In putting this paper on the World Wide Web, I have silently corrected obvious errors of fact, cleaned up points of grammar and deleted explanatory material in the endnotes that seemed merely self-indulgent. At times, as John Hoffman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tactfully noted in his commentary at the Conference on Illinois History, the paper takes on the air of a "jeremiad" against Lowell Mason and other 19th-century musical reformers; remembering how much I have enjoyed hymns by Mason and his contemporaries at Old Harp sings in East Tennessee, I would now write those sections with rather less wailing and gnashing of teeth. But I am posting the paper to the Web substantially as I presented it in October 2000. -- Peter Ellertsen

In December 1822 Christiana Tillson, who had just come to central Illinois from Massachusetts, attended a church meeting near Hillsboro. As she entered the log schoolhouse, a preacher was leading the congregation in song. He raised the hymn by:

... reading the first two lines of the verse, and then with an indescribable nasal twang, singing [with the congregation chiming in] to the tune of 'Old Grimes,' the lines that had been repeated. This was a favorite among them:
'When I can read my titul clare,
Tue mansheons in the skei,
I'll bid farewell to everie fear,
And wipe my weeping ye, yi, yi,
and wipe' &c.

The people were Southerners - largely Methodists, no doubt, because a Methodist circuit rider was preaching that Sunday, but probably also Baptists and Cumberland Presbyterians who attended each other's services. By Tillson's reckoning, they most certainly did not behave like the Methodists she had known back in New England. For one thing, the women smoked, and the men chewed tobacco in church. There were two preachers. One, Tillson conceded, was "somewhat logical." The other, she said, "would 'get happy,' clap his hands, froth at the mouth; the congregation responding, some groaning, some crying loudly, 'Amen,' some calling "Glory, glory, glory to God!'" (78-80). Nearly 50 years later she told her grandchildren, "When I look back on these meetings now, I can recollect but one impression that was left on my mind; that of intense disgust."

Experiences like Tillson's marked the first phase of a Midwestern cultural synthesis described in Richard Lloyd Power's Planting Corn Belt Culture (115-20) and Daniel Elazar's Cities of the Prairie (153-66, 191), and her attitude was typical of the ill will between New Englanders and Southerners along the Illinois frontier. [1] Galesburg historian Earnest Elmo Caulkins catches its flavor nicely when he speaks of New Englanders who scoffed at their neighbors from the upland South as "shouting Methodists, slack farmers, slovenly housekeepers and irresponsible squatters," on the one hand, and of Southerners who dismissed New Englanders as "close, miserly, selfish, dishonest and inhospitable," on the other ("Genesis" 45; They Broke the Prairie 79). But Tillson's account of the meeting was at best a caricature, and her stereotyping is not far removed from a long-enduring popular image of Southerners as innately musical but degenerate, tobacco-chawing, glory-shouting hillbillies (see McWhiney 190-91; Hicks 6-7; Dunn xii-xiv, 198-200; Malone, Country Music 40-42; Hemphill 115-17; Dawidoff 133-36). Compare the picture of a typical "pioneer preacher" in a Montgomery County history published in 1883:

He was no less devoted to his calling and served his day and environments possibly as well as the academically and theologically trained man of this day. He neither asked or received any salary. He claimed no literary ability in the preparation of his sermons. The Bible and the hymn book were his traveling companions. The old leathern saddle bags, and a gentle 'nag' which was usually borrowed, were his outfit. He preached the fear of 'hell fire,' and the promise of the Almighty to 'the righteous' were the burdens of much of his preaching. (2:666)

The difference here, of course, is mostly in tone. What Tillson found disgusting, the county historian accepted, even celebrated.

Christiana Tillson may not have known, and almost certainly would not have cared, that the manner of singing she heard in Hillsboro dates from 17th-century England and Scotland, that the hymn text was by 18th-century English evangelist Isaac Watts or that the tune "Old Grimes is Dead" was a variant of an ancient Scottish melody used to good effect by Robert Burns in "Auld Lang Syne." [2] Nor, for that matter, is it likely that others in the back-country congregation she visited would have known many fine points of Scottish and English hymnody. For all of that, it is fair to say there was more to the music than met Tillson's jaundiced eye.

It is likely that Tillson, like other New Englanders, was simply unable to appreciate her neighbors' music or their way of conducting religious services. Martin Marty, emeritus professor of church history at the University of Chicago, likes to speak of a "spiritual ice-belt," an area of rationality and formalism in religion that "stretches from west of Poland across Europe, Canada, the northern United States, through Japan" (11). Certainly Tillson hailed from within Marty's ice belt while her Montgomery County neighbors did not. In time New Englanders from the "ice belt" would suppress an indigenous tradition of sacred music in Illinois, believing it to be barbaric, culturally inferior, as they had suppressed their own indigenous musical tradition back East a few years earlier.

During Illinois' frontier years, roughly from 1800 to 1850, a uniquely American style of choral singing flourished that preserved many points of the ancient musical tradition Christiana Tillson heard in Montgomery County. Along with it flourished an eclectic repertory of American folk hymns, 18th-century New England anthems, ancient Scottish psalms and pieces composed for English congregational worship. As a native New England hymnody was replaced in the Northeast by the classical strictures of European art music around 1800, old-fashioned singing masters moved south and west. [3] They flourished in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio and the Carolinas, as tunebook compilers collected folk hymns out of the Anglo-Celtic oral tradition and added them to the New England repertory they had inherited. The music in their tunebooks was written in a unique notation, with different shapes to represent the steps of the old fa-sol-la scale -- a triangle for fa, an oval for sol, a rectangle for la and a diamond for mi. The shapes, designed as an aid to sight-reading, were also called patent notes and "buckwheat notes," the latter because the angular noteheads bore a fancied resemblance to kernels of buckwheat. Out of this blending of musical styles came beloved hymns like "Amazing Grace" and "How Firm a Foundation" as well as joyful camp meeting songs with visions of "Canaan's happy shore" and refrains that literally shouted "glory, hallelujah!" It was by reading shape notes in one of these tunebooks, The Missouri Harmony, that a generation of Illinoisans learned to sing during frontier days. Singing from another early shape-note tunebook, The Southern Harmony, lasted into the 20th century in parts of southern Illinois (Jackson, White Spirituals 68-69).

Preserved in the tunebooks was an older repertory that usually was "lined out" in church according to a practice dating to Puritan England. Social historian Jack Larkin says it was practically universal away from the East Coast and the larger cities during the early 1800s:

The actual 'practice of music' in most American churches remained oral, and without instrumental accompaniment. Worshipers sang a handful of tunes from memory, and fitted a wide variety of psalm and hymn texts to the music. They memorized some of the most familiar, often-sung words as well, but well into the nineteenth century American congregations continued in the practice of 'lining out' -- in which a leader, holding his hymn book, read a line or two at a time to the congregation, who then sang it in response. . . . Without instrumental accompaniment, the pace of singing was very slow. Members of the congregation might sing the same text to two or three different tunes. Some singers added their own idiosyncratic quavers and trills on long notes. (Larkin 252-53)

Nearly 200 years later, in the 1990s, Jeff Todd Titon recorded lined-out hymn singing in eastern Kentucky. Of it, he says, "Old Regular Baptist singing ... is very slow and has no regular beat to it. You can't tap your foot to it. The melodies are very elaborate, and they come from the Anglo American folk music tradition, not from classical music or from popular music written to make money" (10). People lined out their hymns, I believe, not so much because they didn't have hymn books, although books indeed were scarce on the frontier. Nor did they line out their hymns because they didn't know better. All indications are that they sang the way they did because they liked to sing that way, and because their practice was consistent with their beliefs.

Behind the practice, as was true for so much of 19th-century American religion, lay the theology of John Calvin. Like other first-generation Protestants, Calvin was deeply distrustful of ecclesiastical music. He prohibited the use of musical instruments in services and limited worshippers to metrical paraphrases of the Psalms of David. Citing St. Paul, he insisted that “spiritual songs cannot be well sung save from the heart” and subordinated artistic considerations to the plain sense of the words, saying “the heart requires the intelligence.” To that end, English Calvinists of the 1640s developed the practice of lining out psalms, that is, of repeating the words line by line so the congregation could join in. The practice was used almost universally in pioneer Illinois, at least outside the cities, and all indications are that it aided worshippers in making a “pure offering of praise to the throne of the Most High,” as an early historian in Fulton County put it.

