Goodman-English Atlantic World

“The Tears I Shed at the Songs of Thy Church”: Seventeenth-Century Musical Piety in the
English Atlantic World

Author(s): Glenda Goodman
Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society , Vol. 65, No. 3 (Fall 2012), pp. 691-
725
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological
Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2012.65.3.691
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
University of California Press and American Musicological Society are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Musicological Society
This content downloaded from

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
“The Tears I Shed at the Songs of Thy
Church”: Seventeenth-Century Musical
Piety in the English Atlantic World
GLENDA GOODMAN
Heare my pray’r, Lord, hark to my cry,

be not still at my tears
—Psalm 39:12 (The Bay Psalm Book, 1640)
S
amuel Sewall knew how to sing. A well-regarded Boston judge and
graduate of Harvard College whose father and grandfather had helped
found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Sewall (1652–1730) was also pre-
centor of the South Church in Boston at the turn of the eighteenth century. It
was his duty to choose the psalm tune and guide the congregation through
the performance every week, a job that required a strong and confident voice,
competence with setting the melody in a reasonable range, and a thorough
knowledge of the psalm tune repertory. Sewall also sang psalms with his family
at home, and invited friends to private worship and psalm singing in his
chambers. But when Sewall led psalm singing with a group of five neighbors
in the privacy of his home on 13 August 1695, he could hardly sing at all. As
he wrote in his diary that day, no sooner did he begin than he “burst so into
Tears that I could scarce continue singing.” His reaction was hardly surprising:
Sewall and his friends had gathered for a day of “Blessing after the death of my
dear Mother.”1 The verses they sang from psalm 27:7–10, offer a stark medita-
tion on the departure of parents and the reunion at the end of time. As verse
10 laments, “My father and my mother both, / though they do me forsake, /
Yet will Jehovah gathering / unto himself me take.”2 The somber tune Sewall
chose, “Windsor,” underscored the melancholy message of the biblical verses.
The memorial, the mournful melody, the plaintive lyrics, and the intimacy of
I am indebted to Andrea F. Bohlman, David D.Hall, Carol J. Oja, and the Journal’s anony-
mous readers for their helpful and perspicacious feedback. Special thanks to the Huntington
Library and the American Antiquarian Society for research support. An earlier version of this arti-
cle was presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Indianapolis,
2010.
1. Thomas, Diary of Samuel Sewall, 337. For an overview of Sewall’s life, see Hall,
“Mental World of Samuel Sewall,” in Worlds of Wonder.
2. The Psalms Hymns and Spiritual songs (1695), 68.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 65, Number 3, pp. 691–726 ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN
1547-3848. © 2012 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jams.2012.65.3.691.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
692 Journal of the American Musicological Society
his friends were too much for Sewall. He crumbled. His voice choked, and his
tears spilled forth, leaving his neighbors to carry the tune without him.
Sewall’s emotional reaction signaled more than a son’s grief. Puritans be-
lieved psalmody created a channel between the singer and God: by singing,
the devout glorified and praised God, but, through singing, the worshipper
was also brought closer to the divine.3 The soul was lifted. Emotions—relief,
despair, love—flooded the worshipper in an apotheosis of obedience and faith.
“[S]inging of Psalmes hath mightily humbled the soule even to teares,” wrote
puritan minister Nathanael Homes (1599–1678) in London fifty years earlier,
and across the ocean Sewall’s tears put proof to the statement.4 The unvar-
nished sound of voices joined together in unison melody was the sonic hall-
mark of this heightened religious expression, and tears were the bodily sign of
music’s spiritual force. Psalm singing constituted a performance of puritan cul-
ture through which a godly community expressed and generated itself.5
The affective dimension of seventeenth-century puritan psalmody has re-
ceived scant attention in modern scholarship. Instead, scholars have focused
on psalmody’s structural elements: gaining bibliographic control over psalm
books, identifying the “core repertory,” tracing changes in performance prac-
tice, and elucidating the English Reformation context in which psalmody
developed.6 Long canonized at the “beginning” of American music history,
psalmody holds a crucial yet conflicted place in U.S. historiography.7 Three
strands run through this branch of musicological scholarship: first, scholars
routinely acknowledge early American psalmody’s English heritage; second,
they herald the “primitive wilderness” of the land in which psalmody took
root, claiming that it fittingly mirrored the rough-hewn and austere character
of the music itself; and third, they chronicle the inevitable decline of Puritans’
3. Throughout this essay I differentiate between “Puritan” and “puritan,” the former refer-
ring to persons while the latter is used descriptively.
4. Homes, Gospel Musick, 9. I have preserved the spelling and punctuation irregularities that
were typical in early modern English sources, changing only “u” to “v,” and “i” to “j” for easier
comprehension.
5. For an overview of the idea of “cultural performance,” see Bauman, “Verbal Art as
Performance.”
6. See Lowens, “Bay Psalm Book,” 22–29; Haraszti, Enigma; Le Huray, Music and the
Reformation; Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church; Crawford, Core Repertory; Britton,
Lowens, and Crawford, American Sacred Music Imprints; Leaver, “Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall
Songes”; and Quitslund, Reformation in Rhyme.
7. Psalmody’s prime place in the canon of American music is demonstrated by the myriad his-
tories that begin with psalmody, and more recently by scholars who forthrightly claim it as canoni-
cal. Histories of American music that begin with psalmody include: Hood, History of Music in
New England; Ritter, Music in America; Matthews, A Hundred Years of Music in America; Elson,
History of American Music; Lahee, Annals of Music in America; Howard, Our American Music;
Kouwenhoven, “Some Unfamiliar Aspects of Singing,” esp. 568; Chase, America’s Music;
Lowens, Music and Musicians; Mellers, Music in a New Found Land. Scholars who directly ad-
dress psalmody’s position in the canon of American music are Hitchcock, Music in the United
States, 1; and Crawford, America’s Musical Life, 22.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Seventeenth-Century Musical Piety in the English Atlantic World 693
musical skills over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies. These strands weave a sterilized tapestry of American exceptionalism:
an image forms of the nonaristocratic and hard-working English migrants
planting a robust and hearty musical tradition in the virgin soil of the New
World. The scholarly projection of this image has come with little recognition
of the violence of the colonial enterprise.8 Psalmody’s decline is depicted as a
crucible, from which American music emerged successfully in the following
centuries with an ever-growing series of unique innovations.9 Some scholars
go further, conjuring a premonition of American democracy in the sacred
strains of congregational singing.10 Yet the position of psalmody at the frontier
of American music history is not always a comfortable one. Scholars grapple
with questions of psalmody’s aesthetic value, using the challenging circum-
stances of the frontier to excuse its seemingly rudimentary style, and justifying
their attention to the repertory by pointing to the music’s ontological role in
American history. Indeed, the fascination with the frontier—both the place of
psalmody literally on the frontier in colonial New England and the figurative
place of psalmody at the beginning of the American musical canon—taps into
powerful discourses of liberal individualism, mastery over nature, and hard-
won “civilized” habits, which have long exhilarated and confounded scholars
of American history, identity, and culture.11
Although the musicological gaze has glided away from psalmody in recent
decades, the sacred music of Puritans has new lessons to teach us about the
affective power of music and about the musical connections between England
8. On the non-aristocratic nature of Puritans and their music, see Covey, “Puritanism and
Music,” 386, 388; and Hitchcock, Music in the United States, 2. The image of the uniquely hard-
working American owes a debt to Weber, “Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism.” The
“wilderness” metaphor can be found abundantly in the literature. For example, John Tasker
Howard, Irving Lowens, and Wilfrid Mellers have section and chapter titles that highlight wilder-
ness: the first section of Howard’s Our American Music is “Euterpe in the Wilderness”; chap. 1 of
Lowens’s Bay Psalm Book is “Music in the American Wilderness”; the first part of Meller’s Music
in a New Found Land is “The Pioneer and the Wilderness.” “Soil,” “root,” and other planting
metaphors are also found extensively, from Matthews’s Hundred Years (8) and Elson’s History of
American Music (2) to Crawford’s American Musical Life (21).
9. On musical decline as a sign of American musical individuality, see Hamm, Music in the
New World, 35. On American exceptionalism more generally, see Kammen, “Problem of
American Exceptionalism.”
10. Foote, Three Centuries of American Hymnody, 6.
11. See, for example, Frederick Jackson Turner’s iconic thesis of how the frontier is a
crucible in which the uniquely individualistic and inventive American identity is forged (and
Turner’s anxiety over what would happen when, at the time he first presented his thesis in
1893, that frontier was “closed”; Frontier in American History, 1–38). In his exploration of
the twin themes of provincialism and cosmopolitanism, Richard Crawford sorts through the
conflicting attitudes that underpin early American music historiography (“Cosmopolitan
and Provincial: American Musical Historiography,” in American Musical Landscape). In the
study of puritan psalmody, Cyclone Covey offers a clear refutation of the idea that the
roughness of the frontier was a shaping force in musical development (“Did Puritanism or
the Frontier Cause the Decline?,” 72–73).

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
and New England in the seventeenth century.12 In this article I delve into the
considerable but scarcely examined library of Puritans’ writings about psalm
singing, and I find that puritan musical life was far more fervent and inward-
focused than we have hitherto understood.13 Stiffly exegetical, yet tremen-
dously passionate, Puritans’ writings from Boston and various sites in England
expose the intimate and emotional nature of psalm singing. Thus, the iconic
image of the Protestant congregation, unified in their beliefs and in their uni-
son psalmody, belies a musical experience that was in fact individual and pri-
vate.14 This is not to say that the congregation was unimportant—indeed,
Congregationalism was the hallmark of New England society, structuring both
civic and religious life.15 However, instances of deeply fervent singing such as
Samuel Sewall’s, though rare, carry a message about the foundational role of
personal piety in puritan psalmody, a message that can be decoded through a
close reading of Puritans’ treatises, sermons, and pamphlets about music.16
12. The bulk of the scholarly literature dates from the 1950s–1980s, with the notable
exception of Temperley’s monumental Hymn Tune Index of 1998. Interest in English
psalmody has not faltered, as recent publications by Temperley and Quitslund illustrate, but
attention to the New England context has largely ceased to occupy musicologists. See
Temperley, Studies in English Church Music; and Quitslund, Reformation in Rhyme. Also
see the work of historian Stephen Marini (Sacred Song in America), and of literary scholars
Amy M. E. Morris (Popular Measures) and Joanne van der Woude (“How Shall We Sing”).
13. This research was conducted at Harvard University Houghton Library, Massachusetts
Historical Society, American Antiquarian Society, Newberry Library, and Huntington Library.
The sources are primarily treatises and pamphlets about singing, but a handful of sources on piety
and Christian living generally include sections on psalm singing. These more general sources are
Bayly, Practice of Pietie; Thomas, Preservative of Piety; and Baxter, Christian Directory. The fol-
lowing is a list of the sources pertaining to psalmody: Wither, Preparation to the Psalter; Ravens-
croft, preface to Whole Book of Psalms; Prynne, Histrio-Mastix; Cotton, preface to Whole Book of
Psalmes; Cotton and Shepard, Singing of Psalmes; Homes, Gospel Musick; Sydenham, Christian
. . . exercitation; Ford, Singing of Psalms the Duty; and Manton’s sermon on music, published
posthumously in One Hundred and Ninety Sermons, 5:183–90. On the oral-literate continuum,
see Fox, Oral and Literate. On the importance of sermons for spreading puritan ideas, see Haller,
Rise of Puritanism, chap. 2.
14. This image is promulgated throughout the scholarship on Protestant church music and
on colonial New England, often ideologically inflected with notes on the congregations’ joyful
liberation from the ignorance perpetuated by the Latin-language Catholic liturgy. For example,
see Scholes, Puritans and Music, chap. 6; Foote, Three Centuries of American Hymnody, 22–24;
Ogasapian, Music of the Colonial and Revolutionary Era, chap. 3; Emerson, John Cotton, 27–28.
Bohlman advocates a similar shift in focus from the congregation to the individual in “Prayer on
the Panorama,” 233–54.
15. Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties.
16. I have not found other examples of Puritans crying while singing, although evidence of
psalmody’s intimate role in individuals’ lives does exist. For example, another formidable diarist
and Sewall’s contemporary, Cotton Mather, regularly mentions psalms and their effect on his spir-
itual and emotional state (Diary). While many scholars have turned to Sewall’s diary entries on
congregational singing for examples of psalmody’s decline in colonial Massachusetts, the private
singing he describes has yet to be discussed. A few scholars have noted in passing the importance
of piety. For instance, Cyclone Covey states that the intense engagement with psalms as pregnant

