When we think of early American music, we tend to think of songs from the late eighteenth century - folk songs that had their roots in English popular music, or in the spirituals of southern slaves. But there is another, older tradition of American music that is well worth a listen. It is psalmody, the music of the Pilgrims.

A splendid introduction to this tradition can be found in two CD's by Paul Hillier and His Majestie's Clerkes,
Goostly Psalmes and
A Land of Pure Delight. It would be a mistake to dismiss these as mere hymns, just as it would be mistake to dimiss most of Bach's work, or Haydn's, or Mozart's work because they were of a religious bent. Where the great composers wrote for professionals, the psalmodist wrote for laymen. Whereas Bach and Mozart relied on the favors of monarchs and courts to fund their music, the American psalmodists supported themselves with day jobs. They were tanners, teachers, and blacksmiths, who wrote their music in their spare time. Where Bach's or Handel's music was ornate and grand, these are simple and unadorned, but equally beautiful nonetheless. And most of all, even now, nearly four hundred years later, the music still conveys the spirit of those men and women who risked everything to cross an ocean and start anew in the wilderness.

The tradition of psalmody has its roots in the Reformation, when Anglican congregations moved away from Latin and began to sing in the English vernacular. They are plain and simple songs, without musical accompaniment, as befitting the Puritans. Their imagery borrows heavily from that of the Old Testament. References to Jerusalem, Canaan, and Israel abound, and many, like Southwell, a hymn from the Massachusetts Bay Psalm Book, are taken directly from the Psalms. You can imagine the Pilgrims, enduring brutal winters, disease, starvation, and Indian wars, singing this with heart:

"Haste God to me, I pray
Thou art my help and liberty,
O Lord do not delay."

Goostly Psalms traces the tradition of psalmody from its beginnings in the rural English church to its full flower in the late eighteenth century colonial period, when it had been transformed into elaborate "fuguing tunes," much like the fugues of Bach, but with voices not organs and harpischords, and still with the Puritan religious imagery. During the colonial period, the tradition was carried on not by the churches as it had been in the previous century, but by singing-masters, who not only taught the music, but composed it, too.

One such singing-master was William Billings, whose music is the subject of A Land of Pure Delight . The singing-master is a familiar figure in early American fiction. Ichabod Crane, in Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was a singing-master, and so was David Gamut in James Fenimore Cooper's
The Last of the Mohicans. They were both comic figures - impractical, vain, and pretentious men. There's no indication that Billings was vain or prententious, but he must have been a little impractical. He pursued his music to the detriment of his tannery busines. And while that surely was no benefit to his family, it was a benefit to us.