An Introduction to America’s Music

36 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR

interesting to know whether subscribers ran chiefl y to like-minded people or

included a wider spectrum of Bostonians.

Patriot, composer, vivid personality, William Billings stands as an emblem-

atic fi gure in American music history. W hen psalmodists and writers of his own

time chose one man to exemplify their tradition, Billings was the natural choice.

When later reformers wished to recall the supposedly crude beginnings of

American music, Billings served their purposes too. More recently, when music

historians have chronicled the origins of A merican composition, or when choirs

have performed music of eighteenth-century Yankees, it is to Billings and his

works that they have been most likely to turn. Billings stands foremost among

our musical founding fathers, long on talent and historical charisma if short on

polish and solemnity.

Billings struggled fi nancially in his later years. Besides teaching singing

schools and publishing tunebooks, during the 1780s he served the city of Bos-

ton as scavenger (street cleaner) and hog reeve (offi cial in charge of control-

ling roving swine). The publication of his last tunebook in 1794 was sponsored

by local singers as an act of charity toward him and his family. When Billings

died in 1800, William Bentley, a Boston minister who had known him for thirty

years, remembered the composer in his diary as “the father of our New En-

gland music.” Bentley’s obituary noted Billings’s lack of “a proper education,”

his disturbing appearance (“a singular man, of moderate size, short of one leg,

with one eye... & with an uncommon negligence of person”), and the air of

defeat that marked his life’s end (“He died poor & neglected & perhaps did too

much neglect himself”). Yet Bentley could think of no rival who matched the

impact of Billings, a man who “spake & sung & thought as a man above the com-

mon abilities.”

Chester (LG 1.4), from The New-England Psalm-Singer, shows Billings in action

as both composer and poet. Written in long meter (8.8.8.8.), the hymn enlists

God on New England’s side in its quarrel with the mother country. The notion

that in 1770 a sacred tunebook could include a piece with a text like Chester’s

shows how far the boundaries of psalmody had stretched since Cotton Mather’s

day, half a century earlier. Then, only divinely inspired texts had been allowed;

now, a prophet of rebellion was opening up the tradition to new expressive

territory.

Much of Chester’s appeal lies in a melody (in the tenor part) whose pro-

fi le is shaped by the dactylic rhythm (long-short-short) that begins all four of

its phrases. Lying high in the voice, the melody reaches its apex (top note) in

three phrases, encouraging full volume, just as the rhythm mandates a fairly

brisk pace. Considering Billings’s text, it is hard to imagine anyone singing

this tune softly or slowly. And the tenor voice holds no monopoly on musical

interest. The bass, for example, moves with sure melodic purpose in all four

phrases, supporting the tenor tune. The treble (soprano), whose fourth phrase

begins like the tenor’s fi rst, sings a melody almost as interesting as the main

one. Only the counter voice (alto), whose role is to complete the harmony, lacks

tunefulness.

Chester thus gave singers a confl uence of independent, interlocking melodic

lines, tailored to fi t metrical verse, a fact important for worshipers and compos-

ers alike. But as a musical composition, it points up Billings’s lack of artistic pol-

ish as well as his talent. For example, the most strongly stressed syllable in the

LG 1.4

Billings as emblem

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