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Together, these sources show that an interpretative shift is in order: psalmody

was not simply a functional component of puritan congregational worship,
but rather was an essential expression of their ongoing labor to search out and
improve the quality of their individual souls.
In this article I offer a major revision to our understanding of Protestant sa-
cred music, deploying insights into the affective power of singing to illuminate
a fundamental but overlooked part of puritan musical beliefs: the individual’s
personal piety. This shift in our understanding ramifies in many directions.
First, it clarifies why Puritans sang in the first place and ameliorates their repu-
tation as a music-hating people (a reputation that continues to besmirch them,
despite having been long discredited by scholars). We see that Puritans care-
fully modeled their musical experiences after biblical and patristic examples,
turning to the Pauline epistles in the New Testament, where the phrase “heart
and voice” abounds, and to Augustine’s Confessions, in which the church fa-
ther describes being moved to tears by music.17 Taken together, these two
models galvanized Puritans to embrace a singing practice that was literally
heartfelt, albeit one in which emotional responses were carefully monitored.
Second, it changes what we know about Puritans’ selection of musical reper-
tory and illustrates how they distinguished their own musical practices from
“dangerous” secular music. And third, it prompts a reconsideration of why
singing styles changed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as
Puritans’ musical abilities seemingly atrophied and singing became ploddingly
discordant. In sum, this corpus of puritan writings is a lens that refocuses the
meaning of music in seventeenth-century religious life, adjusting it from a nar-
rative of degeneration to one of intentional changes aimed at creating a musi-
cal style that encouraged personal piety and reflected the gravity and majesty
of the musical communion with God.
Taken together, these puritan writings on music adumbrate an intellectual
community that spanned the Atlantic Ocean. It was a community that con-
sisted of erudite white Englishmen (only men), most of whom were educated
either at Oxford University or Cambridge University’s Emmanuel College,
then a hotbed of radical reform. Later generations also attended the colonial
education hub, Harvard College. These men, mostly radical ministers, were
dispersed by social and religious upheaval in England in the 1620s and 1630s,
and again in the 1660s. Exile communities formed first in the Netherlands,
with “potential musicality” that goes, for him frustratingly, unrealized; see “Puritanism and
Music,” 387; also see idem, “Did Puritanism or the Frontier,” 756; and Temperley, “Old Way of
Singing,” 512.
17. Puritan writers referred to singing with “heart and voice” and singing with the “Spirit”
repeatedly. See Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, 276; Cotton, Preface to The whole Book of Psalmes, 4–5,
6–7; Cotton and Shepard, Singing of Psalmes, 1, 6, 8, and passim; Homes, Gospel Musick, 1,
15–16, 24; Ford, Singing of Psalmes the Duty, 11–12, 50–53, and passim; Manton, One Hundred
and Ninety Sermons, 5:184–89.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
then in New England, Bermuda, and Providence Island.18 Those who left
England and those who stayed behind maintained an extensive communica-
tion network, which included a theological dialogue about the nature and
significance of music.19
There were considerably more puritan authors in England than New
England, but two key colonial figures were John Cotton (1585–1652) and
Thomas Shepard (1605–1649). Both men attended Emmanuel College at
Cambridge University, were persecuted for their reformist stances in England,
and emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s (Cotton at the
age of forty-eight, Shepard when he was only thirty years old). In New
England, Cotton became the minister of Boston’s First Church. Shepard, an
acutely pious man who filled his journal with anguished soul-searching, became
the minister of the First Church Cambridge (then known as Newtown).20
Together, they wrote a seminal text on the importance of psalm singing based
on their experiences in New England: The Singing of Psalmes, a Gospel Ordi-
nance, published in London in 1647.21 The two men’s life trajectories, with
migration followed by ongoing collaboration and transatlantic publication,
exemplify psalmody’s transatlantic elaboration in the seventeenth century.
Even when separated by thousands of miles, puritan authors read each
other’s works. Evidence of this can be found in small references within the
treatises. For instance, Newcastle minister Cuthbert Sydenham (1622–1654)
referred to New England ministers Shepard and Cotton’s treatise in his own
defense of singing in 1653. So did Thomas Ford (1598–1674), an Exeter
minister who repeatedly bucked authority and was ejected from the Church of
England on the heels of a stridently reformist sermon at Oxford University in
1631. Works also flowed in the opposite direction, with English publications
circulating in New England. In addition to the many psalters that traveled
with English migrants to New England and the Caribbean colonies, the illus-
trious Mather family, a prominent fixture in the Boston ministry, owned a
18. Puritans went to all English colonies, but it was New England, Bermuda, and Providence
Island that were specifically puritan in design. On the spread of Puritans around the Atlantic basin,
see Games, “Piety and Protest in the Puritan Diaspora,” in Migration.
19. On the circulation of books, pamphlets, and letters between England and New England,
see Cressy, Coming Over, 213–34.
20. Shepard, God’s Plot. Cotton was a minister born in Derby, England who emigrated in
1633 after being ejected from his pulpit at St. Botolph’s Church in Boston, England. Shepard
emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635.
21. The Singing of Psalms was published in London with only Cotton’s name on the title
page, and subsequently the book has been attributed to him alone. Cotton lamented this mistake,
however, noting that “Shepard had the chief hand in the composing of it, . . . [and] I am troubled
that my bro. Shepard’s name is not prefixed to it.” These notes appear on a copy of The Singing of
Psalms held at Houghton Library, Harvard University, which also contains Cotton’s notes on the
book’s errata. On the authorship and publication of this and other of Cotton’s works in London
in this time period, see Hall, Ways of Writing, 132.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
copy of Ford’s book of sermons on music that had been published in

London.22
With sources spanning the Atlantic Ocean, therefore, revisiting puritan
psalmody raises larger questions about how we study early modern music his-
tory. A geographically restricted approach is no longer tenable, and here I put
forward a second intervention: an approach that tracks the circulation of mu-
sic and ideas about music in the Atlantic world. In the case of puritan
psalmody, this approach recognizes that although New England was provin-
cial, it was also part of a larger trend of transatlantic exploration, colonization,
and migration. Puritan psalmody existed not just in isolated English parishes
and New England congregations, but occupied a place in that broader
Atlantic world.23
Tracing transatlantic musical connections is not a new idea: as Peter
Burkholder observed in 2009, “The history of notated music in Europe and
the Americas since the sixteenth century is in many respects one history.”24
Attending to transatlantic ties has clear advantages to the field of American-
music studies, as Richard Crawford noted in 2001, when he encouraged us all
to “resist the temptation to think of American history as something that has
happened west of the Atlantic Ocean.” Looking to the overarching historical
trends in which music is indelibly imbedded, Crawford argued that “[t]hough
geographically removed, for more than four centuries America has been tied
economically, politically, and culturally to the Old World, forming a vast
transatlantic arena in which the drama of Western expansion has played out.”25
Recently, George E. Lewis has espoused a still more expansive approach by
questioning “whether a future Americanist musicology might more profitably
begin from a global perspective—not so much a comparative, border-drawing
methodology, but an integrative one that implicitly recognizes the perma-
nence of permeability, the transience of borders, and a mestizaje that draws its
power from dialogue with an American trope of mobility.”26
In this article I put these observations into practice by making an interdisci-
plinary connection to the field of Atlantic history. The study of Atlantic history
traces the circulation of people, goods, and ideas, operating from the premise
that the Atlantic Ocean became a vast circuit connecting Western Europe,
West Africa, the Caribbean, and North and South America in the early modern
22. Sydenham, Christian . . . exercitation, 166–67. The copy of Ford’s Singing of Psalms the
Duty housed at the American Antiquarian Society was owned by the Mathers. Ford refers to
Cotton’s writings regarding the threat of an ignorant denial of singing (136). On New England
writing and the reliance on London printers, see Hall, Ways of Writing.
23. This approach was foreshadowed by Percy Scholes, who wrote a celebratory account of
Puritans’ attitudes toward music in 1934 (Puritans and Music).
24. Burkholder, “Music of the Americas,” 401.
25. Crawford, America’s Musical Life, 15–16.
26. Garrett and Oja, convenors, “Studying U.S. Music,” 692.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
period.27 In what follows, I deploy what historian David Armitage calls a “cis-
Atlantic” approach to puritan psalmody. Armitage defines this approach as one
that “studies particular places as unique locations within an Atlantic world and
seeks to define that uniqueness as the result of the interaction between local
particularity and a wider web of connections (and comparisons).”28 By cou-
pling the cis-Atlantic approach to an analysis of the theological evolution of
Puritans’ ideas about sacred music, I explore personal piety in puritan
psalmody on two levels, showing both its transoceanic breadth and its local
depth in colonial Massachusetts. In what follows I first present the genealogy
of musical piety and the theological justifications for singing, then investigate
Puritans’ solutions to the concrete problems surrounding tune selection and
performance, before concluding with a further elaboration on the idea of the
musical Atlantic world, and personal piety’s place in that world.
Tears in Their Eyes and Music in the Hearts: Puritans Sing

Their Faith
On 11 October 1631, John Winthrop found himself lost in the Massachusetts

