” as he himself observes, is but “little” for it seems he is entirely ignorant with regard to the ratification of all provincial Laws.—I will enlighten his Understanding in this respect,—and inform him that all Acts of this, as well as other Governments are transmitted, home for the Royal Approbation, and most certainly had there been an Act of Parliament “licensing Theatrical performances through the King’s Dominions,” the Act of this Province prohibiting the same, would have been disallowed of by his Majesty, and therefore been expung’d the Province Laws—“That Plays are disagreeable to the Inhabitants of this Town” is too evident to be with any color of truth contradicted, as manifestly appears by the strenuous efforts made a few Years since, to prosecute the performers of a Play, who were Natives of the Town, nothwithstanding the Expence to the Spectators was but trifling in comparison with what is now exacted.—“No Person,” he says, “is obliged to attend that has not leisure, ability and inclination,” very true,—and it is a melancholy truth, that some Persons, if they have but Forty Shillings in their Pockets, will appropriate it to purchase a Play Ticket, and absolutely deprive themselves and Family of the necessities of Life, only for the sake of gratifying their own foolish Curiosity.—What “Motives the present Performers” go upon, I know not, but I am well assured, they will not “meet with the Approbation of the public,” unless the public are disposed to encourage Persons in the Violation of the good and wholsome Laws of this Government.

For the Selectmen’s later directives to William Turner, Sr., owner of Concert-Hall where theatrical performances took place, see BRC, XIII, pp. 168–169 for March 24, 1773 in the section on William Turner, Sr., in this Appendix.

38 Daniel Rea, Jr., was a painter, decorator, and singer of some repute. He sang solos for several years at the anniversary dinners of the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company, Boston. In 1764 he married Rachel Johnston (?1746–1801), daughter of Thomas Johnston, the organ builder. He and Johnston became business partners; and he wrote down Johnston’s brief nuncupative will in 1767. Sinclair Hitchings, “Thomas Johnston,” Boston Prints and Printmakers, 1670–1775, eds. Sinclair Hitchings and Walter Muir Whitehill, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, XLVI (1973). 121.

39 For Turner’s writs of attachment against William Sampson Morgan, see: Boston. Sessions of the Peace, docket 91657, March 25, 1773, in the section on Morgan in this Appendix.

40 Was Turner also involved in a concert on Harvard College commencement day a year earlier at the Court House, Cambridge, on the Wednesday next [July 15] after the BWNL issue of July 9 1772, (also in BG, July 13, 1772) for the benefit of Mr. Coleman? The ad read as follows:

On Wednesday next, (Being the Commencement at Cambridge) Will be performed A concert of Vocal and Instrumental music, For the Benefit of Mr. colman. In the Court-House there. To begin at 8 o’Clock, P.M.

TICKETS may be had at Mr. howe’s in Cambridge, at Half a Dollar each.

41 Sonneck, Early Concert Life in America, p. 258, believed that W. S. Morgan was the conductor of this concert series “. . . otherwise it would not have rested with the managers to appoint Feb. 2d for a ‘grand’ concert of vocal and instrumental music for Mr. Morgan’s benefit (see BEP, January 30, 1775, in the section on W. S. Morgan in this Appendix). On the other hand it is not quite clear whether the managers raised enough additional stock to carry on the concerts during March and April, and if Morgan, regardless of the signs of approaching war, on April 3d announced ‘his first evening’s entertainment’ in the Boston Evening Post, the form of his announcement almost leads one to infer that the contemplated series was an enterprise of his own. . . .”

42 Judith Holyoke (b. 1769) became William Turner, Jr.’s wife in 1795. William Jr., the son of William Turner, Sr. who held this dance, followed in his father’s footsteps and also became a dancing master.

43 The Green Dragon Tavern was on the west side of Union Street near Hanover. For a drawing of it, see fig. 403 in Cynthia Adams Hoover’s contribution to this volume.

44 Grateful thanks is owed Sally Gant from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for her generous contribution of valuable sources documenting Juhan and his activities as a builder of musical instruments in the South, and for permitting their inclusion in the section on this most interesting of eighteenth-century American musical figures.

Mrs. Gant has been an active researcher in the exemplary archival program to document early Southern American arts and to locate and trace the objects. Because this program is chiefly concerned with objects, there may still be newspaper notices which record Juhan’s activities as a performer that remain to be collected in the early Southern newspapers. One always hopes that more highly-organized efforts like the MESDA program will develop in other areas of the country to help trace Juhan as well as other musical itinerants.