In time the old way of singing the old songs, in Illinois as elsewhere, was replaced by a more "scientifically correct" hymnody that gave prominence to hymns of Victorian composition accompanied by organ. The old-timers missed the songs of their youth, however, and some evidence allows us to speculate that the old way of singing was better suited to congregational worship than the more stylish music that replaced it. Certainly, the values of the old music penetrated deeply into the emerging Midwestern culture. And Illinois writers like Carl Sandburg and Edgar Masters wrote compellingly of the old songs and the old values.

Our sources for studying 19th-century folk hymnody are scattered and fragmentary. It is widely agreed that music was an integral, even pervasive part of life among Southern highlanders like those who settled Illinois, with their dance tunes, airs and ballads reaching centuries back into Anglo-Celtic oral tradition. Writing of a slightly earlier frontier, in the Cumberland River country of Tennessee and Kentucky, Harriette Simpson Arnow says of the hymns of evangelists like Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley:

They were for the religious a form of devotion, but even the unbeliever could join in the simple tunes of 'How firm a foundation, yet saints of the Lord; have faith, oh have faith in his excellent word,' or 'Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.' They were sung to put the baby to sleep, 'lined out' in the poorer churches where hymnbooks were few, taught in singing school, but mostly one suspects sung in the home and at work for no reason at all save they satisfied the singer. (396)

But musical practice, like the music itself, only rarely was set down in writing. "Given the universality of singing in the white rural South," says C. Bill Malone of Tulane University, "it is remarkable that travelers and other observers of the region had so little to say about the art." He suggests that scholars therefore are compelled to listen to early 20th-century recordings, compare them to the scant written records and "assume, perhaps rightly, that the styles and songs heard there are survivals of a much earlier period, and that they have remained basically unchanged" (Singing Cowboys 26-27). For religious music of the period, at least in Illinois, we have slightly more to go on.

In Illinois the reminiscences of old-timers at Old Settlers' Association gatherings and in county histories sometimes touched on memories of camp meetings, church services and singing schools. Some of these recollections weren't written down until well into the 20th century, however. Obviously, the use of late sources presents us with problems of accuracy. But, as James E. Davis suggests, even the written sources for early Illinois history are incomplete and anything but free from bias ("Settlers" 13). I believe the benefits of using the old settler's accounts outweigh the dangers. As Tracy E. K'Meyer suggests in an article on sources for religious history, judicious use of the personal narratives collected by oral historians can give us a window into the spiritual life of ordinary people. And personal narratives allow us to explore the "role of religion not only in the individual life story but also in the broader historical narrative" in a way that written histories, often preoccupied with doctrine and denominational politics, usually do not (725-26, 728). Old settlers' reminiscences can give us access to much the same kind of information, although they pose similar problems. In a review of 20th-century trends in oral history, Allistair Thompson suggests "the so-called unreliability of memory might be a resource, rather than a problem, for historical interpretation and reconstructions" (585). I think he has a point. And I think David Thelen of the Journal of American History has a point when he speaks of how people resist "rapid, alien, and imposed change by creating memories of a past that was unchanging, incorruptible, and harmonious" (1125). At any rate, when old-timers got together at the turn of the 19th century, they spoke as if something vital went out of their spiritual lives as the culture grew more urban and "civilized." I believe there was more than nostalgia to their complaints.

Even when the reminiscences come to us through the writing of the children and grandchildren of early settlers, I am inclined to trust them in much the same way I trust folk tales. Their details may be embroidered, or improvised in the telling as happens in oral performance, but their main outlines give a coherent, recognizable picture (see Stadter). With tongue in cheek, folklorist Roger L. Welsch says we would surely be corrected if we told the story of "Goldilocks and the Two Bears" or scrambled a family story of "how Uncle Ruf drove his first Model T right through the back of the farm shed, yelling, 'Whoa! Whoa! Whoa, you miserable damned beast!' The story must be told 'right!'" (72). In another context, biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan suggests the process of oral transmission preserves a recoverable "matrix or core structure" of stories handed down over time (85-89). Obviously, care must be exercised in interpreting historical sources that were recorded long after the events they relate. And great care must be taken when we use them to interpret practice in faith traditions other than our own, as Patrick B. Mullin suggests in a recent article in the Journal of American Folklore, lest we marginalize or romanticize them (139). But there are procedures we can borrow from the oral historians to minimize the risk of getting our facts wrong. Oral historian Paul Thompson recommends evaluating our sources for internal consistence, cross-checking them and evaluating them in a wider context (239-41). Accordingly, I have given greatest weight to old settlers' stories when they square with broad trends discussed in secondary authorities like Nicholas Temperley or Gilbert Chase, with descriptions of Southern upland culture like Harriett Arnow's or with practices and attitudes handed down in contemporary traditions of a cappella congregational singing related to those that flourished in 19th-century Illinois.

Most Illinoisans of the year 2000, if they could be taken back to the rural church Christiana Tillson attended near Hillsboro, would find the singing very strange. We can be almost certain that Tillson, who came to Illinois from an area where the old music had been thoroughly repressed and was described by her contemporaries as a "woman of rare culture and refinement" (Quaife xviii), would have found it equally strange. Yet it answered a legitimate liturgical purpose, one that a similar practice of singing still answers among Primitive Baptist congregations and others who choose the old ways. It is solidly grounded in a Calvinist hymnody -- psalmody, rather, to use the precise word for it -- that emphasizes the meaning of the spoken word as much as or more than it does purely musical qualities. Nicholas Temperley characterizes it as a basic Calvinist belief that "[a]ll that mattered" in congregational singing was "that each person sing the songs of the Bible, with understanding and from the heart" ("Old Way" 513-14). It goes all the way back to Calvin, and before him to St. Paul's counsel of "teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord" (Col 3:16). Thus, singing from the heart was of central importance.

The theology of the old spiritual songs is basically Calvinist, in the broad sense of Calvinist or Reformed doctrine as interpreted and modified by generations of Puritan thinkers and preachers in America. As John B. Boles says so eloquently in his study of revivalism in America, belief in "divine omnipotence" was softened by "a near universal trust in providential deliverance" (118). Hymn after hymn speaks in terms of the awesome majesty of God, the wretched state of sinners facing judgment, the infinite mercy shown by God's gift of grace, and the inexpressible joy of sinners who find salvation (Bruce 96-122). The Isaac Watts hymn that Tillson ridiculed, for example, assures converts that they now can claim ownership of "mansions in the sky." [4] It concludes:

There shall I bathe my weary soul
In seas of heav'nly rest.
And not a wave, and not a wave
And not a wave of trouble roll
Across my sleeping breast.

With the repetition of "not a wave," Watts, who often is given due credit as a poet, underscores the idea of being buffeted by repeated troubles. He also speaks to the rigors faced by a new convert:

Should earth against my soul engage,
And fiery darts be hurled,
Then I can smile at Satan's rage,
And face a frowning world. (Sacred Harp 36b)

Theological points here are generalized enough that Protestants of varying doctrinal hues could sing of mansions in the sky and Satan's rage without violating their beliefs. Indeed, the tunesmiths who complied shape-note tunebooks for use in singing schools were careful not to split doctrinal hairs. William Walker's Southern Harmony, for example, advertises on its front cover that it includes tunes, hymns, psalms, odes and anthems "well adapted to Christian Churches of Every Denomination, Singing Schools, and Private Societies." Walker's inclusive attitude sold tunebooks, as well as serving diverse institutions, and it was one he shared with musicians like John Wyeth of Pennsylvania, who compiled an important tunebook called Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music in the 1810s (Lowens 138-55; Steel, "Wyeth"). But the music most often heard in Illinois, as elsewhere in early 19th-century America, was broadly Calvinist in its origins and theology. [5] And it was thoroughly Calvinist in practice.

In his preface to an early psalter, John Calvin writes, "singing has great force and vigor to move and inflame the hearts of men to invoke and praise God with a more vehement and ardent zeal." But he swiftly adds, "[c]are must always be taken that a song be neither light nor frivolous; but that it have weight and majesty." Since music appeals to the emotions, inflames the heart, it was all the more important to Calvin that religious music be carefully subordinated to liturgical and didactic ends:

... it is necessary to remember that which St. Paul hath said, the spiritual songs cannot be well sung save from the heart. But the heart requires the intelligence. And in that (says St. Augustine) lies the difference between the singing of men and that of birds. For a linnet, a nightingale, a parrot may sing well; but it will be without understanding. But the unique gift of man is to sing knowing that which he sings. After the intelligence, must follow the heart and the affection, a thing which is unable to be except if we have the hymn imprinted on our memory, in order never to cease from singing.

