Hand and personal labour of every kind in Scotland, as everywhere else, has in recent years been largely superseded by machinery, and no one can have failed to notice that even the office of “lettergae,” or precentor, is a rapidly decaying institution in our midst. How rapid the progress of the decay is will be recognised from a consideration of the fact that, within the memory of many persons still alive, “reading the line” was the general custom in congregational praise. Then there was no such thing as an organ, or “kist o’ whustles,” in any Presbyterian kirk in the land, and choirs were the exception. In the North hymns were not mentioned, except with scorn and shaking of the head, and repeating tunes were regarded as a frivolity demanding extermination. By and by the repeating tune was tolerated, hymns were introduced here and there, choirs became the fashion; and thus far the precentor was a sine qua non. Ultimately the kirk doors were opened to the introduction of the organ, and precentors became known as “choirmasters” and “conductors of psalmody.” Now the “whustles” are heard bumming in kirks, bond and free. “Whustle kirks” will very soon be the rule rather than the exception, and the precentor will, in the course of a few years, have become an almost unknown quantity. Some of us who have already cut our wisdom teeth may live to see him a totally defunct species. And yet, if we do, we will not behold the spectacle without acute twinges of regret, for many pleasing memories of the pleasantest period of our lives cluster around the familiar form of the village-kirk precentor as he appeared in the desk with clean-shaven chin, black “stock,” stiffly-starched, high-rimmed linen collar, and ample shirt-front as white as the drifted snaw; and by the mildest effort of the imagination we can even now hear the familiar snap of his snuff-box lid, see him prime the one nostril, then the other, and hear the equally familiar dirl of the “pitchfork” on the book-board, and the reading of the line on the key-note of “Balermo,” or “Devizes,” “Coleshill,” “St. Asaphs,” or the “wild warbling measures of ‘Dundee.’”
Of course it is just as the study of music progresses in Scotland, and the taste for the highly-refining art becomes general, that organs increase and precentors decay. It is to the olden times, however, when he who had a “fairish gude lug” and a thoroughly sound pair of lungs was, irrespective of musical education, elected to “fill the desk,” that the humours of precenting almost exclusively belong. And, truly, of that time many a sufficiently funny and ludicrous story may be told.
The late and lamented David Kennedy, the eminent Scottish vocalist, began his career, as most people are aware, as a precentor in his native city of Perth, where his father before him held a similar office for many years in one of the larger Presbyterian kirks. Of the time of the elder Kennedy’s precentorship, “Dauvit” remembered a well-known old character in Perth, an inveterate snuffer, who sang with all his might, and was in the habit of stopping short in the middle of a verse, blowing his nose in his red pocket-napkin, and, having carefully marked the place, would recommence where he left off, oblivious to the fact that the precentor and the rest of the congregation were two lines in advance of him. That man’s singing resembled the dancing of a Perthshire ploughman I have heard of. This latter individual, who hobbled on the floor like a “hen on a het girdle,” and never modulated the action of his limbs to fast or slow music, said he “maybe wasna a very elegant dancer, but he was awfu’ constant.”
Mr. Kennedy, also, when introducing one of his songs, used to tell a good story of the times when the minister did not choose his Psalms as at present, but the precentor simply went through the Psalm book, taking so many verses each time. The singer’s father and some others, when lads, managed to take advantage of this custom to play a good practical joke on an old precentor. Gaining access to the vestry on the Saturday night they took his Psalm-book and, turning to the part which was to be used on the morrow, neatly pasted in the first page of the well-known ballad “Chevy Chase,” the type in which the two books were printed being nearly similar.
On the day following, the precentor, as was the general custom in those days, read each line before singing it, and so managed to get to the end of the third line without noticing anything out of place:—
“God prosper long our noble king,
Our lives and safeties all;
A woeful hunting once there did”—
Having reached the fourth line he read—