wilderness. In fact, he was not far from his home in Mystic, but on finding a
(temporarily) unoccupied Indian dwelling, he decided to spend the night
there. To pass the time and quell his uneasiness, he sang psalms to himself
while tending his fire.29 The incongruity of the scene, in which a middle-aged
man (the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, no less) got lost in his
own back yard, usurped an Indian’s abode and sang for solace, represents
both the thuggish absurdity of colonialism and the moral conviction of this
brand of colonist: the seventeenth-century Puritan, freshly migrated from
England.
Before Puritans migrated to New England, they were part of a greater re-
formist trend within Protestantism. Emerging in the sixteenth century,
Puritans hoped to change the Anglican Church to make it more “pure” by at-
tending to Scriptural precedents and adhering to the doctrines of the French
theologian Jean Calvin. In the seventeenth century, puritanism grew into a
transnational movement with outposts in the Caribbean and New England. In
New England, Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were distinguished
from their Pilgrim neighbors in Plymouth Colony: the Pilgrims had separated
27. The scholarly literature on Atlantic history is quite extensive; some seminal texts are: 2
books by Bailyn, Atlantic History and Peopling ; Meinig, Shaping of America; and Elliott, Empires
of the Atlantic World. In recent years historians have noted the shortcomings of the field. See, for
example, Games, “Atlantic History”; and Chaplin, “Atlantic Ocean.”
28. Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in British Atlantic World, 23. The pre-
fix “cis-” is used to mean “on this side of ”; ibid., 21–22. Thomas Jefferson coined the term “cis-
Atlantic” in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).
29. Winthrop, Journal, 57.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
from the Church of England and lived in exile before emigrating. The
Puritans had not separated, but rather dissented from within the Church.
“Puritanism” eludes definition, its changing cast of characters and shifting
goals marking it with a “now you see it, now you don’t” quality.30 However,
one key point is critical to understanding the movement: Puritans strove to
find an authentic and unadulterated mode of religious engagement, and thus
were predominately concerned with the practice of religion.31 For direction
they turned to the Bible: in the puritan worldview, Scriptural precedent guided
every action, interpretation, experience, and idea. This was a “primitivist”
credo, for Puritans were driven by a desire to live in literal accordance with the
ancient church traditions.32 When it came to music, time and again Puritans’
primitivist inclinations led them to Biblical accounts of singing, which guided
and legitimated their own practice, making it authentic. “Authentic” also
meant something deeper and more personal, however: Puritans’ inner faith in
God’s benevolence and wisdom, the belief that there was an agreement or
covenant through which some would be saved, and a conviction that one’s
own profound faith signaled membership among the saved. Congregations of
the faithful (called Saints) sang psalms together in order to praise God, to be
united as a congregation, and to replenish that wealth of faith.
Whether braving a night in the North American wilderness or writing from
a radical enclave at Cambridge University, Puritans were neither rigid deniers
nor vehement objectors to music. Rather, they cleaved a middle path, articu-
lating a conservative theology that aimed at tapping into the spiritual resources
of music while keeping the door to earthly seduction firmly shut. What anti-
music sentiments did exist among puritan writers chiefly applied to two types
of music: secular songs, which were believed to encourage an undue focus on
the temptations of sensual pleasures, and “Cathedral music,” meaning the
music of Anglican Church, which they believed veered too closely to Catholic
liturgy.33 London minister Nathanael Homes voiced Puritans’ scorn when, in
the midst of the English Civil War, he wrote that psalmody was quite different
from “Cathedrall singing, which is so abominable.” Not only was such music
full of “unlawfull Letanies, and Creeds,” Homes continued, but “they do not
let all the Congregation, neither sing, nor understand what is sung; battologiz-
ing and quavering over the same words vainly.” Lest a reader still not compre-
hend the precise problem, Homes spelled it out: “Yea nor do all they sing
together, but first one sings an Anthem, then half the Chore, then the other,
tossing the Word of God like a Tenice-ball. Then all yelling together with con-
fused noise. This we utterly dislike as must unlawful.”34
30. Hall, “Understanding the Puritans,” 36; and Cohen, God’s Caress, 3–4, 22.
31. Hall, “Narrating Puritanism,” 74.
32. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives, 73.
33. On Anglican church music policy before, during, and after the English Civil War,
see Wilson, Anglican Chant, chap. 1.
34. Homes, Gospel Musick, 19.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Homes wrote with a zeal that was spurred by the recent downfall of
Anglican Archbishop William Cardinal Laud, whose persistent persecution of
dissenters had driven many of the puritan ministers in New England from
their posts in the old country. In the heady days of the English Civil War,
when Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army swept through the country, the
Long Parliament exercised its might, and King Charles I was beheaded (in
1649), puritan condemnation of Anglican practices took a gleeful turn. Even
though they were far removed from the drama, New Englanders watched the
transatlantic developments avidly. Bolstering the righteous position adopted
by Homes, Cotton and Shepard echoed his anti-Anglican stance when draft-
ing their music treatise in Boston three years later. For instance, they wrote,
“they be Cathedrall Priests of an Antichristian spirit, that have scoffed at
Puritan-Ministers, as calling the People to sing one of Hopkins Jiggs, and so
hop into the Pulpit. God keepe all Anti-Psalmists from the like Antichrisitan
Spirit.”35 Even though the Massachusetts Bay Colony was free from Anglican
antagonists, the insults suffered by Cotton, Shepard, and others before they
migrated still burned. Gazing eastward across the ocean, the Boston writers
keenly anticipated a puritan English nation, a possibility that seemed to be on
the verge of becoming reality in the 1640s. They fashioned their musical ideas
to support that goal.
In both the small settlements in the New England colonies and the towns
throughout England, puritan writers sought out a congregational musical
practice that would encourage piety. They stipulated that sacred music should
consist of unaccompanied settings of Scriptural verses, sung in unison during
worship in order to elevate the congregants’ souls and glorify God. Under-
standing the Bible was of primary importance to Puritans, and thus, in lieu of
ornate polyphonic pieces whose words (whether Latin or English) were inde-
cipherable, they adapted the Hebrew psalms for musical worship. This re-
quired that the psalms be translated into English metrical form, and this effort
began in mid-sixteenth-century England with the Sternhold and Hopkins
psalter (1562). This psalter went through innumerable editions and was used
in New England until a desire to produce a more accurate translation of the
psalms led to the publication of the Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book
printed in North America.36 The Bay Psalm Book did not contain printed mu-
sic until the ninth edition (pub. Boston, 1698), and colonial Puritans partici-
pated in the development of the distinctive performance practice of lining
35. Cotton and Shepard, Singing of Psalmes, 61. Also see Ford, Singing of Psalms the Duty,
161; and Sydenham, Christian . . . exercitation, 204.
36. Haraszti, Enigma; and Morris, “Art of Purifying,” 107–30. The actual title of the first
edition of the Bay Psalm Book is The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English
Metre (Cambridge, MA: Printed by Stephen Daye, 1640).

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
out.37 Useful among groups of musically illiterate or poorly trained singers, in

“lining out” the congregation followed a leader (the precentor), who read or
sang a psalm line, after which the congregation either repeated that line or
continued to the next line.
Singing psalms was meant to foster communion with God and promote
sincere religiosity at the individual level, but those were both interior
processes. Puritans were left to wonder, what were the outward signs of a truly
affecting sacred musical experience? One sign was tears. But while crying
could signal religious sublimity, it could also indicate a succumbing to aes-
thetic seduction, and thus Puritans carefully monitored their emotional re-
sponses to music. In this they followed patristic precedent: Augustine wrote of
his own tears in his Confessions. The fourth-century Christian philosopher and
theologian admitted that he cried on hearing sacred music, but insisted that
his tears were in response to the content of the music and were not merely a
sensual response to the sound of singing. Indeed, Augustine was a model for
self-reflective emoting: he cried twice, once when he heard singing in church,
and again when he feared he had been “more moved by the singing than by
what is sung” and thus had “sinned criminally.” The first tears were pure signs
of God’s music working on his soul; the second tears were in lamentation, and
he called for company in his woe: “See now the condition I am in! Weep with
me, and weep for me, you who so control your inward feelings as that good
results ensue.”38
Augustinian piety, exhibited through the intensely individualistic and inte-
rior experience of crying, played a prominent role in seventeenth-century pu-
ritanism in England and New England. The puritan pietist’s religious life
centered on a constant (and often anguished) examination of the self; he or
she took frequent and full accounting of his or her own sinfulness in order to
strive towards overcoming it.39 This pietist tendency can in part be explained
as a severe response to the structural peculiarities puritan life. Because the reli-
gious principles that guided puritan life could not be fully enforced by reli-
gious and civic leaders, individuals relied on their own scruples to monitor the
state of their hearts (and by extension, the integrity of their congregation and
society).40 This subjective form of piety is “Augustinian” not because it is di-
rectly based on the church father’s writings, but because his ideas typify the
puritan mindset.41
37. On the editions of the Bay Psalm Book, see Lowens, “Bay Psalm Book”; and Krummel,
“Bay Psalm Book Tercentenary,” 281–87. On lining out and its musical effects, see Temperley,
“Old Way of Singing.”
38. Augustine, Confessions, 272–73.
39. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives, 9.
40. Hall, “Understanding the Puritans,” 43.
41. Miller, New England Mind, 4, 7; Hambrick-Stowe, Practice of Piety, 26; Lovelace,
American Pietism of Cotton Mather, 31–39. Matthew P. Brown extends the discussion of piety

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Augustinian piety was laced with a keen sense of music’s power. Indeed,
not only the acute power to induce tears but also the more elemental power to
quicken the heart served as a model for Puritans in England and New England
who struggled to understand their affective responses to music. As Augustine
noted, “I perceive that our minds are more devoutly and earnestly elevated
into a flame of piety by the holy words themselves when they are thus sung,
than when they are not.”42 Cotton and Shepard ruminated on Augustine’s ex-
ample, which they interpreted as a battle between sensual and spiritual respon-
siveness. In their reading of the church father’s tears, Augustine “waver[ed]
between the perill of delight to the sence, and experiment of wholesomenesse
to the soule,” ultimately the tears stemmed not just from “the pleasantnesse of
the Tunes” but also from “himselfe, till his heart were more spirituall.”43
Even when Augustine’s experience was not referenced directly, his brand of
sensitive pietism marked puritan writings. For example, Homes tracked
Augustine at a more oblique angle when he stated that in worship, ideally,
“[t]he Sermon as it were turned the wind into a warme quarter to begin to
thaw the soule; and then the Psalm hath been as the breaking out of the Sun-
beames, to make the heart run with melting.”44 Like the saltwater of falling
tears, the rays of sunlight represented spiritual transformation. It is no coinci-
dence that the sunbeam metaphor was frequently deployed in early missionary
reports from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which conveyed hopeful (or, at
times, wishful) descriptions of American Indians’ conversions.45
In addition to Augustine’s Confessions, the New Testament offered exam-
ples of appropriate affective responses to sacred singing. Puritan writers refer-
enced Paul’s epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians, which included
exhortations to incorporate the heart when singing. Two verses in particular
were cited frequently: Colossians 3:16 and Ephesians 5:19. The Colossians
verse advised, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdome,
teaching and admonishing one another in Psalmes, and Hymnes, and
Spirituall songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.” Similarly,
Ephesians 5:19 declared, “Speaking to your selves, in Psalmes, and Hymnes
and Spirituall songs, singing and making melodie in your heart to the Lord.”46
Each passage refers to the importance of the heart when singing. The heart
served both as a typology of Christian love and as an organ in which religious
ecstasy might be felt physically, and was taken to be an excellent barometer of
through the phenomenology of reading, analyzing how reading religious texts generated “hand
piety” (the tactile experience of handling a book) and “eye piety” (the layout of the page) in addi-
tion to “heart piety” (Pilgrim and the Bee, 91–106).
43. Cotton and Shepard, Singing of Psalmes, 69.
45. See Day-Breaking; Shepard, Clear Sun-shine; Whitfield, Light appearing.
46. Quoted from King James Bible (1611).