As a result, the Reformed churches have tended history to subordinate musical to textual considerations and exalt what Primitive Baptist Elder Zack Guess calls "the most spiritual of all earthly instruments, the living, human heart and voice."

In Puritan England, an Assembly of Divines sitting at Westminster in 1644 ruled that, "In singing of psalmes, the voice is to be tunably and gravely ordered; but the chief care just be, to sing with understanding, and with grace in the heart, making melody unto the Lord" (qtd. in Temperley, "Psalms," New Grove Dictionary 365). To this day Old Regular Baptist and Primitive Baptist congregations in Appalachia, heavily influenced by Calvinist theology, maintain that "worship is not so much in the strains of music as it is in the truth of the words sung" and "the sound of the worship causes [a worshipper's] heart to feel complete" (Drummond 22-23; Cornet 1). The Directory for the Publique Worship of God Throughout the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland adopted by the Westminster Assembly mandated:

That the whole Congregation may joyne herein, every one that can reade is to have a psalme book, and all others not disabled by age, or otherwise, are to be exhorted to learn to reade. But for the present, where many in the Congregation cannot read, it is convenient that the Minister, or some other fit person appointed by him and the other Ruling Officers, do reade the Psalme, line by line, before the singing thereof. (qtd. in Temperley, "Old Way" 532)

In practice the parish clerk would intone a line from the psalter and the congregation would sing after him, slowly and with improvised ornamentation. Tunes were switched about freely, because Calvinist practice was to paraphrase the psalms in strict meter as an aid to congregational singing. The Old Way became the standard not only in the Church of England but also in Scotland and the dissenting English churches. In fact, often it was known as the Common Way or the Usual Way.

Temperley argues convincingly that the practice had its beginnings very early in the Protestant Reformation, and that "the English, like the Germans and French before they began their psalmody by making use of folk tunes already well known to the people" (515-19). Musicians complained bitterly about the Old Way, which made it impossible for the congregation to carry a sustained melody and resulted in what one called "a confused Noise, made up of Reading, Speaking, and Grumbling." But, as music historian Gilbert Chase suggests, "what is considered bad taste or 'a confused noise' by conventional standards may be regarded as a sign of musicianship and a source of pride in the folk tradition" (33-34). This seems to have been the case in 18th-century New England and frontier Illinois alike.

Musical histories tend to imply that people lined out their hymns because they had to, citing the Directory of Publique Worship and citing low literacy rates. That well may have been the case initially, but I believe it makes more sense to assume people clung to the Usual Way in spite of all efforts at reform for more than a hundred years because it satisfied their spiritual needs. Among them were the Primitive Baptists, or Old Baptists, who broke away from other Baptist associations during the 1830s. In Illinois they were known -- by others -- as 'hard-shell" Baptists and often are referred to by that name in the old histories. John Bealle, a scholar of shape-note traditions, says disagreement about "the nature of authentic Christian worship" lay behind their opposition not only to Sunday schools and missions but also to choirs and musical instruments in church. And their words-only hymn books found a "place among those who believed worship music was a direct and unmediated encounter with the Holy Spirit" (Benjamin Lloyd's Hymn Book 2-3). Some congregations to this day practice lining out, as do Old Regular Baptist congregations in Kentucky.

North Carolina folklorist Beverly Bush Patterson reports that Primitive Baptists, who still maintain a tradition of unaccompanied congregational singing closely derived from the Old Way, "recognize in the sound of their singing a complex religious identity." Often they call it the "joyful sound," although many of their tunes "are based on minor sounding melodies that have what some singers call an old 'lonesome' sound." Patterson concludes:

... they hear a certain sound as representative of the Primitive Baptists. More than that, however, they interpret that sound as evidence of being a child of grace, and they further interpret the sound as a representation of the true church; which they believe transcends time and place. ("Forging" 25-26).

Paul Drummond in a history of Primitive Baptist music says the emphasis is on on "spirituality, understanding, and truth" (27). He quotes a late 19th-century church elder who said the essence of worship is not in "correct singing in time, and tune and the melody of voices" but in the truth and spirit of a song. "No form of worship, however beautiful or imposing it may be, can be acceptable to God, unless the heart be in it" (22-23). The affinities with Calvin are clear. And, as we shall see, old settlers in Illinois spoke of the sacred music of their youth in markedly similar terms.

We can say with some assurance that outside the cities, the practice of lining out hymns was almost universally followed in Illinois until about 1840. According to old settlers' accounts, congregations entered into it wholeheartedly. In Springfield, one of them later recalled, "At meeting the men always sat on one side of the house (or aisle) and the women on the other; the minister lined out the hymns, and the congregation sang with right good will, and delighted thereafter to hear an hour and a half sermon" (Historical Encyclopedia, Sangamon 2:633). In a florid but telling description of an indoor service in Canton, a mid-19th century historian of that west central Illinois town characterizes a service conducted by an old-time circuit rider like this:

The old men meet the preacher, and in low tones ask after his health; if he had much trouble in crossing the creek, and how he found the roads. He answers their questions with few words and passes in, shaking hands with some of the older mothers in Israel, and as he hands his hat on a projecting pin, and takes out from his capacious coat-tail pockets his well-worn Bible and hymn-book. Taking his stand in the open doorway, he gravely reads, or rather recites, that old hymn --
'Come let us anew our journey pursue.'
It is sung by every man and woman present, sung with voices clear and loud. No operatic quavers, no voluntary, no pretension. The voices are all blending in a harmony born of devotion and which goes up a pure offering of praise to the throne of the Most High. (Historical Encyclopedia, Fulton 663)

Addressing the first meeting of the Sangamon County Old Settlers' Society in 1859, James Matheny of Springfield contrasted the simplicity of early church meetings with the pomp and ostentation of "one of our modern fashionable churches" (History of Sangamon 435-36). For his audience, he painted a word picture of a meeting of the 1820s:

... See the humble preacher rise from his seat, hear him line out the grand old hymn:
'God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform,
He plants his foot upon the sea,
And rides upon the storm.'
With one accord, they rise to their feet and pour forth the untaught melody of grateful hearts.

While there is no doubt a generous portion of nostalgia in accounts like these, there is more than a distant echo of the Calvinist belief that what matters is that the congregation sing with grace and understanding in their hearts.

In nearby Menard County, Laura Isabell Osburn Nance, the daughter of old settlers, recalled how stirring the music was at Rock Creek Cumberland Presbyterian Church:

The old church would ring with the old hymns of my youth. They fairly resound from the walls -- 'How Firm a Foundation,' 'Old Hundred,' and the 'Doxology' at the end of each service. Sweet voices could ring out
'Oh, the Lord is with us
And He has been with us
And He says that He'll go with us
To the end.'
or
'We've fathers gone to view that Land
To view that Land, to view that Land
We've fathers gone to view that Land
Oh, Halle, Hallelujah.
We've mothers gone to view that Land
We've sisters gone to view that Land' etc.
The Dodds family, Thomas Bone, and Brother William Bone usually provided the music. When William White came from Tallula, we were assured a musical treat. Sunday after Sunday, certain old patriarchs occupied seats in the sanctuary, sometimes lightly called 'the Amen Corner.' I recall Elihu Bone, always dignified and solemn and Grandmother Bone, so gentle and kind. Elihu presided with such dignity and the saintly life of Grandma made a deep impression upon the lives of our community. (Nance 9-10)

Here in a nutshell we have an example of how music, worship and the lives of members of a congregation intersected in one rural community. It is a late reminiscence, written in 1922, but it squares well with John Mack Faragher's account in Sugar Creek of how Calvinist doctrine, the music of The Missouri Harmony and local churches intersected with each other to "regulate the moral behavior of the community" and identify its members as "moral descendents of the Puritans, pioneers on another North American frontier two centuries before" (165-69). The songs that Laura Nance quoted, it is worth pointing out, were floating tag lines heard at camp meetings.