45 Although James Juhan or Joan was “last from Halifax” (Boston. Sessions of the Peace, docket 88654, had a French name and offered to teach the French language in Boston (BWNL, October 20, 1768), he may have spent some time in London.

John Rowe in his diary entry for March 23, 1770 (p. 202), identified Juhan as the unnamed individual who advertised himself in the newspapers in 1769 and 1770 as “a Person who has Read and Sung in most of the great Towns in America”.

46 The two main violinists who have been identified during this period were James Juhan, documented in Boston by October 1, 1768, and William Sampson Morgan, “just arrived from England” (BWNL, December 7, 1770).

47 After the announcement of James Juhan’s son Alexander Juhan, as “Master of Music” in Philadelphia (PP, December 23, 1783), it is difficult to discern which Juhan is active in that city’s concerts. Both James and Alexander lived at Mrs. Perry’s in 1783, the address given for Mr. Juhan, the performer, in 1784. In January of 1786 the Juhan address changed to that of Mr. Brunot. The following two advertisements are certainly those of Alexander, however, because by April 19, 1786, James had taken up residence in Portsmouth, Virginia. The ads for performances by Alexander in Philadelphia are here given in full to record all the compiler knows of the Juhan family to date.

PP, April 22, 1786

concert. At Mr. Duplessis’s New Room, in Church alley, on Tuesday next, will be performed a concert of instrumental music, for the benefit of Mr. Juhan. The Concert will consist of the most favorite Music, viz.

First Part. Simphonie, Stamitz. Double Concerto flute & violin, Davsun, Quarteto, Gambini, Concerto forte piano, Smith.

Sec. Part. Simphonia, Vanhal, Concerto flute, Brown, Duetto forte piano, Smith, Concerto violin, Borghi.

Tickets, at 7/6 each, to be had of Mr. Juhan, at Mr. Brunot’s, the corner of Walnut and Second streets; at Mr. Rice’s Book-store; at the New Coffee-house, and at Mr. Duplessis’s.

April 19.

PP, April 27, 1786

Philadelphia, April 27, 1786.

a grand concert

sacred music,

For the benefit of the Pennsylvania Hospital; Philadelphia Dispensary, and the Poor, for which there has, hitherto, been no regular provision made.——will be performed, at the Reformed German Church, in Race-street, on Thursday, the 4th of May. The doors will be opened at half an hour after nine o’clock, in the morning, but not sooner, and the Music will begin precisely, at eleven o’clock, after which no person can be admitted.——

Order of the Music to be performed.

I. Martini’s celebrated Overture.
II. An Anthem from the 150th Psalm.
III. An Anthem from the 18th Psalm, by the Rev. James Lyon.
IV. Flute Concerto, by Mr. Brown.
V. The voices of time.
VI. An anthem from the 97th Psalm; by Mr. Tuckey.
VII. A violin concerto, by Mr. Juhan.
VIII. An anthem from the izzd Psalm, by A. Williams.
IX. An anthem from the id of Solomon’s Song: by W. Billings.
X. Handel’s celebrated Hallelujah Chorus, in the Messiah.

Tickets at five shillings each; are to be had of Mr. Young, at the southwest corner of Second and Chestnut streets, and of all the managers. To prevent confusion, care has been taken that the number of tickets struck off, should not exceed the number of persons who, by estimating, can be accommodated at the place proposed. Correspondent to this idea, all who apply for tickets will have a right to be supplied, till the who number prepared is exhausted, after which it will be out of the power of the managers to furnish more. And upon the same principle, on the morning of the exhibition, [those] persons supplied with tickets, as they successively offer themselves, will be introduced to their seats, indeed, it is the desire, and will be the endeavour, of the managers, to have the whole of this business conducted with that decency and dignity, which its nature and design seem to require.

To administer some relief to him whose hope is like a shadow, to raise up him who is bowed down with sorrow, and to show that the Fine Arts may and and ought to subserve the purposes of humanity, are we believe the with which the performers have, voluntarily awnsered their service on this occasion. Under a full conviction of their motives being such, and as the highest proof of our approbation, we have, cheerfully, complied with their request, and agreet to act as

managers,

William White, Henry Helmet, Casper Weinberg, Francis Hopkinson, George Nelson, Azariah Horton, Joseph Ker, Reynold Keen, Nathaniel Falconer, William Hall, Henry Hill, Samuel Miles, Joseph Snowden, Daniel Smith, Jacob Baker, William Will, Jacob L. Swyler, John Baker.