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
personal piety. Ideally, the heart was where the Holy Spirit would reside when
a person was singing, and if the heart was “moved” it might mean the singer
was inhabited by the Spirit. One can imagine the hope a singer might feel
when excitement, fear, or the Holy Spirit caused a flutter in his or her breast as
singing commenced.
At least two English ministers published sermons that meditated on
Ephesians 5:19. Thomas Manton (1620–1677), a prominent minister from
Devon, and Thomas Ford, also in Devon. Manton’s sermon was published in
1681, part of a set of 190 sermons on various topics. Ford published a set of
five sermons on Ephesians 5:19 in 1659, and in his more extensive treatment
of the verse, Ford explored the relationship between singing, the heart, and
the Spirit. He suggested, “singing is an effect of the Spirit. And . . . the Spirit is
stirred up in us by singing.”47 In this nearly tautological explanation, the
singer’s heart was understood both as stimulated by the Spirit (if the Spirit was
present) and as rejuvenating the Spirit through the act of singing. According
to Ford, the heartfelt performance that might conjure the Spirit would only
happen “when the frame of a man’s heart is suteable to the holy and spirituall
matter that is sung, this is singing in the heart, or with grace in the heart, to the
Lord.”48 But when it did occur, it would bring the singer into fuller commu-
nion with the Lord, and thus was an experience deeply desired by Puritans.
Singing from the heart not only indicated the singer’s own spiritual condi-
tion, but also was an audible sign of sincere belief. Yet the connection between
internal feeling and the external display of sincerity was impossible to verify;
like most aspects of puritan worship, the contents of one’s heart and soul
could be known only by God. This imponderability did not stop Cotton and
Shepard from advising their readers to undertake singing only with unfeigned
ardor. Like Homes before them, and Ford after, the colonial writers argued
that the heart must be foremost in singing:
When we say, singing with lively voyce, we suppose none will so farre miscon-
strue us, as to thinke wee exclude singing with the heart; For God is a Spirit,
and to worship him with the voyce without the Spirit, were but lip-labour:
which (being rested in) is but lost labour . . . . But this wee say, As wee are to
make melody in our hearts, so with our voyces also.49
“Lip-labour” and “lost labour” refer to Isaiah 29:13, in which the Lord warns
the hypocritical Israelites that a people who “draw near me with their mouth,
and with their lips do honor me, but have removed their hearts far from me”
in favor of the counsel of wise men would come to realize their folly. The ref-
erence was a handy rebuke to any who slipped into thinking that the work
of singing was effort enough to glorify God and elevate the soul. No, wrote
47. Ford, Singing of Psalms the Duty, 118. Also see Cotton and Shepard, Singing of Psalmes, 8.
48. Ford, Singing of Psalms the Duty, 58. Emphasis in original.
49. Cotton and Shepard, Singing of Psalmes, 2. Ford also warned against “lip-labour”;
Singing of Psalms the Duty, 57.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Shepard and Cotton: one must also take part in “singing with the heart,” else
the entire effort be for naught. Their cohort across the ocean agreed.
The Singing of Psalms: A Moral Duty
Separating the virtuous and truly sacred music from the profane was an impor-
tant task puritan writers assigned to themselves. So important was it that they
labored to articulate the parameters of godly singing, even though theologians
including Calvin had already done so one hundred years earlier. Puritans
might have simply accepted Calvin’s injunction to sing God’s praises “so that
the hearts of all may be aroused and stimulated to make similar prayers and to
render similar praises and thanks to God with a common love.”50 But instead,
with their endless cogitative energy for biblical exegesis, Puritans refined and
elaborated on the existing justifications, drawing on the theological tenet of
“moral duty” to do so. Homes noted in passing that psalm singing was a
moral duty, but it was Cotton and Shepard in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
who delved into with the issue most thoroughly, providing a model that their
brethren in England might follow.51
Prescribed by God in the Bible, moral duties pertained to the soul’s ulti-
mate salvation. They were of the utmost importance. The sacrament of the
Lord’s Supper was a moral duty, as was baptism. Ceremonial duties, by con-
trast, were created by men and applied to the quotidian details of religious
life—rituals, governance, matters about which the Bible offered no specific in-
dications, and which were not directly tied to salvation.52 The different
sources of authority for moral and ceremonial duties (God for the former,
men for the latter) had consequences for music. Because it appears in the
Bible, psalm singing, and only psalm singing, counted as a moral duty.
Ceremonial music, however, was at the very least irrelevant, and Puritans be-
lieved it was often worse than irrelevant: it could be dangerous, appealing to
the congregation’s sensual interests and distracting them from spiritual
growth. Thus, when Shepard and Cotton repudiated singing as mere “lip-
labour,” it was because such a performance cut against the main theological
justification for singing in worship.
Cotton and Shepard stated unequivocally that “[the] singing of Psalmes
with lively voyce, is not a ceremoniall but a morall dutie” because accounts of
50. This statement was part of the set of Articles Calvin presented on 16 January 1537 to the
council organizing the Geneva church. Quoted in Garside, “Origins,” 7–8.
52. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives, 57; Bozeman notes that this is in contradistinction to
the Anglican idea of adiaphora, or “things indifferent,” which emerged in the 1530s in association
with Thomas Cranmer and stipulated that certain elements of religious ceremony (such as psalm
singing) needn’t be based on biblical precedent.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
psalm singing appear in both the Old and the New Testaments.53 In their
analysis, the two ministers took care to stipulate that because it was a moral
duty, everyone should sing psalms, including women (an uncontroversial
claim) and the “prophane” congregants who were not counted among the
godly community of the saved Saints (somewhat more controversial): “Yea
carnall and prophane persons and Pagans, though they cannot expect the like
blessing from their empty outside performances; yet they sometimes taste
more sweetnesse and enlargement therein, then flesh and bloud could imag-
ine.”54 But while Cotton and Shepard welcomed a heterogeneous congrega-
tion of singers, they specified that “spirituall gifts be requisite to make
[singing] acceptable.” This meant that everyone must sing, but only those
who sang with grace in their hearts were achieving their full measure of spiri-
tual benefits and truly fulfilling their moral duty.55 Qualified thusly, Cotton
and Shepard’s obligatory psalmody made a bold statement for the importance
of personal piety.
Because psalm singing was a moral duty imbued with affective power, puri-
tan writers believed psalms were a panacea for all ills—there was a psalm for
every exigency, mundane or catastrophic. As Cotton and Shepard wrote:
“There is no estate and condition that ever befell the Church and people of
God, or can befall them, but the Holy Ghost, as he did foresee the same, so he
hath provided and recorded some Scripture-Psalme, suitable thereunto.”56
The providential omnipotence that generated the psalms also bequeathed the
Puritans a repertory whose usefulness was boundless and, importantly, offered
them a way to replicate biblical practices in an unprecedented manner. As
composer and psalm-tune compiler Thomas Ravenscroft (1592?–1635?)
wrote in the preface to The Whole Book of Psalms (published in London in
1621), singing a psalm “comforteth the sorrowfull, pacifieth the angry,
strengtheneth the weake, humbleth the proud, gladdeth the humble, stirres
up the slow, reconcileth enemies, lifteth up the heart to heavenly things, and
uniteth the Creature to his Creator.”57 The idea that psalms possessed mani-
fold abilities remained popular well into the eighteenth century, with the eru-
dite Boston minister Cotton Mather attesting to their unique capacity in his
1718 translation of the psalms, Psalterium Americanum. “Whatever Maladies
we find our Minds distempered withal, we may repair to the PSALMS as to a
Dispensatory fill’d with the noblest Remedies,” wrote Mather, the grandson of
53. Cotton and Shepard, Singing of Psalmes, 23; also see Homes, Gospel Musick, 2.
54. Cotton and Shepard, Singing of Psalmes, 6–7. Other writers also defended singing in a
“mixed congregation” comprised of those who were full church members and those who were
not. See Homes, Gospel Musick, 10, 24; Cotton and Shepard, Singing of Psalmes, 44–53; Ford,
Singing of Psalms the Duty, 29, 34, 38–39, 42–45; and Baxter, Christian Directory, 3:166.
56. Ibid., 25. A similar statement was included in Cotton’s 1640 Bay Psalm Book preface,
iv–v. Also see Ford, Singing of Psalms the Duty, 103.
57. Ravenscroft, Preface to the Whole Book of Psalms, (first page).

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
John Cotton and best known for his role in the Salem witch trials (at which
Sewall was a judge).58
The psalms’ potential efficaciousness was undisputed, but whether or not
the performance of psalmody met Puritans’ exacting standards was predicated
on the level of the singer’s piety. The degree to which music was able to pro-
vide spiritual benefits was counterbalanced by its potential to lead to de-
bauched and carnal profanity. All of its affective powers could lure the sinful
singer off the path to potential salvation. Sacred music was made profane
through the singer’s (or listener’s) misuse, a peril well known to the patristic
role model, Augustine. “But the gratification of my flesh,” bemoaned
Augustine, “to which the mind ought never to be given over to be enervated,
often beguiles me, while the sense does not so attend on reason as to follow
her patiently; but having gained admission merely for her sake, it strives even
to run on before her, and be her leader. Thus in these things do I sin unknow-
ingly, but afterwards do I know it.”59 The grey area between aesthetic pleasure
and religious uplift that had dogged Augustine also nipped at the heels of pu-
ritan writers, especially those in England, who also blamed music for appealing
to the sensual side of humanity.60
Problematic Melodies
Beautiful melodies could foster “the sinful corrupt inclinations of man,” wrote
Shropshire minister Richard Baxter (1615–1691) in 1673.61 The problem of
overly appealing melodies, and of secular music generally, caused anxieties to
the Puritans, although more so to those in England than in New England.
The former wrestled with the lingering influence of Elizabethan liberalities
and were beleaguered by the presence of Anglicans and Catholics, while
colonists such as Cotton and Shepard were faced with ideological challenges
of a lesser caliber and thus could afford to take a more lenient view of
melodies.62 The challenge of finding appropriate melodies for their psalm
58. Mather, Psalterium Americanum, v. Emphasis in the original. This approach was not
unique to Puritans: Richard Hooker, the sixteenth-century arch-antipuritan and defender of
Anglican orthodoxy, pithily queried: “What is there necessary for man to know, which the Psalms
are not able to teach?” Hooker, Works, 183. Also see Bernard, “To the Christian Reader” in
Davids Musick.
60. Austern, “ ‘Alluring the Auditorie,’ ” 343–54.
61. Baxter, Christian Directory, 3:166b. Baxter’s works were highly influential, and mission-
ary John Eliot translated several of them into the Algonquian dialect spoken by the Massachusett
Indians (distinguished from the colony’s “Massachusetts” name) in the mid-seventeenth century.
62. This is not to say the New England Colonies were religiously homogeneous. Early antag-
onists such as Thomas Morton, dissenting factions such as that led by Anne Hutchinson in the
1630s, and the presence of Quakers, made the colonies something other than a calm religious
refuge.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
singing touched all Puritans, however, regardless of their location in the

Atlantic world.
The key to avoid succumbing to music’s seductive power was to choose
tunes carefully, puritan writers in England decided. Melody, with its beguiling
wiles and aesthetic beauty, could distract the most devout singer from what
was truly important: the words of the psalms, furnished by God. Had the
Bible included guidelines for fashioning sacred music, no doubt Puritans
would have eagerly followed them. As it was, they turned to two Biblical
touchstones when considering psalmody: King David’s composition and per-
formance of psalms, and the singing that took place at the Last Supper. But
when puritan writers quarried the Bible for clues about what melodies were
used, they found nothing. George Wither (1588–1667), a poet close to the
English monarchy under James I and Charles I, pointedly described the irre-
trievable nature of biblical melodies: “among the infinite and innumerable
multitudes of those things which in the world have perished or suffered any
kinde of alteration, there is nothing whose losse is more irrecoverable, or
whose change is lesse demonstrable, then that of Musicke: for it consisteth of
inarticulate sounds.”63 The recognition of music’s inherently ephemeral nature
forestalled any attempt to reconstruct biblical melodies. Ancient tunes that had
never been recorded in written form were lost forever, Puritans conceded.
Since God in his providential omnipotence was uninterested in providing
any legible clues, Puritans reasoned he must intend for his subjects to find new
tunes. Less exercised about the dangers of seductive melodies than his coun-
terparts in England, Cotton commented, “[T]he Lord hath hid from us the
Hebrew tunes, lest we should think our selves bound to imitate them. . . .
Every nation without scruple might follow as the graver sort of tunes of their
owne country songs, so the graver sort of verses of their owne country po-
etry.”64 By linking melody and nation, Cotton proposed that Puritans need
not search for tunes that could serve universally. Instead, they just required
suitably grave and solemn tunes that would work in English. But even if his
English readers agreed with his sanguine assessment, where were they to find
such tunes?
Many Protestant denominations solved this problem with a dose of prag-
matism, employing preexisting repertory and thereby drawing the new sacred
music into the vernacular fold. Puritans followed suit, albeit with a high level
of theological hand wringing. In a well-known example, Martin Luther offered
the first model of a pragmatic approach: he adapted popular tunes, German
devotional songs, music from Catholic liturgy, and new compositions in order
to craft a sacred-music repertory that served as a vehicle for expressions of
Protestant theology in the vernacular language. While some early reformers
63. Wither, Preparation to the Psalter, 80. Wither himself was laboring to create his own ver-
sion of the metrical psalms.
64. Cotton, Preface to Whole Book of Psalmes (1640), ix.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
looked askance on such practices, most notably Ulrich Zwingli of Zurich (he
rejected music entirely), most felt that Luther’s strategy was effective.65 This
approach appealed to sixteenth-century English authors and psalm book com-
pilers. For example, on the cusp of the English Reformation the indefatigable
translator of the Bible and psalms, Exeter Bishop Miles Coverdale (1488–
1568), presented vernacular sacred music as an ideal substitute for popular
songs, cobbling together new and old tunes in his hymnal, Goostly Psalmes
and Spirituall Songes Drawen out of the Holy Scripture (London, 1535).66 In
Coverdale’s opinion, people were going to sing for pleasure no matter what
the church told them; their repertory may as well be sacred, rather than the
“hey nony nony, hey troly loly, and soch lyke fantasies” of secular ditties.67
Besides, a basic Reformation platform was the importance of understanding
the Word of God, which was why the psalms were translated into English in
the first place. If the singers were accustomed to the tunes, then that was one
less hurdle on the track to full comprehension of God’s words.
Despite the myriad practical justifications for using preexisting melodies,
Puritans were more conflicted than other Reform sects about the practice.
They objected to such melodies on theological grounds, claiming that any
tune “invented” (composed) by man was automatically infected by his inher-
ent sinfulness.68 Again, those in England had somewhat different concerns
than colonists in New England. For writers in England, the real opposition to
invented music stemmed from their objection to the creative license taken in
Anglican and Catholic music. “Cathedral music” exemplified the ludicrous
and pernicious result of an overabundance of human invention and creativity.
The decadent polyphony of Anglican anthems was, to Puritans, a clamorous
obfuscation of the Word of God. The complex music, with its hockets, imita-
tive passages, and multiple voices, was clearly “intended onely to please the
eare, and no way ordered to the use of edifying in grace and knowledge.”69
Passages such as these may appear to be evidence that Puritans were utterly
anti-creative, primitivist, and Bible-bound, but when it came to tunes this was
not the case. What they objected to in “Cathedral music” was the privileging
of aesthetics and virtuosity over clarity of meaning.70
65. Leaver, “Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes,” 36–37.

66. Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church, 19–20; Quitslund, Reformation in Rhyme,
201.
67. Coverdale, Goostly Psalmes, iii.
68. The theological problem with invention extended to the practices of translating and para-
phrasing Scripture, which were subject to similar censure to tunes. Still more controversial were
hymns. Elizabeth Clarke traces dissenting sects’ changing attitudes toward hymns in seventeenth-
century England, noting that at the beginning of the century hymns were “seen as a function of
human intelligence that was highly suspect,” but by the close of the century “the rhetorical power
of poetry was seen as a human endeavour that could be acknowledged by God for use in his wor-
ship”; “Hymns, Psalms, and Controversy,” 32.
69. Ford, Singing of Psalms the Duty, 59.
70. On puritan anti-creativity, see Bremer, Puritan Experiment, 15–16.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Avoiding the decadence of “Cathedral music,” Puritans nevertheless still

had to sing tunes invented by someone. Several treatises and sermons raise the
question of whether it was permissible to sing invented tunes, indicating a
need to rationalize the practice. Authors adopted a number of strategies in
their justifications. Some skirted the issue, choosing instead to focus on the
fact that the practice of singing itself was not invented, but in fact rested on
both Scriptural example and precedents set by the ancient churches. Calvin at-
tested that the practice of singing was “not a thing invented a short time ago,”
but rather had been in practice “from the first origin of the Church.”71 Baxter
followed suit with a statement that the idea of singing is what matters, and re-
turned to the stricture on moral duty to that singing, at least when considered
as an abstract duty, was by definition not invented.72 Another approach was to
dismiss the objection to invention out of hand by drawing a parallel between
composing tunes and the generally accepted task of translating the psalms.
After all, writers argued, both tasks were precursors to the successful perfor-
mance of worshipful singing. As Ford wrote from Devon, if we are “bound to
reade the Psalmes in our own Tongue, why may we not as well sing them in
our own Tunes?”73 Ford saw no need to find a solution for the entire world,
and wanted only to be able to sing English psalms set to English tunes.
In New England, where the soundscape was permeated by “howling
wilderness” and Native Americans’ singing rather than the music of Anglican
or Catholic cathedrals, the concern about invented tunes pertained less to mu-
sical aesthetics and more to the question of personal piety, and by extension,
to the cohesion of the religious community. Confronted with a native popula-
tion whose cultural and spiritual cosmogony was indelibly alien, colonists
sought to bolster their congregational integrity and display that enhanced
piety for their metropolitan interlocutors back in England.74 Therefore it is no
surprise that, of all the Puritans writing about music, it was Cotton and
Shepard who produced the most compelling justification for invented tunes,
one that hinged on the importance of personal piety. Undistracted by the
echoing “Tenice-ball” sounds of cathedral polyphony, they dedicated an entire
chapter to the topic, “Of the manner of Singing.”
By delicately posing the questions such as “Whether it be lawfull to sing
Psalms in Meeter devised by men?” and “Whether in Tunes invented?” the
71. Garside, “Origins,” 32.

72. Baxter, Christian Directory, 3:167a.
73. Ford, Singing of Psalms the Duty, 26, also 20–21. Richard Baxter adopted a similarly
pragmatic approach, suggesting that English tunes facilitated psalm singing, which in turn edified
the singers, and thus the fact that they were invented could be overlooked; Christian Directory,
3:166–67b.
74. On colonial encounter, music, and the sense of cross-cultural difference in seventeenth-
century New England, see Rath, How Early America Sounded, chap. 5; and Goodman, “Indian
Psalmody.” On Protestant music in New World encounters more generally, see Bloechl, Native
American Song, chap. 2.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
two writers outlined an exceptionally tolerant attitude towards musical expres-

sion, accepting the private use of instrumental music and spiritual songs that
weren’t drawn from Scriptural sources, as well as new spiritual songs com-
posed for congregational singing in the church. Any music that had the affec-
tive heft to foster personal piety within each individual was acceptable. An
invented psalm tune was satisfactory in public worship, for Cotton and
Shepard believed that it would surely originate from the Lord, and thus would
signal the singer-composer’s communion with God: “If the Lord should fur-
nish any of the members of the Church with a spirituall gift to compose a
Psalme upon any speciall occasion, he may lawfully be allowed to sing it before
the Church.” In individual and family worship at home, they propounded,
any music that provided “private comfort” was permissible, as was instrumen-
tal music employed in the “remembrance of some speciall benefit, or deliver-
ance.”75 Uninterested in policing their neighbors, Cotton and Shepard trusted
that the ends justified the means: if someone found greater solace in a tune he
or she composed, Cotton and Shepard had no interest in interfering with that
man or woman’s personal worship.
For Cotton, the enthusiasm for invented tunes stemmed in part from his
aversion to “set forms” of worship: such set forms—the prayers found in the
Book of Common Prayer, for example—minimized personal responsiveness
to the religious experience. They also acted against pietist inclinations by en-
couraging an unaffected, mindless, and uninvolved religious encounter that
was the opposite of what music was supposed to accomplish.76 Cotton criti-
cized set forms forcefully in works published in 1640, 1642, and 1646, claim-
ing that written prayers, such as those found in the Book of Common Prayer,
usurped Scriptural precedent and dictated church government and worship
practices in an unwarranted display of human authority.77 In a richly exegetical
chapter of The Singing of Psalmes, a Gospel Ordinance, he and Shepard stated
why set forms were nonconducive to truly pious worship.
In reading a stinted forme of prayer, there is no gift of the Spirit at all mani-
fested, but rather (as I conceive) a manifest breach of the second Commande-
ment of God, which is a grieving of the Spirit. But in singing of the Psalmes of
David, there is a gift of the Spirit manifested, even the gift of obedience to the
command of the Apostle. And that is the personall gift of him that singeth.78
75. Cotton and Shepard, Singing of Psalmes, 15. However, the singing of a newly composed
psalm in front of the whole church congregation would be a rare event, they predicted. In the first
case, it would require an unusual degree of divinely inspired musical ability, and as Cotton put it,
“such gifts now are not ordinarily bestowed.” Homes concurred (Gospel Musick, 16–17), as did
Ford (Singing of Psalmes the Duty, 20–21).
76. Hambrick-Stowe, Practice of Piety, 45.
77. Cotton, Friendly Triall; idem, Modest and Cleare Answer; and idem, Gospel Conversion,
49–57. See Emerson, John Cotton, 25–26.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
No other puritan author in England or New England had explicitly welcomed

instrumental and newly composed music, and Cotton, with Shepard’s input,
did so because he was profoundly committed to encouraging individuals to
have meaningful and heartfelt experiences with musical worship.
Writers in England did not adopt this position, however. In fact, this boldly
liberal approach to musical worship was articulated from a relatively remote
node in the Atlantic world, as Boston in the 1640s garnered irregular atten-
tion from Englishmen distracted by the upheavals brought by the Civil War.
Puritans in England could ill afford the colonists’ relative open-mindedness,
confronted as they were with armed opposition. New England teetered on the
brink of irrelevance for those in England, with its numerically insignificant pas-
sel of colonists and lack of lucrative exports (as opposed to Virginia, which
produced tons of tobacco while devouring countless laborers). Indeed, New
England was just a “sideshow” for England in the seventeenth century, partic-
ularly in the 1640s and 1650s.79
Despite being separated from their colleagues across the ocean by thou-
sands of miles, Cotton and Shepard shared with them the belief that it was in
the psalm lyrics that true affective and spiritual potency existed. Detailed tax-
onomies placed psalms into categories based on the topics, emotions, or per-
sonal trials they were best suited to address. Although there is every indication
that New Englanders were equally scrupulous when considering what psalm
was best suited for every occasion, it was those in England who labored most
intensively over these “catalogs.” Both Ravenscroft and Ford created exegeti-
cal lists of the psalms, detailing what psalms were suited for particular emo-
tions or occasions. For instance, both men noted the usefulness of certain
psalms for dealing with feelings of despondency. Ravenscroft suggested, “If
thou finde thy selfe quite dejected, and as it were forlorne in trouble, then
with compunction of heart sing the 13. 31. 44. 54. 56. Psalms,” while Ford
proposes, “Suppose all goes against thee, and thou hast no visible means of re-
lief, how pertinently mayest thou sing the eleventh Psalm?”80 Ravenscroft and
Ford’s lists had little overlap, but the underlying idea—that psalms could be
organized by their purpose—was the same.
Psalm tunes were not exempt from the cataloging impulse. For instance,
each of the thirteen psalm tunes included in the ninth edition of the Bay
Psalm Book (1698) was assigned to a category of psalms. The four categories
were “consolatory,” “prayers, confessions, funerals,” “peculiar psalms,” and
“praise and thanksgiving.”81 The tunes were printed from crude wood blocks,
and included solmization-syllable notation as well as bass parts (which were
likely not sung in New England congregations). Though printed in Boston,
the musical materials had a transatlantic origin, as they were copied from John
79. Cressy, Coming Over, vii. On Virginia, see Morgan, American Slavery.
80. Ravenscroft, Preface to Whole Book of Psalms (second page); Ford, Singing of Psalmes the
Duty, 95 and 137–58.
81. Psalms hymns and spiritual songs (1698), 419–20.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Playford’s A Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick (first published London,