Much has been written about camp meetings, and they were controversial even in their day. Even the Rev. Peter Cartwright, an acknowledged master of camp meeting pyrotechnics, admitted that "some of our members ran wild, and indulged in some extravagancies that were hard to control" (43, 45-47). Yet the impression left by first-person accounts often has a certain majesty. James Leaton's History of Methodism in Illinois describes a meeting held in 1807 at Shiloh campground near Belleville:

On Friday morning the meeting commenced by the sounding of a horn, as a signal to rise; then, at the second sounding, they were to assemble at the altar for prayer before breakfast. Having assembled, a hymn was first lined, and then sung. Whilst singing, they suddenly heard the sound of voices at a distance, as if also engaged in singing. It was the elder [Presiding Elder William McKendree], who rode up in company with several preachers; and the singing was continued amidst hearty hand-shakings, tears, and smiles, and shoutings of hosannas, which lasted fifteen or twenty minutes before the preachers could get off their horses. (51)

All too often, the role that music played in these gatherings goes unmentioned. Yet it was prominent in Laura Nance's memories of old days in Menard County. "On the slope of the hill just west of Rock Creek Church, a large shed with seating capacity for several hundred people was erected," she said. "From this center, the heavenly sound of some pioneer preacher's voice could be heard for a radius of half a mile." One of them, the Rev. Guthrie White, had a voice that was especially "deep and mellow and when he sang, it was clear as a bugle" (10). Alice Keach Bone describes the singing at Rock Creek campground like this:

Prominent among the preachers on the platform was Rev. John M. Berry. He would give out the hymn, read it, line it, and, in a strong voice, lead the singing himself, the people joining in one after another.
'On Jordan's stormy banks I stand,' and 'How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in His excellent word' were favorites. These were frequently followed by
'There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Emmanuel's veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.'
Then came an earnest, heartfelt prayer and, sometimes, another song. After this he announced the text and began to preach. He did not time his sermons, neither did the people turn uneasy glances toward their camps. (Bone 31-32)

Another veteran of Menard County camp meetings, T.G. Onstot, in 1902 recalled somewhat tartly that old-timers would set the pitch themselves: "There was good singing. The preacher would read the hymn in a loud voice and then would 'line' it and everybody would sing. Music boxes hadn't been invented then" 126-27). By the time Onstot wrote, new practices had come in, and he didn't much care for them.

In the up-and-coming town of Springfield, First Presbyterian Church by the 1830s had a brick building, a belfry and a choir supported by musical instruments. Its pastor was from New Jersey, it was the church favored by settlers from the Northeast and its musical practice was that of New England and large cities of the day. According to an anniversary sermon preached in 1903 by the Rev. T.D. Logan, a musician took advantage of the interchangeable nature of hymn texts and tunes in a way that might prove tempting to choir members of any historical period:

Mr. Rague was ... leader of the choir. The tune book was Mason's Missouri Harmony with patent notes. Edward Jones was the accompanist on the flute, and Henry E. Dummer on the violin. It is said that one night when the hymn 'Sweet Is Thy Works, My God, My King, To Praise They Name, Give Thanks and Sing,' was announced, before Rague could pitch his pipe of 'Kingsbury' [the tune] to which it was set, Dummer started it to 'Ye Banks and Braes of Bonny Doon.' (Seventy-Fifth 12-13).

Not all of the details check out, which is hardly surprising for a story that must have been retold for years before it found its way into a printed sermon. The Missouri Harmony was edited by a Tennessean named Allen Carden, not Lowell Mason, and the hymn cited in the story does not appear in it. [6] But both the text and the tune are in common meter, and it might be argued that it is in the nature of amateur musicians to barge ahead with a melody of their own choosing. Moreover, the violin and flute of the story are typical of the instruments commonly used in church music before organs came to the Midwest during the Victorian era. The story handed down at First Presbyterian rings true.

Elsewhere, the Old Way held on. Witness this account of the use of a shape-note tunebook during services in early Coles County:

There were not song-books to hand around to the congregation, but the leader would arise with his old 'Missouri Harmony,' containing the music written in 'buckwheat' notes, and announce some familiar hymn. He would then read in solemn, monotonous tones the first two lines and lead the congregation in singing them. Then the next two lines would be read followed by singing, and so on until the hymn was finished. And the leader did not announce, as ministers so often do now [1906], that the 'first, second and last stanzas' would be sung. But they sung it all, no matter how many stanzas there were. (Historical Encyclopedia, Coles 627)

Clearly in Coles County, as in Calvin's Geneva, the word was still paramount, no matter how many stanzas of it there were.

But shape-note tunebooks like the Missouri Harmony were harbingers of musical reform. They had their origins, it will be remembered, in an effort to reform the Usual Way. In 1720 the Rev. Thomas Symmes of Boston, who is credited with being the father of the 18th-century singing school movement, justified reading music, or "singing by note," in precisely those terms:

Now singing by note is giving every note its proper pitch, and turning the voice in its proper place, and giving to every note its true length and sound. Whereas, the usual way varies much from this. In it, some notes are sung too high, others too low, and most too long, and many turnings or flourishings with the voice (as they call them) are made where they should not be, and some are wanting where they should have been. (qtd. in Chase 28)

Before long, singing schools spread throughout America, and they were influential - in a word, they set the repertory. In the cities of the Eastern seaboard, they brought in classical European music. But in rural New England and almost everywhere else in America, they prompted the development of an indigenous American hymnody.

Singing schools usually lasted a week or two, and often they were held in the winter and at night when youngsters were not taken up with other duties. Often they were conducted by singing masters who went from town to town soliciting subscriptions, although by the time they got to Illinois they seem to have been conducted mostly by people living in the same community. Laura Nance in Menard County remembered them largely as social occasions:

One of the most interesting features in early times and during my girlhood was singing school, which ... came along with the winter months. Young people came from miles around, usually on horseback in small groups. They loosened up their vocal chords with a little harmonizing as they rode along the country lanes to a home or schoolhouse or church where they spent the evening singing, for the most part, sacred songs. Uncle Tommy Mosteller, grandfather of Mrs. Frackelton, taught a number of singing schools in the Rock Creek neighborhood. He was a good instructor. William White of Tallula had a beautiful voice and also taught at Rock Creek. (Nance 31)

Pupils brought their own candles and tunebooks, while the singing master brought little more than a strong voice, a tuning fork and "a cloth chart with musical staffs on which he placed the musical characters needed as his course progressed" (Lowens 281-83; Allen 188-89). Often he would bring a supply of tunebooks he could sell to his pupils. The pedagogy changed little from 18th-century New England through the 19th century in Illinois.

Irving Lowens suggests that "many marriages must have grown out of singing-meetings," but more importantly a truly American music grew out of the demand they created for new music. By the 1760s and 70s, Yankee tunesmiths were beginning to write choral settings for English hymns, or texts, in four-part a cappella harmony:

When it was composed, this music was experienced rather than heard because it was not written for an audience's appreciation or to tickle an ear -- it was written to be experienced in performance by performers. How it 'sounded' to a non-participant was of very little importance. This is no novel concept; it is one of the essential pre-conditions of genuine church song. ... To my mind, this identification of the music with the performers rather than the listener, this inwardness, this lack of self-consciousness, is a fundamental though generally overlooked characteristic which early American church song shares with authentic church song of all times and all places. (83-84)

The tunesmiths typically had other pursuits. William Billings, for example, was a tanner. And Justin Morgan lent his name to a breed of quarter horses. Most of them were aware of the music being written for country parish choirs at the time in England, but their knowledge of European musical theory was not deep. It is better, perhaps, that it wasn't. Continental theory on harmony put the melody in the highest part, called soprano rather than treble, and required the harmony parts to sing chords enhancing the one part. The tunesmiths put all four parts in contention with each other, especially in canon-like "fuging tunes" with staggered entrances for the four parts. Billings liked it like that. In his introduction to a tunebook called Continental Harmony, he writes:

... while each part is thus mutually striving for mastery, and sweetly contending for victory, the audience are most luxuriously entertained, and exceedingly delighted; in the mean time, their minds are surprizingly agitated, and extremely fluctuated; sometimes declaring in favour of one part, and sometimes another. -- Now the solemn bass demands their attention, now the manly tenor, now the loftily counter, now the volatile treble, now here, now there, now here again. -- O inchanting! O ecstatic! (qtd. in Hamm 146)

But the heyday of the New England tunesmiths soon was over. Around 1800, a new generation of reformers came along, and European art music came into vogue. By the 1810s, the center of indigenous American music publishing shifted to Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. In the 1820s and 1830s, it followed the frontier to South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and the Ohio Valley.

