Understanding the culture of living with hymnbooks offers new insight into the histories of poetry, literacy, and religious devotion. It stands barely three inches high, a small brick of a book. The pages are skewed a bit, and evidence of a small handprint remains on the worn, cheap leather covers that don’t quite close. The book bears the marks of considerable use. But why—and for whom—was it made? Christopher N. Phillips’s The Hymnal is the first study to reconstruct the practices of reading and using hymnals, which were virtually everywhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Isaac Watts invented a small, words-only hymnal at the dawn of the eighteenth century. For the next two hundred years, such hymnals were their owners’ constant companions at home, school, church, and in between. They were children's first books, slaves’ treasured heirlooms, and sources of devotional reading for much of the English-speaking world. Hymnals helped many people learn to memorize poetry and to read; they provided space to record family memories, pass notes in church, and carry everything from railroad tickets to holy cards to business letters. In communities as diverse as African Methodists, Reform Jews, Presbyterians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, and Unitarians, hymnals were integral to religious and literate life. An extended historical treatment of the hymn as a read text and media form, rather than a source used solely for singing, this book traces the lives people lived with hymnals, from obscure schoolchildren to Emily Dickinson. Readers will discover a wealth of connections between reading, education, poetry, and religion in Phillips’s lively accounts of hymnals and their readers.

"This book originated in a conference, Music, Cultural History and the Wesleys, hosted by CHOMBEC (Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth) and held at the University of Bristol in July 2007"--Pref.

This book offers a comprehensive examination of Methodist practice, tracing its evolution from the earliest days up to the present. Using liturgical texts as well as written accounts in popular and private sources, Karen Westerfield Tucker investigates the various rites and seasons of worship in Methodism and examines them in relation to American society.

The Sacred Harp, a tunebook that first appeared in 1844, has stood as a model of early American musical culture for most of this century. Tunebooks such as this, printed in shape notes for public singing and singing schools, followed the New England tradition of singing hymns and Psalms from printed music. Nineteeth-century Americans were inundated by such books, but only the popularity of The Sacred Harp has endured throughout the twentieth century. With this tunebook as his focus, John Bealle surveys definitive moments in American musical history, from the lively singing schools of the New England Puritans to the dramatic theological crises that split New England Congregationalism, from the rise of the genteel urban mainstream in frontier Cincinnati to the bold "New South" movement that sought to transform the southern economy, from the nostalgic culture-writing era of the Great Depression to the post-World War II folksong revival. Although Bealle finds that much has changed in the last century, the custodians of the tradition of Sacred Harp singing have kept it alive and accessible in an increasingly diverse cultural marketplace. Public Worship, Private Faith is a thorough and readable analysis of the historical, social, musical, theological, and textual factors that have contributed to the endurance of Sacred Harp singing.

Still a bestseller after more than 70 years!