1654).82
The rigor of such taxonomies did not necessarily reflect actual musical ex-
periences, either in England or in New England. For instance, the psalm
Samuel Sewall sang in Boston to memorialize his mother in 1695, Psalm
27:7–10, was not singled out by either Ravenscroft or Ford as being particu-
larly fitting for such a purpose. That said, the tune Sewall sang, “Windsor”
(Ex. 1), was listed as one of those to be used with “psalms of prayer, confes-
sion, and funerals” in the Bay Psalm Book. Moreover, the words carry an an-
guished appeal to God, with the singer pleading for mercy, and the
minor-mode tune matched the lyrics’ pathos.83
The tune is representative of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century changes in
English Protestant hymnody and psalmody, a period in which simple melodies
called “common tunes” came to replace older official hymn tunes.84 Tunes
such as “Windsor” were distinguished by their brevity and unembellished sim-
plicity. Set in Common Meter (alternating eight and six notes per line),
“Windsor” appears with more than twenty separate texts in psalters beginning
in the late sixteenth century, including Ravenscroft’s psalter of 1621 and the
ninth edition of the Bay Psalm Book (1698).85
“Windsor” was certainly an “invented” tune, and it had been in circulation
for at least one hundred years when Sewall sang it in 1695. It was first printed
in 1591 in a published collection of hymn and psalm tunes compiled by
William Daman, an Italian composer turned Elizabethan court musician.
However, it likely had an earlier source, for the tune bore striking similarities
to two preexisting melodies: a hymn from the English composer Christopher
Tye’s metrical setting of The Actes of the Apostles (London, 1553), and a popu-
lar sixteenth-century ballad, “How should I your true love know.”86
“Windsor” was not the only sacred tune with possible secular associations;
psalm tunes were regularly borrowed from popular ballads in the sixteenth
century.87 Popular ballads were useful: people knew them, and it was easier to
have a congregation sing well-known tunes, particularly in the early days of
82. The Boston printers seemed to have used three different editions of Playford’s manual,
from 1667, 1672, and either 1674 or 1679. See Lowens, “Bay Psalm Book,” 27–28. Also see
Music of the Bay Psalm Book.
83. Psalms hymns and spiritual songs (1695), 68.
84. Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church, 67, 69.
85. Crawford, Core Repertory, xii, lxiv; Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church, 67, 69.
86. Daman, Former Booke; Tye, Actes of the Apostles, chap. 3. Frost suggests the hymn in Tye’s
collection is the source for “Windsor”; English and Scottish Psalm and Hymn Tunes, 352.
Temperley first noted the similarities between “Windsor” and “How should I your true love
know” in 1979; Music of the English Parish Church, 67, 69. The ballad can be found in nineteenth-
century antiquarian William Chappell’s compendium, Popular Music of the Olden Time, 1:236.
Temperley notes that only one or two of the common tunes in Daman’s and other important
sources are associated with secular melodies.
87. Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church, 67.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Example 1 The tune “Windsor,” used for the setting of Psalm 27:7–10. Transcribed from The
Psalms Hymns and Spiritual Songs (Boston: B. Green and J. Allen, 1698).
&b w ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ #w ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ w
&b ˙ w ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ œ œ #w ˙ w ˙ ˙ #˙ w
the English Reformation, when congregational psalmody and hymnody was

new. Whether “Windsor” stemmed from Tye’s sacred hymn or the secular
ballad, it demonstrates the way in which psalm tunes could became orthodox
as much through accidents of history as through intentional consecration.
Puritans in both England and New England were pragmatic in their accep-
tance of psalm tunes. Though uncomfortable with the implications of “in-
vented” tunes, and certainly not insensible to the illicit connotations of secular
ballads, Puritans sought out practical solutions to these theoretical and theo-
logical hurdles. Viewed in comparison with their English colleagues, Cotton
and Shepard could afford to be more generous in their attitudes toward
melodies, thus casting the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the unusual role of
being rather more lenient than the home country (contrary to conceived wis-
dom, which constructs them as religiously intolerant). In England, puritan
writers found satisfaction in categorizing psalms and psalm tunes, which
enabled them to gain a modicum of control over the affective musical experi-
ence. The tune Sewall chose exemplifies the complex and historically contin-
gent dimension of Puritans’ psalmody experiences, and while he likely did not
suspect that “Windsor” had possible secular origins, his heartfelt singing was a
model of late seventeenth-century affective musical worship.
“There Is More Sweetness of Meditation in Singing”: Musical

Declension or a Personalized Performance Practice?88
One final realm attended to by puritan writers was the manner in which
psalms were sung. It was a sensitive topic: seventeenth-century Puritans
smarted from the times when psalm singing was belittled and ridiculed. The
Clown in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale teasingly claimed that a
Puritan “sings psalms to hornpipes,” subverting puritan piety by hitching
psalmody to the hornpipe, a wind instrument usually used for “ribald” dance
tunes.89 More substantially, psalms were mockingly called “Hopkins jigs”
(after John Hopkins, the sixteenth-century psalm translator whose name
88. Ford, Singing of Psalms the Duty, 72.
89. This remarks appears in act 4, scene 3, line 45.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
bedecked literally hundreds of editions of so-called Sternhold and Hopkins

psalters during and after the English Reformation) and “Geneva jigs” (refer-
ring to the community of Marian exiles who lived in Geneva in the mid-
sixteenth century), glib monikers that galled writers such as Homes, Cotton,
and Shepard.90
Puritan writers in both England and New England wanted melodies to en-
courage personal piety, and thus the tunes and performance style had to
conform to a musical standard that was restrained and majestic. But this ideal
was difficult to meet. As Shepard and Cotton wrote, the tunes must be “grave,
and solemne, and plaine” and “befit both the holinesse and gravitie of the
matter, and the capacitie of the Singers.”91 Such psalm tunes would enlighten
the congregation, weld the singers together in heart and voice, and, most im-
portantly, “stirre up the affection” of the individual.92 The irreverence of the
term “jigs” countermanded these ideals. Yet disliked though they may have
been by pious Puritans, the facetious labels “Hopkins jigs” and “Geneva jigs”
are also suggestive, conjuring an earlier performance practice that was perhaps
lively and fast-paced, in keeping with the customs for sixteenth-century secular
jigs. Over time the melodies’ secular associations faded as the tunes became
more subdued, with slower tempi and smoother rhythms.93 As congregations
in the colonies and in the old country sang more and more slowly, they began
to embellish the tunes, a practice encouraged by lining out.94 Furthermore,
musical training grew more rare with each passing generation (particularly in
New England), and less confident singers created a “drag” on the melody by
hesitating before every note while musically undisciplined congregants did not
always wait for the precentor to finish the line before jumping in.95 With the
whole congregation wading through the tune and each individual improvising
his or her own variation, the music was more cacophonous than unified, more
turgid than solemn.96
Scholars have viewed these musical developments as a kind of inexorable
degeneration, leading to controversy and reform in the first decades of the
eighteenth century. Indeed, the musicological historiography has a strong par-
90. Homes also uses the phrase, asserting that it was a “prophane Priest” that gave psalms the
label “Hopkins his Jiggs”; Gospel Musick, 15. Cotton and Shepard refer to “Hopkins Jiggs”;
Singing of Psalmes, 61. Temperley explains the history of this usage; “Old Way of Singing,” 516.
91. Cotton and Shepard, Singing of Psalmes, 56, 54.
92. Ibid., 60.
93. Nicholas Temperley suggests that in the sixteenth century sacred and secular songs were
sung in the same tempo, but by the mid-seventeenth century, psalms were sung close to four
times slower than secular songs: “Old Way of Singing,” 522–23.
94. Among seventeenth-century writers, lining out was seen as a necessary evil born of lim-
ited resources. As Ford wrote of the practice in Devon, England, “I for my part wish we had no
need so to do, for questionless it were farre better if all had books, and could read, or else had
learnt the Psalmes by heart, But if singing be a duty, and we cannot do it without this help, I know
no reason we have to reject it”; Singing of Psalms the Duty, 129.
95. Temperley, “Old Way of Singing,” 523–28.
96. Temperley and Crawford, “Psalmody (ii).”

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
allel in historian Perry Miller’s declension theory for Puritans in colonial New
England, in which he posited that second- and third-generation colonists be-
lieved their piety was declining and were subsequently tormented by the fear
that God had abandoned New England.97 Mirroring Miller’s thesis, music
scholars in the first half of the twentieth century and earlier fixated on
colonists’ isolation in the wilderness of New England, blaming psalmody’s
decline on colonial Puritans’ musical negligence as well as their rough circum-
stances.98 In Three Centuries of American Hymnody (1940), written cotermi-
nously with Miller’s declension thesis, Henry Wilder Foote attributed “the
rapid decline of ability to sing in the New England churches during the seven-
teenth and the early years of the eighteenth century” to a loss of cultural
knowledge between the first immigrants and the second and third genera-
tions. “There was an unavoidable shrinkage of all cultural values,” because
“[t]he second and third generations inevitably lacked the cultural background
which their parents or grandparents absorbed in England.”99 Substitute
“godly” for “cultural,” and we have Miller’s declension theory.
Yet interpreting the trajectory of puritan psalmody as a declension narrative
misses two important points: first, New England psalmody did not take place
in a vacuum, but was quite connected to England throughout the same sec-
ond and third generations singled out by Foote. Transatlantic migration did
not entail a total and permanent rupture. In fact, quite the opposite: as several
historians have shown, colonists kept well abreast of personal and national
news via a regular stream of letters and through the informal but vital network
of transoceanic travelers.100 It is unimaginable that, given the constant flow of
information and colonists’ voracious appetite for news from home, word of
such developments in religious worship should not also be trafficked back
and forth. After all, psalters and treatises about music were imported from
England and, once the Bay Psalm Book series began to be published in 1640,
were sent to England. With the notable exception of Cotton and Shepard’s
adventuresome approach to invented melodies, puritan theologians in
England and New England agreed in their approaches to music (at least in
writing). Why then should musical practice have been utterly ignored?
The second aspect that has been overlooked is this: the singing style itself
may have been embraced because it increased the sense of individuality
within the congregation.101 A singer who feels free to sing at his or her own
pace, ornamenting when so moved, might thereby achieve a more personal
97. Miller, “God’s Controversy with New England,” in New England Mind.
98. Ritter, Music in America, 9; Howard, Our American Music, 6–7; Covey, “Puritanism
and Music,” 380; Chase, America’s Music, 8; Mellers, Music in a New Found Land, 6.
99. Foote, Three Centuries of American Hymnody, 91. Miller and Foote were both professors
at Harvard, although Foote retired six years before Miller joined the faculty in 1931.
100. Cressy, Coming Over, chaps. 9 and 10.
101. Temperley’s work provides the vital background for both these insights. He discovered
that the Old Way of singing was an international and transhistorical phenomenon, not limited to