As the singing masters moved south, they found sacred texts sung to the melodies of the old ballads and other Anglo-Celtic songs in the back country of the South. [7] Very little record has been left of the origin of this body of music, since it came out of the same oral tradition as the ballads and fiddle tunes brought to America by Scots-Irish settlers who took to the Appalachian back country before the American Revolution. "In bringing jigs, country dances, and old love songs and ballads into hymnody, these folk were not merely religious radicals, they were religious revolutionaries as well," writes Charles W. Joyner of South Carolina. "This showed no lack of respect for religion; on the contrary, the upcountry folk brought one of their most loved and treasured possessions -- their musical heritage -- and laid it on on the altar of their faith" (64). Many of the tunes are modal, sung in the haunting minor keys of the southern Appalachians (Horn, 17-18; Jackson, White Spirituals 158-63)). So when the tunebook collectors reached the Southern hill country, they found a distinguished body of music to work with.

By 1820, shape-note hymnody was flourishing in the old South and West. It came to Illinois with the first settlers. Particularly popular in Illinois was The Missouri Harmony, printed in Cincinnati and published by a Tennessean staying in St. Louis (see Krohn, "Check List" 201). Also attested in Illinois are songs from Wyeth's Repository, published in 1803 and 1810 in Pennsylvania, and The Southern Harmony, published in 1835 by William Walker of Spartanburg, S.C. William Black, a Georgian by birth who followed the frontier through Tennessee and Kentucky to western Illinois during the 1820s, hand-copied a number of shape-note tunes into a copybook now preserved in the Illinois State Historical Library (Historical Encyclopedia, Cass 2: 853). His copybook, which he began in 1818 and appears to have added to over the following decade, records Southern folk hymns but many more New England compositions, most likely copied from Missouri Harmony and Wyeth's Repository, Among them is Sherburne, which sets Nahum Tate's text "While shepherds watch'd their flocks by night," written in 1700 and the first text that was not a metrical psalm to be widely sung in Britain, to a 1783 fuging tune by Daniel Read, a prolific song writer who also manufactured horn combs (Lowens 159-77). Black also copied Greenwich, an Isaac Watts text set to another fuging tune by Read, and Billings' Easter Anthem.

Two songs preserved in Southern Harmony and another popular Southern tunebook, The Sacred Harp published by Georgian B.F. White in 1844, are associated at least in legend with Peter Cartwright, although he made no mention of them - or any other songs - in his 1856 autobiography (Christ-Janer 1:307-08; 2:202, 2:271). Each is a rousing Southern folk hymn. The version of Hebrew Children in Southern Harmony has a verse in typical camp-meeting style:

By and by we'll go and meet them,
By and by we'll go and meet them,
Safe in the promised land:
There we'll sing and shout together,
There we'll sing and shout hosanna,
There we'll sing and shout forever,
Safe in the promised land. (266)

In his note to the song the 1911 edition and later revisions of the Original Sacred Harp, editor Joe James said Cartwright "was a minister of the gospel, and used this tune in his camp meetings long before it was ever placed in notation. It is one of the old melodies of America, and has a long time been quite a favorite of many of the older people in their younger days who are now living" (133). The other song attributed to Cartwright, The Saints Bound for Heaven or "Our Bondage It Shall End," is sung to a melody belonging to the same tune family as "Rye Whiskey" and "Jack o' Diamonds." [8] It is tempting to imagine Cartwright raising the tune when the drunks got out of hand at a camp meeting, but we have no evidence to support it.

With some of the early singing masters, we are on firmer ground. Among the Illinois settlers who taught shape-note singing was James Miller of White County, whose sister married James Rutledge and had a copy of Missouri Harmony at New Salem in the 1830s (Bergvin 180; History of Wayne and Clay Counties 211, 225). This is the tunebook that young Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge sang from in the 1830s, at least according to legend. While shape-note tunebooks were used occasionally in worship services, they were primarily associated in Illinois as they had been in the East with singing schools.

An anonymous historian, who wrote for an 1883 history of White County published by Inter-State Publishing Co. of Chicago, recalled the singing schools like this:

The old-time method of conducting singing-school was . . . somewhat different from that of modern times. It was more plodding and heavy, the attention being kept upon the simplest rudiments, as the names of the notes on the staff, and their pitch, and beating time, while comparatively little attention was given to expression and light, gleeful music. The very earliest scale introduced in the West was from the South, and the notes, from their peculiar shapes, were denominated 'patent' or 'buckwheat' notes. They were four, of which the round one was always called sol, the square one la, the triangular one fa, and the 'diamond-shaped' one mi. . . . The 'old' 'Missouri Harmony' and Mason's 'Sacred Harp' were the principal books used with this style of musical notation. (271-72)

Other old settlers remembered not so much the music as the socializing that went with singing school. M.C. Wadsworth of Auburn said on the South Fork of the Sangamon, "young folk flocked in for miles around, crowding the houses where they were held," belting out rousing tunes like Ninety-Fifth (another setting of the "When I can read my title clear" text that so irritated Christiana Tillson in Hillsboro) and Jefferson loudly enough to "waken the echoes" (Sangamon 176). Ninety-Fifth is typical of the songs that singing school students delighted in. The text was a favorite; Christiana Tillson may have been one of the few people in Illinois who ever complained about it. We know it was a favorite of Sarah Bush Lincoln's (Herndon 48-49). It was a floating text, sung to Ninety-Fifth in the Missouri Harmony (48) and Southern Harmony (27), and to an old folk hymn known as Pisgah in Wyeth's Repository. [9] The tune was first printed in 1813 in Cincinnati, a center of shape-note publishing, for a Pittsburgh bookseller named Robert Patterson. We cannot be sure who composed it, but it is in the style of the old New England fuging tunes with staggered entrances - bass, tenor, treble and alto coming in separately and tossing the melody back and forth in the second part of the song. The youngsters in singing school would have loved it.

In Menard County, "[y]oung people came from miles around, usually on horseback in small groups," said Laura Isabell Osburn Nance. "They loosened up their vocal chords with a little harmonizing as they rode along the country lanes to a home or schoolhouse or church where they spent the evening singing, for the most part, sacred songs" (31). But by mid-century styles changed in Illinois as they had elsewhere. The Inter-State Publishing Co.'s historian in White County caught the moment in detail:

About 1850 the 'round-note' system began to come around, being introduced by the Yankee singing-master. The Carmina Sacra was the pioneer round-note book, in which the tunes partook more of the German or Puritan character, and were generally regarded by the old folks as being far more spiritless than the old 'Pisgah,' 'Fiducia,' 'Tender Thought,' 'New Durham,' 'Windsor,' 'Mount Sion,' 'Devotion,' etc., of the old Missouri Harmony and tradition. (72)

The tunes here, as is usual in shape-note collections, show varied origins. Whatever its antecedents, Pisgah is almost certainly a folk hymn. Fiducia is a modal tune related to the Appalachian carol "Star in the East" (Down-East 188-89). New Durham is a fuging tune, and Windsor is an old Scottish psalm setting that goes back to the Bay Psalm Book and beyond (Missouri Harmony 75, 66; Chase 20). What they have in common is that youngsters would enjoy singing them. If the method of instruction was plodding, the singing was spirited. In this regard, it was like the singing at camp meetings across the state.

Times were changing by the 1840s, however, as Lowell Mason and others from the East brought European pedagogy and European theories of harmony to a wider public. Mason's own hymn tunes are mostly pallid exercises in conventional piety. "Spiritless," the White County historian's term, would be a good word indeed for them. But Mason's influence could not have been greater. After a stint in banking as a young man, he introduced music as a subject in the Boston public schools, using the latest European pedagogy, and designed teacher education curricula for the Massachusetts State Board of Education as well as busily writing hymns, tunes, tracts and other religious works (Chase 151-61). At the same time, the indigenous American hymnody of the shape-note books was coming under heavy attack outside New England.

