174 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
revival in Scotland, they made Moody and Sankey famous, and soon they were
making evangelical tours of the United States. Singing played a key role in the
work of turning sinners into Christians. Moody and Sankey and other traveling
evangelists found in gospel hymns—sacred songs in popular musical dress—a
way to give their audiences easy access to Christianity’s spiritual truths. Gospel
hymns fed a desire to connect with God in an attitude of praise, with little con-
cern for edifi cation.
By 1875 evangelical revivalism was not only a religious force to be reckoned
with but also a successful business in the United States. Huge crowds fl ocked to
Moody’s meetings, where they heard massed choirs trained by Sankey. In 1876
Sankey gathered the hymns he had used in Britain, added some by like-minded
colleagues, and brought out Gospel Hymns, a collection that was to be a best-
selling hymnal until well into the twentieth century. With copies being sold at
Moody’s meetings, royalties of some $360,000 were paid during the book’s fi rst
ten years in print, proceeds that helped fi nance the duo’s evangelical work.
One of the book’s selections, “Sweet By and By” (LG 7.2), is a daydream of
heaven by a composer outside the revivalist circle. Joseph P. Webster composed
“Sweet By and By” in 1867 to words by S. Fillmore Bennett. The music sustains
the reverie of Bennett’s text, avoiding complication: only three chords are used
(tonic, dominant, and subdominant), and not a single added sharp or fl at dis-
turbs the diatonic melody and harmony. Equally important is the unbroken
rhythmic fl ow. Webster instructs performers: “With much feeling and in perfect
time.” This is an unusual direction, for slowing the tempo is a standard way to
emphasize feeling in a sung text.
“Sweet By and By” follows a familiar form: piano introduction, unison verse,
and harmonized chorus. Its main interest lies in the chorus, which introduces
the title phrase and main message, and whose length is doubled by a repeat—
all features of post–Civil War popular songs, increasingly so as the century pro-
gressed. An echo effect between male and female voices invites singers and
listeners to savor a rosy view of eternity: believers will meet on a “beautiful
shore” when their days on earth are over. An air of serene confi dence radiates
from this hymn.THE RISE OF TIN PAN ALLEY
A lthough several cities were the home of music publishers throughout the nine-
teenth century, by the late 1800s New York City had emerged as the capital of a
new kind of publishing, one that focused exclusively on popular songs. Tin Pan
Alley, the nickname given the publishing district that took shape in New York
around 1890, is also an apt metaphor for an approach new to the trade: populist
in tone, noisy with the sound of song pluggers, and shameless in the pursuit of
commercial advantage. Tin Pan Alley’s economics, like its atmosphere, differed
from that of older publishing fi rms. The nineteenth century’s fl agship music
publisher was Oliver Ditson & Co. of Boston. From its founding in the 1830s,
Ditson’s business grew spectacularly, and by 1890 the company had bought the
catalogues of more than fi fty other publishers and set up new fi rms in Phila-
delphia, New York, Chicago, and Cincinnati. Ditson published many popular
songs, but they made up only a fraction of the fi rm’s comprehensive catalogue.LG 7.2gospel hymns172028_07_162-182_r3_ko.indd 174 23/01/13 10:19 AM