MuSiC

Music took many forms across the colonies of British North America. European migrants to the New World brought many different varieties of music, both sacred and secular. Ballads crossed the ocean with immigrants and were taught by parents to children, with many regional variations on both sides of the ocean.

The Pilgrims brought the Ainsworth Psalter for use in worship, with tunes edited and composed by the English scholar Henry Ainsworth. The book provided 39 tunes to be used interchangeably. Some congregations, as in Salem, found the music too hard and soon discontinued the Psalters use, while others used it until 1692, when the Pilgrims merged with Massachusetts Bay.

The Puritans objected to musical instruments in church; they sang liturgy but not psalms. The simplicity of their music may be attributed to their lack of musical training rather than their disapproval of the art. Their 1640 Bay Psalm Book was the first book printed in the North American colonies. Though it did not provide tunes, the book gave instructions about meter, and it offered advice about selecting appropriate music. Only the ninth edition of 1698 gave music, and that in just two parts.

Two styles of singing soon developed. Followers of “Regular Singing,” common in urban areas, strictly adhered to the rules given in the psalters. “Irregular Singing” followed rural customs and folkways, in which each congregation had its own rules and each person had their own variation on the tune. In the 1720s reformers like Thomas Walter began to lecture on the importance of the “Regular” style, and by 1750 liturgical music had been standardized throughout New England.

Many colonists owned musical instruments. People of all classes owned virginals (keyboards), citterns (early guitars), violins, and wind instruments. Fiddles (broadly defined as a violin played anywhere but in the home) commonly were found in taverns. A few performers and composers flourished during the 18th century, most notably William Billings and Francis Hopkinson. Such artists always needed supplemental income, whether through manual labor (Billings worked as a tanner) or operating music schools. By the mid-18th century a few organs appeared in Anglican churches.

Attempting to attract more colonists to religious services, Governor James Edward Oglethorpe invited the Methodist minister John Wesley to visit Georgia in 1735. Two years later, influenced by the hymn singing of Moravian immigrants, Wesley published a collection of hymns and Psalms in Charleston. Wesley’s emphasis on music during church services spread, in part due to the Great Awakening. The Methodists published several hymnals in this period, some to compete with other collections of “popular spiritual songs.” John Newton (1725-1807) published three volumes of hymns of his own composing, the best known being “Amazing Grace.”

The Moravians were a particularly musical sect, and their singing inspired many others. They settled primarily in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where they emphasized choral, organ, and brass music (especially trombones) and the works of J. S. Bach. They translated many of their hymns into local Indian dialects for missionary purposes and also used them to outreach to slaves.

The diversity of African cultures makes it difficult to generalize about slave music. However, song was a principal music expression in Africa, used on most major occasions. An alternation between solo and chorus, called “call and response,” is common in West Africa and was frequently used in America as well. Moreover, performers placed special emphasis on rhythm and improvisation. A song leader might improvise on the main theme while the chorus, sung by everyone else, remained constant. Masters sometimes encouraged slaves to sing work songs, believing that it would improve morale and lower mortality rates.

Slaves brought an early version of the banjo with them from Africa, incorporating it into traditional and new songs. Because it could be constructed in a variety of ways and with different materials, the banjo was well suited to the uncertainties of slave life. Drums were important in Africa and probably would have played a larger role in slave music except that their use was sometimes forbidden in British North America except in time of war.

Most slave music of this era did not include Christian themes since most slaves continued to embrace the religious beliefs of their African ancestors. Slave owners sometimes discouraged evangelizing in the slave quarters, and it was not until the second half of the 18th century that efforts were made to teach the singing of psalms.

Further reading: Gilbert Chase, America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); John Ogasapian, Music of the Colonial and Revolutionary Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004).

—Victoria C. H. Resnick