George Pullen Jackson, an early 20th-century shape-note music scholar, lumped Mason and the other critics together as the "Better Music boys" and rued their influence as they moved west in the 1830s and 40s (White Spirituals 16-19). Among them was Thomas Hastings, an editor and hymn writer of upstate New York, rwho eferred to shape-note music as "dunce notes" and said he feared the popularity of shape-note tunebooks in the Mississippi Valley would "hold back the progress of musical improvement in that region for half a century to come" (qtd. in Bealle, Public Worship 43). In Cincinnati, a Miss Augusta Brown railed against the old-fashioned singing schools:

Hundreds of country idlers, too lazy or too stupid for farmers or mechanics, 'go to singing school for a spell,' get diplomas from others scarcely better qualified than themselves, and then with their brethren, the far famed 'Yankee Peddlars,' itinerate to all parts of the land, to corrupt the taste and pervert the judgment of the unfortunate people who, for want of better, have to put up with them. We have heard of one of these cute geniuses, who 'set up' in a town way down east as a cobbler! ... Cobbling and music! We just ask how any musical nerve can stand that? (qtd. in Jackson, White Spirituals 19-20)

In Cincinnati Timothy Mason, Lowell's brother, came out with a tunebook called the Ohio Sacred Harp that set popular religious songs, including folk hymns, to more correct harmonies and bristled with admonishments. One was that people learn to use the new do-re-mi scale. Another was that the melody "is always to be sung by female voices, and by them alone." The book proved to be popular, and a shape-note edition even came out -- although over Mason's objection. He also introduced an organ in his Presbyterian church in Cincinnati, which, in Jackson's words, drowned out "the hard-learned and dearly loved harmonic vocalism of the singing school folk and relieved the church-going masses of the necessity of doing much more than following the organ's lead and singing the melody part" (16). By the 1840s, reform came to Illinois as well. In time, the earlier shape-note singing schools would be all but forgotten.

As New Englanders moved west in increasing numbers, they brought with them not only the schools, churches and other institutions of their regional culture. They also brought an inability to see much value in any cultural institutions other than their own, and an attitude that Richard Lyle Power has aptly described as "Yankee cultural imperialism." So it was that New England singing masters, taught to follow the latest methods prescribed by the "Better Music boys," repressed the shape-note singing schools much as their predecessors had repressed the fuging tunes and anthems of native composers like Billings and Justin Morgan. In this they were entirely successful. In a 1931 article on "Early Music and Musicians in Illinois," for example, the president of the Madison County Historical Society baldly asserted that, "The singing school was a New England institution, originated by Lowell Mason, the father of American Church music, and his associates." He also praised the District Singing School Masters, many of them graduates of normal schools who had learned Mason's curricula, who "made their yearly visits from the eastern states, bringing with them not only musical culture, but educational and literary ideals which made lasting impressions" (Armstrong 31). It was as if nothing and no one had gone before the Better Music boys.

But change did not come without a fight. Gov. Thomas Ford's Illinois history has an extended account that rings true. He says, plausibly enough, that singers in the days before the Better Music came to Illinois learned to value the kind of singing they heard at camp meetings:

The public exercises in religion were greatly aided by the loud and wild music made by the singing of untutored voices. He was considered the best singer, who could wake up the echoes to his voice from the greatest distance, in the deep woods around; so that in process of time, when the New England singing masters began to establish singing schools, many people looked upon their scientific and chastened performances with perfect scorn.

Consequently, at least one Yankee singing master of the day was practically howled down by his pupils:

One of these itinerant teachers of music called his scholars together, they being large, loud-voiced young men and women, trained to sing at camp meetings. As he stood out in their midst, and began a tune in a low, melodious voice, sawing the air with his hand, to beat the time, sliding gracefully about the room, after the fashion of a singing master, his scholars lifted up their loud voices, and struck into the tune before him, overwhelming him with a horrible din of sound, such as he had never heard before, drowning his feeble voice and fine music, both together. The scholars were vastly pleased with their own performance, and held that of their teacher in utter contempt. Whereupon, they all concluded with one accord, that each one of them was already far superior to his teacher, and the school broke up. (40-41)

But in time the "scientific and chastened" practice of the Better Music won out.

In 1889 John Moses, a former aide to Gov. Richard Yates who later served as secretary of the Chicago Historical Society, came up with a fairly balanced assessment, for his day, of the missionaries who came out from New England:

Their methods were not popular with Western people, who approved neither their precise manners, their correct mode of speaking, their wearing fine clothes, their extreme anti-slavery sentiments, nor, least of all, their persistent and ever-recurring Sunday collections. The people were accustomed to an animated, even boisterous style of preaching, and craved spiritual excitement. They believed in a demonstrative religion, induced by the stirring of the feelings to their very depths; and were but little interested in, or affected by, a sermon read from manuscript, in a low tone of voice. Still these devoted missionaries, preserved, under great difficulties. (396)

Moses credited the New Englanders with allowing families to sit together, with an increased emphasis on "an intellectual over an emotional religion" and with an "improvement in church music" as singing masters were imported from the East Coast:

The old patent-note singing-books, with their tunes generally in minor keys, were exchanged for the better and more modern collections of Lowell Mason and others; and men began to see that for the production of harmonic effects in the mingling of voices, something more was required than mere noise. (397)

In a parallel development, organs and other musical instruments came into use in local churches throughout Illinois. This development was more controversial than replacing the fa-sol-la with the do-re-mi scale, since many 19th-century Illinoisans believed that musical instruments had no legitimate place in church. This belief they based not on the tendency of organ music to drown out congregational singing but on an interpretation of scripture that went back at least to Calvin and is still stoutly maintained by Primitive Baptists and other conservative Protestants to this day. A musical instrument, explains Elder Zack Guess, "is incapable of doing anything required by music in Christian worship except make melody, and it does not do that in the right place - the human heart."

Thus, according to a history of the Methodist Church in Athens north of Springfield, controversy arose when an early pillar of the church donated a melodeon or reed organ, and "Some of the older members strenuously objected to having a musical instrument in the church saying that they did not believe in trying to Serve the Lord by machinery." They conceded a violin would have been even worse, though, since "it was supposed to be an instrument of Satan fit only for the much tabooed dance hall" (Menard 14). Out in Iowa, a Methodist circuit rider named Michael See was wholly unambiguous. He was an old-time preacher in the mold of Peter Cartwright, and it was said of him that, "When Michael See whispered, he could be heard for one-fourth of a mile. When he talked out loud or sang, he could be heard for two miles" (Nye 94). Russell G. Nye, the grandson of another circuit rider, tells the story:

There was one church building on the circuit. He came to this place one day, having been away several months. During his absence, a small reed organ had been placed in the sanctuary. Horrors! A wooden devil. He rolled the organ out to the wood shed and broke it up with an ax. When the people came to the service that evening, no mention was made of the organ. The service was opened by his 'lining out' the hymns as usual. (149)

In time, however, those who approved of musical instruments won out. Cartwright had some experience with them in 1852, when he attended a General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston. He was lionized as "the old pioneer of the West," and he found the New Englanders to be devout, generous, hospitable people. But he was concerned by such practices as allowing men and women to sit together, instrumental music during worship and the use of choirs:

The choir practice destroys congregational singing almost entirely, and has introduced the awkward and irreverent practice among congregations of turning their backs on the sacred desk, and facing about to the choir, and this whole system has a tendency to destroy the humble practice of kneeling in time of prayer, and contributes largely to the Church-dishonoring practice of sitting while the prayers of the Church are offered up to God. (310)

Speaking to the Sangamon County Old Settlers' Society in 1879, Judge Milton Hay said "[o]ld habits and old industries" that "disappeared on the appearance of the locomotive" in the mid-1840s. Along with public schools, servants and a market-oriented agricultural economy, he recalled the introduction of choirs, "fiddles" and sermons "The [much shorter] 'forty-minute' sermon began to be preached,' he said, as "men and women no longer divided off on each side of the church; the minister ceased to line off the hymn for the congregation, and the congregation quit singing:" (464) Further comment on how the 'Better Music' affected congregational singing would be superfluous.

