An Introduction to America’s Music

28 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR

A comparison of the prose beginning of Psalm 23 in the King James Bible

with the versifi ed form in the Bay Psalm Book illustrates how metrical psalmody

works in practice:

KING JAMES VERSION BAY PSALM BOOK (1651 EDITION)

The Lord is my shepherd; The Lord to me a shepherd is

I shall not want. Want therefore shall not I.

He maketh me to lie down in He in the folds of tender grass

green pastures; Doth make me down to lie.

He leadeth me beside the still waters; He leads me to the waters still

He restoreth my soul. restore my soul doth He;

He leadeth me in the paths of In paths of righteousness, He will

righteousness for His name’s sake. For His name’s sake lead me.

The Bay Psalm Book’s translators, following the example of Sternhold and Hop-

kins, Ainsworth, and others, set the psalm in four-line stanzas so that it could be

sung strophically, that is, with all stanzas of text sung to the same music. (Psalm

23 fi lls fi ve stanzas in the Bay Psalm Book version.)

The Bay Psalm Book’s translators did all they could to simplify psalmody for

congregations. In that spirit, they set 125 of the 150 psalms in common meter, add-

ing fourteen in long meter and another eight in short meter, leaving only three

remaining psalms in unique meters. A congregation singing from the Bay Psalm

Book, then, needed to know only a handful of tunes. These numbers indicate that

tunes in seventeenth-century New England were chosen not to underline the

meaning of the words but merely to provide a musical vehicle for their delivery.

THE OLD WAY VERSUS REGULAR SINGING

Metrical psalters were published to serve worshipers who could read. But by the

1640s, some New England congregations could get by with only one copy of a

psalter. A single singer (sometimes called the deacon or precentor) would read

Translators typically made each stanza four lines

in length, with each line containing six or eight

syllables, using the iambic (short-long) foot. The

favorite meters were:

Common meter 8.6.8.6.

Long meter 8.8.8.8.

Short meter 6.6.8.6.

Psalm 23 in the Bay Psalm Book is a common-

meter text; it could be sung to any tune in which

Matching Tunes to the Text Meters of English Psalmody

A CLOSER LOOK

the number of notes per phrase matches the

syllabic pattern of the psalm text. OLD HUNDRED is

a long-meter tune; it can be used for any metrical

psalm versifi ed in long meter—not just Psalm 100.

This mix-and-match approach is fundamental to

Protestant psalmody. For that reason, psalm tunes

have names, conventionally printed in small caps,

that rarely have anything to do with the texts to

which they can be sung. In that respect, the name

OLD HUNDRED is unusual.

172028_01_018-043_r2_mr.indd 28 23/01/13 9:50 AM