1. The Complete Works of William Billings , edited by Karl Kroeger and Hans Nathan, 4 vols. (Charlottesville, Va., 1977-90) was undertaken with the sponsorship of the American Musicological Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts as a project to commemorate the Bicentennial of the American Revolution. See also Karl Kroeger, Catalog of the Musical Works of William Billings , Music Reference Collection, no. 32 (Westport, Conn., 1991). The basic studies of Billings's life and music are J. Murray Barbour, The Church Music of William Billings (East Lansing, Mich., 1960), David P. McKay and Richard Crawford, William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer (Princeton, 1975), and Hans Nathan, William Billings: Data and Documents , Bibliographies in American Music, no. 2 (Detroit, 1976).

2. Both quotations are from William Billings, The Continental Harmony (Boston, 1794), xxviii n.; reprinted in Complete Works 4:29n.

3. McKay and Crawford, William Billings , 98-102; also Complete Works 3: xviiixix.

4. Billings's The New-England Psalm-Singer (Boston, 1770), a collection composed entirely by Billings himself, was first advertised for sale on 10 December 1770, some two months after the composer's twenty-fourth birthday. See Allen Perdue Britton, Irving Lowens, and completed by Richard Crawford, American Sacred Music Imprints, 1698-1810: A Bibliography (Worcester, Mass., 1990), 176.

5. Frèdèric Louis Ritter, Music in America , 2d ed. (New York, 1890; reprint, New York, 1970), 58, writes: "To Boston will belong most of the honor of having opened a new era for musical development in the New World. It was one of her sons who, first among Americans, stepped forward with the publication of a number of pieces of church-music composed by himself; and this first Yankee composer was William Billings. "

6. See Richard Crawford, ed., The Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody , Recent Researches in American Music, vols. 11 and 12 (Madison, Wis., 1984), an edition of the 101 sacred compositions most often printed in America before 1811. Billings composed eight core repertory pieces—besides "An Anthem for Easter," A MHERST , B ROOKFIELD , C HESTER , J ORDAN , L EBANON , M AJESTY , and M ARYLAND —a total exceeded only by Daniel Read, who composed nine.

7. As one example, the anonymous compiler of a Philadelphia tunebook wrote in 1970:

On perusing the foregoing pages the Psalmodist will find a very considerable number of the most pleasing tunes, are by our ingenious countryman, Mr. Billings . Every lover of music will, I am persuaded, thank the Editor for inserting so great a proportion of tunes, from an author of such distinguished merit. By mere force of nature, he has excelled all his cotemporaries [ sic ], and equalled any, perhaps, who have gone before him, in composing for the voice. ( A Selection of Sacred Harmony , 3d ed. [Philadelphia, 1790], Appendix, quoted in Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 548)

8. See chap. 2 above, 49-50.

9. The first section of John Tasker Howard, Our American Music (New York, 1931), bears that title. See chap. 1 above, 248-49n.98.

10. Billings, New-England Psalm-Singer , 20. Quoted in Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 177.

11. Gilbert Chase, America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York, 1955), was the first general history to tell that story. See especially Chap. 7, "Native Pioneers" (which includes a section on "Billings of Boston," 139-45), and Chap. 8, "Progress and Profit," in which Lowell Mason plays a leading role.

12. See Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , Appendix I, for a chronological list of tunebooks.

13. See Kroeger, Catalog .

14. Josiah Flagg, A Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes (Boston, 1764), fol. 2v, quoted in Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 272.

15. See Crawford, Core Repertory , xxiii, 3-4.

16. Both passages are from William Billings, The Singing Master's Assistant (Boston, 1778), [2], quoted in Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 181.

17. Richard Crawford, Andrew Law, American Psalmodist (Evanston, Ill., 1968), 16.

18. The passage is from Stowe's story "Poganuc People." Quoted in Chase, America's Music , 142; also in Crawford, Core Repertory , xliii.

19. Alan Lomax, Folk Song Style and Culture (Washington, D.C., 1968), 15, quoted in Crawford, "A Historian's Introduction to Early American Music," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 89 (1979): 293.

20. Crawford, Core Repertory , xi-xvi, sorts out and describes the different kinds of declamatory motion.

21. Crawford, Core Repertory , xiv-xvi.

22. The tunes with four printings were published only in The Singing Master's Assistant , which appeared in four editions, all printed from the same engraved plates. The numbers are taken from an unpublished index of the entire repertory (1698-1810), made while I was working on Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , and Crawford, Core Repertory .

23. Printings referred to here are in the following collections: Andrew Law, Select Harmony ([Cheshire, Conn.], 1779); Daniel Bayley, Select Harmony ([Newburyport, Mass., 1784]); The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony (Worcester, Mass., 1786); A Selection of Sacred Harmony (Philadelphia, 1788); Amphion or the Chorister's Delight (New York, ca. 1789); E. Sandford and J. Rhea, Columbian Harmony (Baltimore, 1793; compiled in Alexandria, Virginia); Thomas H. Atwill, The New-York Collection of Sacred Harmony (Lansingburg, N.Y., 1795); The Village Harmony (Exeter, N.H., 1795); Amos Pilsbury, The United States' Sacred Harmony (Boston, 1799; compiled in Charleston, S.C.); and Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music (Harrisburg, 1810). See Crawford, Core Repertory , xxviii.

24. Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate, A New Version of the Psalms of David (London, 1696). Isaac Watts, The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (London, 1719). Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs in Three Books (London, 1707-9). All of these works were often reprinted in America through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

25. For more on patriotic elements in Billings's texts see McKay and Crawford, William Billings , 63-65, 97-98.

26. See Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 2-8, for a description of tunebook types.

27. CHESTER was first published in The New-England Psalm-Singer , set to Billings's own "Let tyrants shake their iron rod," to which he added four more patriotic stanzas when he reprinted the tune in The Singing Master's Assistant . That text hardly survived the war, however. In later years, C HESTER appeared most often as a setting of Philip Doddridge's hymn, "Let the high heav'ns your songs unite." The original words were still sometimes sung on patriotic occasions. See Crawford, Core Repertory , xxx-xxxi.

28. Crawford, Core Repertory , li.

29. George Hood, A History of Music in New England: With Biographical Sketches of Reformers and Psalmists (Boston, 1846; reprint, New York, 1970), documents the custom in some congregations during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries of singing the whole psalter. The Salem, Mass., First Church records for 1667 complain of Ainsworth's collection of tunes that "we had not the liberty of singing all the Scripture Psalm's according to Col. 3.16" (53). Church records in Plymouth, Mass., from 1692 record that on 19 June the congregation resolved to "consider of some way of accommodation, that we might sing all the psalms," and on 14 August, "began to sing the psalms in course" (54). According to Hood, in Massachusetts in the early eighteenth century, "in pious families two [psalms] were sung every day in the week, and on the Lord's day not less than eight, thus repeating each psalm not less than six times a year" (78). Moreover, in congregations at this time, Hood writes, "the psalms were not selected to suit the preacher's subject, but were sung in order; at least this was the custom for one part of the day, and in many congregations it was their constant rule'' (79; see also page 81 for Cotton Mather's documentation of that premise). I have found no evidence that congregations of Billings's time continued the earlier custom of singing the whole psalter, nor that they gave it up. Thanks to Nym Cooke for calling my attention to these references.

30. See McKay and Crawford, William Billings , 221-30, on Billings's attempts to copyright his music.

31. McKay and Crawford, William Billings , 228.

32. Of the fifty-one compositions in The Continental Harmony , only four—S T . T HOMAS , S UDBURY , T HOMAS T OWN , and WEST S UDBURY —-or 8 percent, were printed in American tunebooks in the succeeding fifteen years (1795-1810). In the other four tunebooks Billings devoted to his own music, the proportion of compositions borrowed by other compilers is higher: The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770), 20 percent; The Singing Master's Assistant (1778), 72 percent; The Psalm-Singer's Amusement (1781), 50 percent; and The Suffolk Harmony (1786), 44 percent.

33. Cf. Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 643-44 with 644-46.

34. Karl D. Kroeger, "The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony and Sacred Music in America 1786-1803," 2 vols., Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1976, is the standard work on Thomas and his tunebook.

35. Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 6-8, documents The Worcester Collection's impact as a model for other tunebooks.

36. See Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 7, for the figures.

37. Simeon Jocelin, The Chorister's Companion (New Haven, 1782-83) carries no compiler's name. However, its title page reports that it was "printed for and sold by Simeon Jocelin and Amos Doolittle." Doolittle signed the work as engraver. The preface, which is unsigned, uses the plural "we," indicating that Jocelin and Doolittle were co-compilers as well as copublishers. A second edition (1788), also without compiler's name, was "published and sold by Simeon Jocelin," and the preface is written in the singular. The preface of The Chorister's Companion's first edition is dated 16 December 1782; it was advertised for sale as early as 19 December. It also contains a forty-eight-page supplement, "Part Third'' with a separate title page but no separate date. Because it is not known whether Part Third was issued with the rest or later, I have treated it here as a part of the first edition. See Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 366-70, for bibliographical details.

38. Other spondaic tunes in The Singing Master's Assistant are BALTIMORE (six printings), H OLLIS S TREET (five), and R OXBURY (five).

39. See Playford's English Dancing Master 1651. A facsimile Reprint, with an Introduction, Bibliography, and Notes , edited by Margaret Dean-Smith (London, 1957). The rhythm of "Saraband" (18) is almost identical to J UDEA from start to finish, though its melodic contour is different. And the melody to Playford's "Tom Tinker" (74) begins with a similar gesture, though it soon goes a different way.

40. The Chorister's Companion (New Haven, 1782), 1, quoted in Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 368.

41. Irving Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York, 1964), 72-77, illuminates relationships between Law's and Thomas's tunebooks.

42. Worcester Collection (1786), fol. 2v, proclaims:

For the progress of Psalmody in this country the Publick are in a great measure indebted to the musical abilities of Mr. William Billings , of Boston: It is but doing him justice here to observe, that he was the first person we know of that attempted to compose Church Musick, in the New-England States; his music has met with great approbation. Many tunes of his composing are inserted in this work, and are extracted from the Chorister's Companion, printed in Connecticut, from Copper-plates. (Quoted in Britton et al., American Sacred Music Imprints , 621)

43. The Columbian Magazine or Monthly Miscellany (April 1788): 212-13, quoted in McKay and Crawford, William Billings , 155-56. According to the author of this piece, Billings's style "upon the whole bears a strong resemblance to that of Handel, and nature seems to have made him just such a musician, as she made Shakespeare a poet."

44. See above, chap. 1, p. 25 and n. 83.