48 Hans Nathan, William Billings: Data and Documents, p. 15; David P. McKay and Richard Crawford, William Billings of Boston, Eighteenth-Century Composer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 67.

49 Mr. Hartley was George Harland Hartley, an organist and performer in Boston who flourished there from 1763 to 1771. Hartley came to Boston in 1763 as organist to King’s Chapel, succeeding, after a two-year vacancy, Thomas Dipper. He retained this position until at least 1768. He also gave at least eight Boston concerts. For another reference to Hartley, see BG, December 18, 25, 1769, in the section on James Juhan in this Appendix. Because Hartley is not known to have offered any kind of musical instruction while in Boston, a section on him has not been included in this Appendix.

50 “Colo Dalrymple” was from the 14th Regiment, according to John Rowe in his Diary, p. 209, with whom Dalrymple dined on October 19, 1770.

51 Sonneck, Early Concert Life in America, p. 269, pointed out that the list of wind instruments indicates that this concert included a full orchestra of the period.

52 Propert’s “Expectation soon of the Arrival of a Capital Performer” was thought to be the return of W. S. Morgan. Morgan first appeared in Boston late in 1770 and stayed at least through September of 1771. From 1771 to 1773 he lived and worked in both Newport, Rhode Island and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Propert stated in his ad in BEP, January 25, 1773, that “The Performer he expected is come . . .”. Propert sided with Morgan against William Turner, Sr., in presenting competing concerts. As was seen earlier, in the section on William Turner, Sr., in this Appendix, Turner had legitimate cause to be displeased with Morgan; Turner was the cause of the Selectmen’s warning of Morgan from Boston on March 25, 1773, which documents with certainty Morgan’s presence in Boston. Because Propert and Morgan continued to present concerts in Boston after this warning, Propert probably gave security to the Selectmen to indemnify the town from further problems arising from the difficult Morgan.

53 For a more complete description of William Selby’s career and a list of his compositions, see the excellent article by McKay, “William Selby,” pp. 609–627. See also Sonneck, Early Concert Life in America, pp. 263, 268–287, 293–295, 313, 317. Foote, in Annals, II, 403, said of Selby: “There is reason to believe that great care was taken from the time of the reopening of the Chapel that the musical service should be not only thoroughly devotional, but level with the taste and science of the time. There are not wanting indications that William Selby, who was organist from 1782 to 1804 [sic: 1798], was at the head of his profession, we can hardly say as an organist, for there cannot have been organs enough in Boston to justify a comparison, but as a musical performer. His salary was £66. 13s.4d. . . .”

54 The Post incorrectly identified Selby as John rather than William.

55 Sonneck, Early Concert Life in America, p.283, states that this fact was not correct, “as ‘Jonah, an oratorio, composed by S. Felsted’ was performed at New York on June 11, 1788.”

56 McKay, “William Selby,” p. 622, states unequivocally that Selby was the conductor of this concert.

57 Bromfield’s Lane, also called Rawson’s Lane is now named Bromfield Street. In 1779–1780 Vandale was instructor of French at Harvard College. Seybolt, Private Schools, p. 77.

58 Bradford Adams Whittemore. Memorials of the Society of the Cincinnati (Boston, 1964), p. 646.

59 Griffith published two dance manuals. They are:

John Griffith. A Collection of the Newest Country Dances and Cotillions. (Providence, [Rhode Island, 1788]). Evans 21122. For details, see fig. 29 in vol. I of this book.

John Griffiths. A Collection of the Newest Cotillions and Country Dances. (Northampton, [Massachusetts, 1794]). Evans 21121. For details, see figs. 7, 31, 31 in vol. I of this book.

60 Mrs. West is Susannah Holyoke, sister of Margaret Holyoke and Judith Turner.

61 The “new Assembly rooms” were in Hamilton Hall, built in 1805 and named in honor of Alexander Hamilton.

62 “Wm. Turner” could either have been William Jr. or his son William Henry who would have been fifteen years old in 1813.

1 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, 1935), pp. 135–136; Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1936), II, 580–582.

2 Holyoke Diaries, ed. George Dow (Salem, Mass., 1911), p. 39.

3 Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, I, 159.

4 Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, II, 161.

5 Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, 1971), pp. 341–342.

6 Sibley’s Harvard Graduates; 17 vols. (Cambridge, 1933–1975), v, 452.

7 Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vi, 481–482.

8 The Testimony of the President, Professors, Tutors and Hebrew Instructor of Harvard College in Cambridge, Against the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, And his Conduct (Boston, 1744), pp. 4–8.

9 Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, XXXIII, xxxi.

10 Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, XXXIII, 170.