American Congregational Song To 1950

The three hundred year span of time from 1640 to 1940 saw the development of great variety in congregational singing throughout America. Beginning with the Psalters of the first colonists, Americans contributed widely varying styles of songs and hymns, culminating with the popular and influential gospel song. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Huguenot settlers brought their French metrical psalms and psalm tunes with them to South Carolina and Florida. In the early years of the seventeenth century, the settlers of Jamestown carried their "Sternhold and Hopkins" with them, singing the tunes of the 1592 Este Psalter. Following this, the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620; they sang from the familiar Ainsworth Psalter of 1612 along with its accompanying thirty-nine tunes. But it was left to the Puritans, who settled around Boston, to produce their own Psalter, the first book printed in America. That book, The Whole Booke of Psalms Faithfully Translated in English Metre…