In the meantime, nostalgia for the old songs found its way not only into Old Settlers' addresses and county histories but also the work of such Illinois literary figures as Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters. Sandburg's accounts of Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge are heavily embroidered, and his assessment of the Missouri Harmony belongs as much to the realm of fiction as history. "Young Abraham Lincoln and his sweetheart, Ann Rutledge, sang from this book in the Rutledge tavern at New Salem, according to old settlers there," he says in his American Songbag. "It was used at camp meetings of Peter Cartwright and other circuit riding evangelists, and was highly thought of by many church members in the Mississippi Valley" (152). Also heavily embroidered were versions of the Ann Rutledge legend that circulated in Menard County, for example Josephine Craven Chandler's allusion to "stories of Sunday evenings when the family sang in unison and he turned for her by fire and candle light the worn pages of the 'Missouri Harmony Songbook'; and, it is told, she sang for him alone sometimes in her clear, strong, girlish voice" (43). It is more likely that Lincoln, who had an awful singing voice, parodied the Missouri Harmony instead. Robert Rutledge, Ann's brother, recalled that he would "tip back his chair and roar it out at the top of his voice, over and over again, just for fun." The noise was loud enough to scare the youngest Rutledge daughter (Hertz 314; Walsh 42-43, 45; Gallaher 17: Hammand). But the old stories have an honorable place in legend, if not in uncontroverted historical fact. For one thing, Sandburg had a poet's feel for the old songs: "A dark and moving poetry and music from the religion of the people of Europe three hundred years back reached out to take the hearts of the pioneers in the long-cabin tavern, singing by candlelight there in New Salem" (Prairie Years 1:182). Whatever the truth of Lincoln's relationship with the Rutledge family, he and the Rutledges alike were formed by the essentially Calvinistic attitudes of 19th-century America in general, and the Illinois frontier and Missouri Harmony in particular.

For his part, Masters writes eloquently of the old songs. In The Sangamon, his contribution to the Rivers of America series but more of an elegy than a history, he speaks of a folk hymn called "I Will Arise and Go to Jesus" and of the men and women who sang the old songs at Menard County's old Concord Cumberland Presbyterian Church during his youth:

If there was a culture, a spiritual flowering and growth in the Sangamon River country, it was among these Cumberland Presbyterians, these humble, generous souls, who in the days of Andrew Jackson followed him faithfully as their salvation from the evil plots of cities, from the schemes of selfish money-changers. They read the Psalms and the poetry of the Bible, and they sang the hymns of Watts and the Wesleys. Like primitive Christians they stood for moral virtue, good will, as the means of accomplishing what they regarded as the supreme object of life, the eternal salvation of the soul. Truthtelling, honest dealing, neighborly kindness were their religion. (124)

While there is a lot of Masters' own political and economic theorizing reflected in his musings on rural Menard County, it is clear that the old songs had penetrated deep into his appreciation of central Illinois culture.

In his liner notes to a recording of early New England psalmody, musicologist Richard Crawford sketches in a commonly received myth about early American music, which he says "offers a strong cultural symbol and a useful musical perspective" ("Mainstreams" 2-4). His myth, in its essential details, is the same account that George Pullen Jackson and Gilbert Chase present of the rise and fall of the indigenous American hymnody. Crawford says it is mythical "not in the sense of something untrue but rather in the sense of a coherent, believable tale" of New England tunesmiths who "forged a music quite unlike any other." But "the word went out from new arbiters of taste that the Yankees' music couldn't hold a candle to the new 'approv'd' tunes of the Europeans." So in time, the native tradition died out, although "it continued to flourish in outlying areas to the west and south." Then, during the 20th century, the old music came back in light of a "fresh interest in American vernacular traditions" coupled with a growing distrust of most claims of scientific progress. "The myth," says Crawford, "is powerful, useful, and mostly accurate." Certainly it is accurate in Illinois.

When I began to research the sacred music of the early 19th century, as a shape-note singer in the Sacred Harp tradition and an interpreter at Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site, I didn't expect to find Crawford's myth replicated in so many of its details in Illinois. I knew the folk hymns and other songs characteristic of the Appalachian culture that so many of Illinois' first settlers had absorbed on earlier frontiers in the Carolinas, Tennessee and Kentucky. And of course I was aware of the legend that Abe Lincoln and Ann Rutledge sang from the Missouri Harmony, at New Salem. But I didn't expect to find anything like an early settler hand-copying New England fuging tunes in shape notes as he followed the frontier from Georgia through Tennessee and Kentucky to a farm in Cass County. As I read the old settlers' reminiscences, however, it was increasingly clear to me that the struggle between indigenous New England tunesmiths and New England reformers carried over into Illinois, as New England missionaries and singing masters came west to stamp out not only a Southern upland tradition of shape-note singing but the rough-hewn fugues and anthems of their own predecessors as well.

Nor did I expect to find lined-out psalmody to be as prevalent as it was in Illinois. I had associated it mostly with English Puritans, the Kirk of Scotland, the Bay Psalm Book and deeply conservative Old Regular Baptist congregations in Appalachia. But it was quickly apparent, as Jack Larkin suggests, that the practice was nigh universal in rural Illinois as it was almost everywhere else in early 19th-century America. And it was abundantly clear the old settlers who grew up with lined-out-hymns found something important to be lacking in later religious services, and they associated their loss with the choirs and musical instruments that came in with the Better Music reforms. I could appreciate what they were saying, because I sing sacred music a cappella myself, and I have experienced the power and beauty of group singing without an organ blaring away at close range. I have tried to keep my own experience from unduly coloring my observations, but I did catch myself wishing Lowell Mason had stayed in the banking business and exercised his zeal for reform on regulating wildcat currency or lending practices at state-chartered banks - on anything but music.

Irving Lowens, a noted historian of early American music, says the old New England compositions succeeded artistically because they accomplished what is essentially a liturgical purpose:

Clearly, a basic function of congregational song within the service should be to enable members of the congregation to participate actively in worship through music. ... Thus, congregational music must make its impact felt not through the hearing experience, as with choir music, but through the performing experience. To my mind, this identification of the music with the performer, this inwardness, this lack of self-consciousness, is a fundamentally though generally overlooked characteristic which early American church song shares with authentic church song of all times and all places. (283-84)

The same can be said of the Southern folk hymns. I believe both the lined-out hymnody that early settlers brought with them from the southern Appalachians and the shape-note singing school tradition allowed the kind of participation that Lowens speaks of, and they encouraged an emphasis on "singing from the heart," in Calvin's words, or "the untaught melody of grateful hearts," in James Matheney's words at an Old Settlers' Day picnic some 30 years later.

Shape-note singing never died out entirely. It survives in unbroken tradition in the foothills of southern Appalachia, where it flourished at non-denominational singing conventions, descended from the old singing schools, and a Southern church institution known as an all-day singing with dinner on the ground (Dunn 154-56; Cobb, "Sand Mountain" 40-42; Kimzey 56-61). "Some branches of the American shape-note tradition are represented today only in history books," notes Buell Cobb, a historian of the Sacred Harp, the largest surviving shape-note tradition. "But the Sacred Harp does not yet exist in the abstract alone. It is a living thing, re-created anew by the singers who ... tune their voices to its ancient chords" (Sacred Harp 40). From the 1930s onward, people like George Pullen Jackson and folk song collector Alan Lomax brought the shape-note songs to the attention of a wider public, including folk musicians who heard them on field recordings by Lomax and other collectors (Cantwell, When We Were Good 215), and the old vernacular singing got to be part of the folk revival.

During the 1980s, a group from Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music began a series of singings from the Sacred Harp that has spread a traditional Georgia and Alabama style of singing to other Midwestern cities (Bealle, Public Worship 200-02, 209-11). Singers in downstate Charleston revived Sacred Harp singing in the 80s, and interpreters at Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site have been singing it since 1995.

Nor did the sound of lined-out psalmody die out. Songs in both the shape-note and Primitive Baptist traditions, as Beverly Patterson points out in Sound of the Dove, are related in complex ways as they are handed down in oral tradition. And traditional Sacred Harp singers in the South to this day observe points of ornamentation and intonation that seem to predate the written tunebooks (see Cobb 40-47). Robert Cantwell hears antecedents of the "high lonesome" of vintage bluegrass in it:

In the Old Regular Baptist and other folk churches of Appalachia hymns are still 'lined out;' the deacon chants one or two lines, usually dropping by two or three steps from a fifth to its tonic, with which he gently calls the congregation to himself; they gather closely together in the tonality he has given them. ascending and descending the simple altar of the melody in an imperfect unison, which at its point of highest intensity glows with an unmistakably blue radiance. (Bluegrass Breakdown 134)

More indirectly, the sound got into Southern gospel music by way of singing conventions using a modified form of shape-note notation (Malone, Country 21-22). And it lives on in the throaty, wavering ornamentation of country singers like Hank Williams Sr. and Loretta Lynn (Patterson 234-42, 245). Something of the Old Way got into African-American musical traditions, too, combined with: the call-and-response pattern of African music, and lives on in "Doctor Watts" singing among other forms (Chase 78-83; 232-58; Cauthen 30-39). Something of the spirit of the old camp meetings may live on, in however attenuated a fashion, in the redemption stories of Nashville musicians like Johnny Cash or the evangelical tone of Dolly Parton's songs about her roots in the Tennessee hills (see Ellison 128-30). In the world of art music, 20th-century arrangements of shape-note songs by Alice Parker and Robert Shaw, and by Virgil Thompson have gained the old songs an audience among people who once might have thought them barbaric and unscientific. Mainline denominational hymnals and missals reprint folk hymns from the shape-note traditions in increasing numbers.