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
connection with God. The “discordant heterophony” of the congregation

was in fact many individuals wrapped up in devout euphony with God.102 This
claim, that congregants pursued increasingly individualistic singing styles be-
cause it heightened their sense of personal piety, has startling implications for
how we interpret the changes in psalmody performance toward the end of the
seventeenth century. It changes the scholarly narrative from declension to one
of positively enhanced affective experience. This interpretive shift calls into
question the aesthetic guidelines by which we evaluate musical development.
The sound of puritan psalmody did not grow more dulcet, but its significance
and affective power certainly did not decline.
Atlantic Vantages
If the psalm tunes were suitably somber and the singer totally sincere,
psalmody could illuminate the singer’s heart and soul—so puritan writers in
England and New England averred. Laboring to explain music’s role in their
devout transatlantic societies, these writers built an edifice for “gospel music,”
one that from a distance shimmers with Bible-based reasons to sing. The edi-
fice forcefully refutes any claim that the Protestant sect despised music—
rather, they were music’s (that is, sacred psalmody’s) defenders. But viewed
more closely, the edifice shows itself to be a thicket of thorny and erudite ra-
tionales and justifications that hint of ambivalence and irreconcilable tensions
undergirding the arguments. Music facilitated a deep communion with God
and was peerless in this regard, but it also endangered the faithful with aes-
thetic seduction that would lead to a path of sinful sensuality and perdition.
Believing music to have powerful affective properties capable of influencing
both emotional and mental states, Puritans wrestled with the question of how
to harness music, directing its influence so as to guide men and women along
the path to godly living. Indeed, much of the conservatism guiding their ap-
proach, including proscriptions of instrumental and polyphonic church music
as well as secular song, came from an impulse to err on the side of caution
when it came to music.
As the early decades of the eighteenth century passed, individuated singing
in New England became a bellweather for the century-long cultural shift from
Congregationalism to an emphasis on individual religious experiences, a shift
that culminated with the Great Awakening in the 1740s.103 Yet, as noted
above, this singing style was not unique to New England. Even with the dif-
ferent historical trajectories of the two locations—with New England life
New England, and noted that the singing style was antithetical to communal singing—in other
words, it increased individuality. See “Old Way of Singing.”
102. Temperley and Crawford, “Psalmody (ii).”
103. Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties, chaps. 7 and 10.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
marked by repeated wars with Native Americans and the yearly sufferings of
colonial life in the inhospitable northeast, and the massively disruptive Civil
War in England—the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were any-
thing but isolated in their cis-Atlantic node. Specifically, a meaningful and sus-
tained transatlantic discourse on the significance of psalmody connected the
New England colonies to England. By reading sources from both sides of
the Atlantic, we see that Puritans’ sense personal piety was fed by psalmody,
which occupied an important place in the larger transatlantic history of pietist
Protestantism.104
It is by using a conceptual framework that holds the entire Atlantic basin in
mind that the pietist dimensions of puritan psalmody come into focus. Such a
framework, borrowed from the field of Atlantic history, encourages us to con-
sider how the ocean currents transported both music and ideas about music
back and forth between the New and Old Worlds. From an Atlantic vantage,
the seventeenth-century configuration of the English-Atlantic network is easy
to visualize: we see droves of migrants from England landing in the Boston
harbor, as well as Virginia, Maryland, Barbados, and other Caribbean islands,
as part of the “Great Migration” in the first half of the seventeenth century.105
Both return and intercolonial migration was common, and amidst this tumul-
tuous movement of people, music was freighted with powerful symbols of
community, belief, place, and home.
By examining Boston’s relationship to England I have focused on one
modality of Atlanticism, yet it is important to note that Massachusetts was just
one node in a circum-Atlantic network of English colonies. Keeping in mind
the English colonies in Barbados, Bermuda, Virginia, and Providence Island,
we may well ask why matters of music and theology were taken up only in
New England. Indeed, it is possible that the Puritans in Bermuda and
Providence Island read the same treatises and sang from the same psalters that
were circulating between England and New England. However, Providence
Island and Bermuda were small colonies riven with religious disputes, with lit-
tle chance to attend to finer points of religious practice. Energy that might
otherwise have been devoted to matters such as the musical expression of per-
sonal piety was instead expended on more immediate political problems.106
That the Massachusetts Bay Colony possessed men with the ability and the
104. For another study of the transatlantic transmission of hymnody, particularly its im-
pact on Methodist and Moravian pietism in the eighteenth century, see Stowe, How Sweet
the Sound, esp. chap. 1, “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”
105. Games, Migration; Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia.
106. Whereas in the Massachusetts Bay Colony dissent was dealt with by exiling troublemak-
ers (as happened when Roger Williams founded Rhode Island after being cast out of Massa-
chusetts in 1636), the island colonies did not have the excess land to which they could send
dissenters. See Games, Migration, 153. Going further, Games characterizes puritanism in the
colonies as “a disorganized and divisive affair,” 162. Providence Island was seized by the Spanish
in 1641, further curtailing the potential for discourses on Protestant music; see Kupperman,
Providence Island.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
interest to create a purified translation of the entire book of psalms that would
eventually come to be the primary psalter of the colonies (a feat unmatched by
the colonial Puritans’ counterparts in England), and also produced a major
treatise on psalmody’s place in worship, is remarkable.
Adopting a cis-Atlantic view of seventeenth-century Massachusetts helps us
to reconceptualize American music history. Rather than taking psalmody as
the exceptional seedbed of American music, we see that maintaining transat-
lantic connections to England was far more significant to puritan colonists
than launching a new society replete with a unique musical culture. This alter-
native genealogy allows us to move beyond the paradigm of seeking out
“firsts” in American music history, and forces us instead to reckon with specific
instances of America’s complex musical imbrication with peoples and places
from around the Atlantic basin.107 Skeptics might inquire whether reaching
across disciplinary boundaries into the territory of Atlantic history is com-
pletely necessary; yet, I counter, without this approach we cannot fully make
sense either of how early modern musical discourses developed or of how we
interpret the European lineages in American music. Only by accounting for
the litany of arguments for psalm singing that sprang from the pens of English
ministers can we truly understand the profoundly affective experiences with
psalmody described in the writings of Cotton and Shepard and displayed in
Sewall’s tears. A cis-Atlantic approach allows us to attend to the distinctiveness
of psalmody developments in colonial New England, while also recognizing
the important and ongoing connections to England. And finally, by locating
the local particularity of Sewall’s tearful singing in Boston within the English
Atlantic world, we see how his singing enacted a typology of personal piety
that had as its foundation in scriptural precedent, Augustine’s example, and
the rigorous prescriptions laid out in the painstaking exegetical inquiry of the-
ologians from earlier in the seventeenth century.
The colonial societies in which Shepard, Cotton, and Sewall lived were not
theocratic: the clergy did not dictate or police people’s lives. We must be care-
ful when reading the writings of the educated elite and avoid automatically im-
puting abstract theology to the laity. That said, the emotional climate that
produced experiences such as Sewall’s cannot be understood separately from
the intellectual and theological currents documented in music treatises and
other sources.108 Intensely personal encounters with the affective power of
psalmody germinated ideas about what sacred singing meant and how its in-
107. In recent years, a number of musicological studies have connected musical develop-
ments in Europe and America, although without necessarily drawing on Atlantic history. See
Bloechl, Native American Song; and Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy. Exemplary studies out-
side musicology include Roach, Cities of the Dead; and Gilroy, Black Atlantic.
108. As historian Robert Middlekauff notes, religious experience was somewhat “routinized”
by the late seventeenth century, as prescriptive doctrine internalized over several generations led
Puritans to expect to experience, and therefore truly experience, certain emotions; “Piety and
Intellect in Puritanism,” 469. Anne Bagnall Yardley discusses the specifically musical instantiation
of piety; see Performing Piety, 10.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
fluence should be harnessed at an individual level. The fact that singing psalms
was a congregational practice has obscured the individualistic meaning of
psalmody. For while it was frequently during congregational singing that
Puritans strove to regulate sacred-music performance practice, it was control-
ling the place of music in each individual’s heart that was the foremost con-
cern. Ultimately, it was the grace in one’s heart that determined whether the
path to the next world—one that psalmody helped illuminate for the singer—
was to lead up or to lead down.
Works Cited
Editions of the Bay Psalm Book

(The book of psalms known as the Bay Psalm Book appeared in numerous edi-
tions, under a number of different titles. Those cited in the article are listed
here in chronological order of their publication.)
The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre . . . . Cambridge,
MA: Printed by Stephen Daye, 1640. (Known as the Bay Psalm Book.)
The Psalms Hymns and Spiritual Songs, of the Old and New-Testament, faithfully trans-
lated into English metre . . . . 8th ed. Boston: Printed by John Allen, and Vavasour
Harris, for Samuel Phillips, 1695.
The Psalms Hymns and Spiritual Songs, of the Old and New-Testament: faithfully trans-
lated into English Meetre . . . . 9th ed. Boston: B. Green, and J. Allen, 1698.
The Music of the Bay Psalm Book [9th ed., 1698]. Edited by Richard Gilmore Appel.
I.S.A.M. Monographs 5. Brooklyn, NY: Institute for Studies in American Music,
1975.
Other Works
Appleby, Joyce. “A Different Kind of Independence: The Postwar Restructuring of the
Historical Study of Early America.” William and Mary Quarterly 50 (1993):
245–67.
Armitage, David, and Michael J. Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Augustine. Confessions. Translated by J. G. Pilkington. Edinburgh: T. & T.Clark, 1914.
Austern, Linda P. “ ‘Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie’: Music and the Idea of the
Feminine in Early Modern England.” Music and Letters 74 (1993): 343–54.
Bailyn, Bernard. Atlantic History, Concept and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006.
———. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. Curti Lectures, 1985.
New York: Knopf, 1986.
Bauman, Richard. “Verbal Art as Performance.” American Anthropologist 77 (1975):
290–311.
Baxter, Richard. A Christian Directory, or, A summ of practical theologie, and cases of
conscience . . . . 4 volumes. London: Printed, by Robert White, for Nevill Simmons,
1673.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Bayly, Lewis. The Practice of Pietie . . . . London: Printed for Philip Chetwinde, 1672.
Originally published in 1612.
Bernard, Richard. Davids Musick: or Psalmes of that royall prophet, once the sweete singer
of that Israel . . . . London: Imprinted by Felix Kyngston, 1616.
Bloechl, Olivia A. Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Bohlman, Philip V. “Prayer on the Panorama: Music and Individualism in American
Religious Experience.” In Music in American Religious Experience, edited by
Philip V. Bohlman, Edith L. Blumhofer, and Maria M. Chow, 233–54. Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Bozeman, Theodore Dwight. To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in
Puritanism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Bremer, Francis J. The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to
Edwards. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976.
Britton, Allen Perdue, Irving Lowens, and Richard Crawford. American Sacred Music
Imprints, 1698–1810: A Bibliography. Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian
Society, 1990.
Brown, Matthew P., The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in
Early New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Burkholder, J. Peter. “Music of the Americas and Historical Narratives.” American
Music 27 (2009): 399–423.
Chaplin, Joyce E. “The Atlantic Ocean and Its Contemporary Meanings, 1492–
1808.” In Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, edited by Jack P. Greene and
Philip D. Morgan, 35–54. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Chappell, William W. Popular Music of the Olden Time: A Collection of Ancient Songs,
Ballads, and Dance Tunes, Illustrative of the National Music of England. 2 vols.
London: Chappell & Co., 1855–59.
Chase, Gilbert. America’s Music from the Pilgrims to the Present. Music in American
Life. Revised 3rd ed. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Clarke, Elizabeth. “Hymns, Psalms, and Controversy in the Seventeenth Century.” In
Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales, edited
by Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes, 13–32. Oxford and New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2011.
Cohen, Charles L. God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
———. “The Post-Puritan Paradigm of Early American Religious History.” William
and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 695–722.
Cooper, James F., Jr. Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial
Massachusetts. Religion in America Series. Oxford and New York: Oxford Uni-
Cotton, John. Gospel Conversion: Discovering, Whether Any Gracious Conditions, or
Qualifications, Are Wrought in the Soul Before Faith in Christ. . . Together, with Some
Reason Against Stinted Formes of Praising God in Psalmes, &C. Now Published for
the Generall Good, by Francis Cornwell, Minister of the Gospel. London: J. Dawson,
1646.
———. A Modest and Cleare Answer to Mr. Balls Discourse of set formes of Prayer . . . .
London: Printed by R. O. and G. D. for Henry Overton, 1642.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
———. Preface to The Whole Book of Psalmes, faithfully translated into English metre
. . . . Cambridge: Printed by Stephen Daye, 1640.
Cotton, John, and Thomas Shepard. The Singing of Psalmes, a Gospel Ordinance.
London: Printed for J. R. and H. A., 1647.
Coverdale, Miles. Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes. [London], s.l.: Imprinted by
Johan Gough, 1535.
Covey, Cyclone. “Did Puritanism or the Frontier Cause the Decline of Colonial
Music? Debated in a Dialogue between Mr. Quaver and Mr. Crotchet.” Journal of
Research in Music Education 6 (1958): 68–78.
———. “Puritanism and Music in Colonial America.” William and Mary Quarterly 8
(1951): 378–88.
Crawford, Richard. The American Musical Landscape: The Business of Musicianship
from Billings to Gershwin. Berkeley: University of California Press: 1993.
———. America’s Musical Life: A History. New York: Norton, 2001.
———. The Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody. Madison, WI: A-R Editions,
1984.
Cressy, David. Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and
New England in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
Daman, William. The Former Booke of the Musicke of M. William Damon. London:
Printed by T. Este, 1591.
The Day-Breaking, If Not the Sun-Rising of the Gospel with the Indians in New-England.
London: Printed by Rich. Cotes, for Fulk Clifton, 1647.
Delbanco, Andrew. “The Puritan Errand Re-viewed.” Journal of American Studies 18
(1984): 343–60.
Elliott, John Huxtable. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America,
1492–1830. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2006.
Elson, Louis C. The History of American Music. History of American Art 2. New York:
Macmillan, 1925.
Emerson, Everett H. John Cotton. Twayne’s United States Authors Series 80. New
York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1965.
Foote, Henry W. Three Centuries of American Hymnody. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Ford, Thomas. Singing of Psalms the Duty of Christians under the New Testament . . . .
London: printed by W. B. for F. Eaglesfield, 1659. First published in 1653.
Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700. Oxford Studies in
Social History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.
Frost, Maurice. English and Scottish Psalm and Hymn Tunes, c. 1543–1677. Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
Games, Alison. “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities.”
American Historical Review 111 (2006): 741–57.
———. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999.
Garrett, Charles Hiroshi, and Carol J. Oja, convenors. “Colloquy: Studying U.S.
Music in the Twenty-First Century.” This Journal 64 (2011): 689–719.
Garside, Charles, Jr. “The Origins of Calvin’s Theology of Music: 1536–1543.”
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 69, no. 4 (1979): 1–36.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E. Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic

Relations, 1850–1920. Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993.
Goodman, Glenda. “ ‘But They Differ from Us in Sound’: Indian Psalmody and the
Soundscape of Colonialism, 1651–74,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 69,
no. 4 (October 2012): 793–822.
Hall, David D. “Narrating Puritanism.” In New Directions in American Religious
History, edited by Harry S. Stout and Daryl Hart, 51–83. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997.
———. “On Common Ground: The Coherence of American Puritan Studies.”
William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 193–229.
———. “Understanding the Puritans.” In The State of American History. Edited by
Herbert K. Bass. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970.
———. Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-
Century New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
———. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New
England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Haller, William. The Rise of Puritanism, or, The Way to the New Jerusalem as Set Forth in
Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton,
1570–1643. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938.
Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in
Seventeenth-Century New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1982.
Hamm, Charles. Music in the New World. New York: Norton, 1983.
Haraszti, Zoltán. The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1956.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth
Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Hitchcock, H. Wiley. Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction. Prentice-
Hall History of Music Series. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988.
Homes, Nathanael. Gospel Musick, Or, the Singing of Davids Psalms . . . . London:
Printed for Henry Overton in Popes-Head Alley, 1644.
Hood, George. A History of Music in New England: With Biographical Sketches of
Reformers and Psalmists. Boston: Wilkins, Carter, & Co. 1846.
Hooker, Richard. The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker. London: Printed by Thomas
Newcomb for Andrew Crook, 1666.
Howard, John Tasker. Our American Music: Three Hundred Years of It. New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1931.
Kammen, Michael. “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration.”
American Quarterly 45 (1993): 1–43.
Kouwenhoven, John A. “Some Unfamiliar Aspects of Singing in New England
1620–1810.” The New England Quarterly 6 (1933): 567–88.
Krummel, Donald W. “The Bay Psalm Book Tercentenary, 1698–1998.” Notes 55
(1998): 281–87.
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Lahee, Henry C. Annals of Music in America: A Chronological Record of Significant

Musical Events, from 1640 to the Present Day, with Comments on the Various Periods
into Which the Work Is Divided. Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1922.
Leaver, Robin A. “Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes”: English and Dutch Metrical
Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove, 1535–1566. Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Le Huray, Peter. Music and the Reformation in England 1549–1660. Studies in Church
Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Le Huray, Peter, and John Morehen. “Daman, William.” In Grove Music Online.
Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article
/grove/music/07112. Accessed 24 February 2011.
Lovelace, Richard F. The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American
Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian University Press, 1979.
Lowens, Irving. “The Bay Psalm Book in 17th-Century New England.” This
Journal 8 (1955): 22–29.
———. Music and Musicians in Early America. New York: Norton, 1964.
Manton, Thomas. One Hundred and Ninety Sermons on the Hundred and Nineteenth
psalm. London: printed for T[homas]. P[arkhurst], sold by Michael Hide, 1681.
5 vols.
Marini, Stephen. Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture. Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Mather, Cotton. Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1724. Vol. 1, 1681–1708. Collections
of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 7th ser., 7. Boston: Massachusetts
Historical Society, 1911.
———. Psalterium Americanum. The Book of Psalms, in a Translation Exactly
Conformed unto the Original . . . . Boston: Printed by S. Kneeland, 1718.
Matthews, William S. B. A Hundred Years of Music in America. Chicago: G. L. Howe,
1889.
Meinig, Donald William. The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500
Years of History. Vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
Mellers, Wilfrid. Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History
of American Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Middlekauff, Robert. “Piety and Intellect in Puritanism.” William and Mary
Quarterly 22 (1965): 457–70.
Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1984 [1956].
———. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. New York: Macmillan,
1939.
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial
Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.
Morris, Amy M. E. “The Art of Purifying: The Bay Psalm Book and Colonial
Puritanism.” Early American Literature 42 (2007): 107–30.
———. Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in Seventeenth-Century
Massachusetts. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005.
Ogasapian, John. Music of the Colonial and Revolutionary Era. American History
through Music. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Prynne, William. Histrio-Mastix. London: Printed by E. A. and W. I., 1633.

Quitslund, Beth. The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English
Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
Rath, Richard Cullen. How Early America Sounded. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2003.
Ravenscroft, Thomas. Preface to Whole Book of Psalms. London: Printed for the
Company of Stationers, 1621.
Ritter, Frédéric Louis. Music in America. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1883.
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia
Scholes, Percy. The Puritans and Music in England and New England: A Contribution
to the Cultural History of Two Nations. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962.
Shakespeare, William. The Winter’s Tale. Edited by John Pitcher. London: Arden
Shakespeare, 2010.
Shepard, Thomas. The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth upon the Indians in
New-England. London: Printed by R. Cotes for John Bellamy, 1648.
———. God’s Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety, Being the Autobiography & Journal
of Thomas Shepard. Edited by Michael McGiffert. Amherst: University of Massa-
chusetts Press, 1972.
Stowe, David W. How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Sydenham, Cuthbert. A Christian, sober & plain exercitation on the two grand practi-
call controversies of these times; infant baptism and singing of psalms. London:
Printed for Robert White, 1653.
Temperley, Nicholas. The Hymn Tune Index: A Census of English-Language Hymn
Tunes in Printed Sources from 1535 to 1820. Assisted by Charles G. Manns and
Joseph Herl. Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press,
1998.
———. The Music of the English Parish Church. 2 vols. Cambridge Studies in Music.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
———. “The Old Way of Singing: Its Origins and Development.” This Journal 34
(1981): 511–44.
———. Studies in English Church Music, 1550–1900. Variorum Collected Studies,
CS926. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate/Variorum, 2009.
Temperley, Nicholas, and Richard Crawford. “Psalmody (ii).” In Grove Music Online.
Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article
/grove/music/22474. Accessed 7 September 2011.
Thomas, M. Halsey, ed. The Diary of Samuel Sewall. Vol. 1, 1674–1708. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.
Thomas, William. A Preservative of Piety . . . . London: Printed for E. T., 1662.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt
and Co., 1920.
Tye, Christopher. The Actes of the Apostles.Translated into Englyshe Metre . . . . London:
Nycolas Hyll, for Wyllyam Seres, 1553.
Van der Woude, Joanne. “ ‘How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land’
(Ps. 137:4): A Transatlantic Study of the Bay Psalm Book.” In Psalms in the Early
Modern World, edited by Linda Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David Orvis,
115–34. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC
Weber, Max. “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism.” In From Max Weber:
Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills,
302–22. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.
Whitfield, Henry. The Light appearing more and more towards the perfect Day. London:
Printed by T. R. & E. M. for John Bartlet, 1651.
Wilson, Ruth M. Anglican Chant and Chanting in England, Scotland, and America
1660–1820. John Harvard Library. Oxford Studies in British Church Music.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Winthrop, John. The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649. Edited by Richard S.
Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle. The New Middle Ages. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Wither, George. A Preparation to the Psalter. London: printed by Nicholas Okes, 1619.
Yardley, Anne Bagnall. Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English
Nunneries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Abstract
This essay reconsiders the role of seventeenth-century psalmody in Puritans’

religious lives, drawing on a rich yet little-discussed cache of writings about
music from New and Old England to show that, contrary to popular belief,
Puritans were deeply invested in the affective power of psalm singing as an
expression of personal piety. Importantly, treatises about music circulated
transatlantically, thus imbricating psalmody in a broader Atlantic-world dis-
course about the significance of sacred singing. The essay first examines the
nature of Puritans’ personal piety, an interior and individual experience of faith
and communion with God. Then it delves into the theological justification for
singing psalms and the method for selecting tunes. Attuning to the impor-
tance of individual affective experience brings about a reevaluation of the
significance of early American psalmody’s “decline” in the early eighteenth
century. By tracing the contours of puritan musical thought on both sides of
the Atlantic Ocean, this essay also puts forth “Atlantic musicology” as an illu-
minating approach to early modern music and ultimately challenges the histo-
riographical tendency to view psalmody as the departure point for an
exceptional American music history.
Keywords: psalmody, Puritan, personal piety, Bay Psalm Book, Atlantic studies

129.105.215.146 on Wed, 19 Jan 2022 23:44:28 UTC

Goodman-English Atlantic World

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Goodman-English Atlantic World

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

“The Tears I Shed at the Songs of Thy Church”: Seventeenth-Century Musical Piety in the

English Atlantic World

This content downloaded from

Heare my pray’r, Lord, hark to my cry,

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Together, these sources show that an interpretative shift is in order: psalmody

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

copy of Ford’s book of sermons on music that had been published in

This content downloaded from

Tears in Their Eyes and Music in the Hearts: Puritans Sing

On 11 October 1631, John Winthrop found himself lost in the Massachusetts

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

out.37 Useful among groups of musically illiterate or poorly trained singers, in

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

The Singing of Psalms: A Moral Duty

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

singing touched all Puritans, however, regardless of their location in the

This content downloaded from

65. Leaver, “Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes,” 36–37.

This content downloaded from

Avoiding the decadence of “Cathedral music,” Puritans nevertheless still

71. Garside, “Origins,” 32.

This content downloaded from

two writers outlined an exceptionally tolerant attitude towards musical expres-

This content downloaded from

No other puritan author in England or New England had explicitly welcomed

This content downloaded from

Playford’s A Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick (first published London,

This content downloaded from

the English Reformation, when congregational psalmody and hymnody was

“There Is More Sweetness of Meditation in Singing”: Musical

This content downloaded from

bedecked literally hundreds of editions of so-called Sternhold and Hopkins

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

connection with God. The “discordant heterophony” of the congregation

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Editions of the Bay Psalm Book

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E. Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic

This content downloaded from

Lahee, Henry C. Annals of Music in America: A Chronological Record of Significant

This content downloaded from

Prynne, William. Histrio-Mastix. London: Printed by E. A. and W. I., 1633.

This content downloaded from

This essay reconsiders the role of seventeenth-century psalmody in Puritans’

This content downloaded from

You might also like