Varieties of Religious Songs
The old song books spoken of above contain various sorts of religious pieces. Among these are the early psalm tunes, evangelical hymns, spiritual songs, religious ballads, “fuguing” songs, and anthems. Each of these varieties represents loosely a phase of, or a period in, religious, musical, or poetic development. Some are folk-songs and many are not. The psalm tunes with their Old-Testament texts—the sober song fare of the early Protestants in Europe, in the British Isles, and in the American Colonies—are probably to some extent of folk origin; but since psalm singing in early America can not be looked on as a free expression of the folk, and since the psalm tunes themselves gave way easily to other far more folky types of religious song, I have chosen to exclude them from the present discussion and collection. The fuguing songs are examples of an early American art development in composing and in group singing in New England during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Despite their enduring popularity in southern rural folk-singing circles and despite the fact that many of them are found to be constructed on the basis of folk-melodic themes, I have decided that they would be inappropriate to this collection. The same objection, that they are of an essentially composed nature, holds also for the anthems and has demanded their elimination.
After making these exclusions I centered attention on three mutually rather distinct types of song all of which seemed to be in varying degrees folk products—the religious ballads, hymns, and spiritual songs.
Religious Ballads
The religious ballads by and large are folk-produced beyond any reasonable doubt. They are uniformly songs for individual singing, not for groups. The sung story was the thing. In one ballad it would be the story of some bad woman, Wicked Polly for example, “who died in sin and deep despair” and went to hell; in another, of some good woman, the Romish Lady for instance, who was burned at the stake for espousing the Protestant cause. Much ballad material was furnished also by the Bible. Scriptural events like the curing of the man sick with the palsy, the restoring of sight to blind Bartimeus, Daniel’s experience in the lions’ den, the raising of Lazarus, the baby Moses in the rushes, the Prodigal Son parable, the birth of Christ, His crucifixion and death,—all are retold in the ballads.
A younger variety of song which I include under the heading of religious ballads is that in which the singer tells his story in the first person. Such stories are those of the poor wayfaring stranger just a-going over Jordan, the departing preacher or missionary, a dying boy or girl, and even a pious gold hunter dying on his way to California. The story may be also the plaint of the religious “mourner”, the backslider, and the criminal sinner, or the exultant tale of the saved. Still another group of ballads is aimed more directly at the conversion of the “young, the gay, and proud.” They usually begin by telling the religious experience of the singer and close with a warning as to the tragic results of worldliness and an exhortation to turn from “this vain world of sin.” These songs are quite similar to the worldly ballads in form, and their tunes are, as will be pointed out presently, of the common folk stock.
Folk-Hymns
The ballads (excepting the experience variety) probably did not originate in any particular organized religious movement. The folk-hymns were, on the other hand, bound up genetically with the protestant evangelical activity which followed John Wesley’s lead in England and then in America. The Wesleyan Revival began as an ordered small-group affair and spread and developed ultimately into a movement whose aspects and practices were completely free-affairs of the uninhibited masses. In the same way the song of that movement, beginning with merely the taste of textual freedom offered by Watts and the Wesleys, and of musical freedom offered by those who furnished the melodies, spread ultimately far beyond the “allowed” tunes and hymn texts of the authorities until religious gatherings were musically completely liberated.
When John Wesley picked up a popular melody here and there on his travels through England and set it to a good hymn text, he little realized that he was setting an example and starting a movement which was to bring into existence hundreds of folk-hymns; that is, songs with old folk-tunes which everybody could sing and with words that spoke from the heart of the devout in the language of the common man.
With the spread of this movement to America a fertile soil for its further development seems to have been found. Here it became known as the Great Southern and Western Revival. Here its store of songs, made after the pattern used in England, was greatly enlarged. In fact the masses took the matter of what they were to sing so completely into their own hands that the denominational authorities, especially the Methodists, though they tried to control it, became helpless.[2]