Lowens in 1964 suggested early American music could serve as a "source from which our congregational song may perhaps draw inspiration, strength, and vigor," largely because it "was born of the cultural traditions of our own land, and because it somehow reflects, in microcosm, our world, the New World, and its development" (285-86). Certainly modern Illinoisans who sing the old music find in it a strength and vigor often lacking in other forms of congregational song. "People sing their hearts out," says Sacred Harp singer Elizabeth Hoffman in Liturgy 90, a publication of the Catholic archdiocese of Chicago. "The singers and the sound will lift your spirit, and you may get a new insight on what 'full, active and conscious participation' is about," she adds, echoing the liturgical reforms of Vatican II (8-9). "I love it," says Eric Zorn, a columnist for The Chicago Tribune. "I love the unfamiliar, haunting harmonies, the full-throated vigor of the singers and the passion and poetry of the antique lyrics." But Zorn's column stops short of predicting a national renaissance of shape-note singing. "My wife finds it harsh," he acknowledges, "occasionally discordant and, lyrically, a bit grim"

As American composer Virgil Thompson noted in 1941, the shape-note songs in the Sacred Harp and Southern Harmony are "older than America itself, that is the musical basis of almost everything we make, of Negro spirituals, of cowboy songs, of popular ballads, of blues, of hymns, of doggerel ditties, of all our operas and symphonies" (216). Charles Ives, whose father was a municipal band leader in Connecticut after the Civil War, thought the old camp meeting songs sounded best when sung like they had been in his father's day. "I've heard the same hymns played by nice celebrated organists and sung by highly-known singers in beautifully upholstered churches," he said in a notebook entry, "and in the process everything in the music was emasculated -- precise (usually too fast) even time -- 'ta ta' down-left-right -- pretty voices, etc." (133). Is there an echo here of the slow, rhythmically irregular singing of lined-out psalmody? At any rate, Ives' heart was lifted by the singing he heard as "great waves of sound used to come through the trees" at the camp meetings of his youth.

Father, who led the singing, sometimes with his cornet or his voice, sometimes with both voice and arms, and sometimes in the quieter hymns with a French horn or violin, would always encourage the people to sing their own way. Most of them knew the words and music (theirs) by heart, and sang it that way. If they threw the poet or the composer around a bit, so much the better for the poetry and the music. There was power and exaltation in these great conclaves of sound from humanity. (132-33)

That, of course, is the sound that Ives captured in his Third Symphony and the Concord Sonata. It is good to know it could be heard in Danbury, Conn., years after the Better Music advocates had thoroughly put their mark on music in New England. It is good to know it also flourished in Illinois. It is American in a way that no longer knows regional boundaries, and in time its revival may give us a coherent, believable story of indigenous American hymnody with a happy ending.

Peter Ellertsen teaches English and journalism at Springfield College in Illinois.
This study grew out of my efforts to document songs that might have been sung around New Salem during the 1830s for the New Salem Shape Note Singers, a group of interpreters at Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site; and research for two sites I maintain on the World Wide Web: "Sacred Harp Singing in Downstate Illinois" <http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/downstateharp.html>; and "Shape-note Singing in the Sangamon River Country" <http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/newsalem.html>. For advice, encouragement and factual information, thanks are due to my SCI colleagues John Phillips and Susan Full; to Springfield shape-note singer Berkley Moore; and members of the fasola-discussions list on the World Wide Web at <fasola.org>. The responsibility for errors of fact or wrongheaded interpretations, of course, rests wholly with me.

[1] On the animosity between Yankees and "crackers," or Scots-Irish settlers of the Southern highlands, especially as it reflected differing attitudes toward religion, I follow David Fischer, Albion's Seed (605-15); and Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture (23-28). Especially illuminating, although limited in scope, is the discussion of strife in Don Harrison Doyle's Social Order of a Frontier Community (47-51). In addition to works cited in the text, I rely for background on Frontier Illinois, by James E. David, and The Frontier State, 1818-1848, by Theodore Calvin Pease. I was struck by the high regard Lois A. Carrier expressed for Christiana Tillson's powers as an observer (56-57, 58), and found her perspective a useful corrective for my own distaste for what I took to be arrogance and snobbery on Tillson's part.

[2] Here I follow Jackson, Spiritual Folk-Songs 147-48. Matching hymn texts to tunes in the old accounts is at best a speculative enterprise, since texts and tunes were switched about freely and many of the tunes come down in oral tradition with numerous variants. Berkley Moore of Springfield, who has studied shape-note hymnody in considerable depth, suggests the text would more likely have been sung to Pisgah, a common tune of undetermined British origin (please see note 9 below), because the "yi-yi yi's" in Tilson's quotation better fit that tune. His suggestion also has considerable merit. Sung very slowly with elaborate vocal ornamentation, as probably was the case in early Montgomery County, the tunes would have sounded rather alike in any event; Tillson may not have known what she was hearing.
.
[3] The story of shape-note music was first told in George Pullen Jackson's White Spirituals of the Southern Uplands and elaborated in detail in Gilbert Chase's history of American music. Irving Lowens' Music and Musicians in Early America and David Warren Steel's "John Wyeth and the Development of Southern Folk Hymnody" tell how the music moved south and west, and Buell Cobb's discussion of the history and background of the Sacred Harp explains how it survived into the 20th century. Each has shaped my thinking in important ways. I also rely heavily on Harry Eskew's discussion of shape-note hymnody in The New Grove Dictionary.

[4] In assigning dates to hymns and tunes, I rely on the scholarship that went into 1991 Denson revision of The Sacred Harp published in Bremen, Georgia; I also have taken advantage of earlier editions of the same tunebook, titled The Original Sacred Harp, that incorporate notes from the 1911 edition by Joseph James, which sometimes give traditional lore about the music not available elsewhere. I follow the practice, customary among shape-note singers, of designating whether the hymn appears in the top (t) or bottom (b) brace, or staff, of music.

[5] In tracing the development of lined-out hymnody from its Calvinist origins, I follow Nicholas Temperley's article "The Old Way of Singing"; Alan Dunstan's outline of Protestant hymnody in the SPCK's Study of Liturgy (509-13); Temperley's discussion of metrical psalms in The New Grove Dictionary; and the article by Temperley and Richard Crawford on psalmody in The New Grove Dictionary. In my interpretations of past practice, I also am guided by the descriptions of lined-out singing today by Jeff Todd Titon and Beverley Patterson.

[6] While the reference cannot conclusively be identified, Lowell Mason's Eclectic Harmony carries the text, "Sweet is the work, my God, my King ..." to a long meter tune called Slade by Americk Hall. My thanks to members of the fasola-discussions electronic mailing list who responded to my query.

[7] In addition to the works cited in the text, I am indebted in my understanding of Appalachian folk hymnody to Dorothy Horn's Sing to Me of Heaven throughout and Jackson, White Spirituals (158-63). Charles Hamm does a particuarly thorough and lucid job of relating the folk hymns to other points of the Scots-Irish oral tradition in New World Music (47-55, 64, 261-74).

[8] As always, the relationships among oral-tradition tunes are arguable. I rely on the listing in Andrew Kunz' on-line Fiddlers Companion at <http://ceolas.org/tunes/fc/>, which includes Saints Bound for Heaven in a tune family that includes not only "Rye Whisky" but also the fiddle tune "Drunken Hiccups." Joe James in his notes to the Original Sacred Harp merely says it is "an old melody" (35).

[9] Jackson says Pisgah is of English origin and may be related to the ballad "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" (Spiritual Folk-Songs 144). Song collector Annabel Buchanan notes its resemblance, in some varants, to the old ballad and says she heard her parents and grandparents sing the text, "When I can read my title clear" to Pisgah when she was a child (Buchanan xxxi-xxi, 84). After reviewing the evidence available on its antecedents, Horn says its British folk origins are "certainly open to doubt." She concludes, "Perhaps someone else can determine the amount and direction of lend-lease involved here" (34-35). I am willing to let Horn have the last word on the subject.

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