Grassroots Hymnody: A Porous Tradition
Our current UU hymnal, “Singing the Living Tradition” is sometimes described as the closest thing we have to a sacred text. Without a creed, without a single holy book as our scriptural authority, the hymnal is our most authoritative source for articulating our shared theology.
This feels particularly true for me, since “Singing the Living Tradition” came of age about the same time I did. I was 11 years old and just about to begin my immersion in the UU youth community when “STLT” was published. So its lyrics, readings, and music have been in the background (and often foreground) of my entire life as a Unitarian Universalist.
Looking back at UU music history, though, has shown me how porous the canon of our hymnody really is. I used to think that there was one hymnal (or at least, one at a time) that defined the music of our movement. I used to think of it like a large Oak tree, with roots and branches in different directions, but one solid entity. But the more I learn about the history of our hymnody the more it feels like a forest -a complex ecosystem. Our tradition is more porous than I had known, and that’s not unique to the present, when the music of the Beatles or Beyonce occasionally shows up on Sunday morning.
The next ‘hymnal’ in UUism isn’t going to be a book. It’ll be an online resource. It will be porous, allowing for edits and updates. It will allow for more kinds of songs and more kinds of arrangements of those songs. This may feel like a radical departure from our hymnal tradition, but the more I’ve learned about our hymnal history, the more it feels like the obvious next step and perhaps even, a return to our roots.
Here are three ways the ecosystem of our UU worship music thrives.
#1. Sharing New Music
Congregations have always copied and shared music with each other. Particularly as the hymnals age and new music is written and discovered, musicians and ministers share their favorite songs with each other and always have. In the 1950s, before youtube, before copy machines even, congregations were constantly mimeographing sheet music and passing those copies around.
One of the first ventures of the newly formed UUA after merger was to create a new hymnal,
“Hymns for the Celebration of Life,” published in 1964. But the publication of this hymnal was followed almost immediately by second-wave feminism, which called for a revision of old patriarchal language. The newly published book, filled with words like, ‘mankind,’ and ‘brotherhood,’ was almost immediately out of date. The result was a constant editing of the hymnal and newly printed revisions. A similar shift happened in the late 1700s. After the American Revolution against King George III, monarchy metaphors for the divine were suddenly out of fashion and congregants went through their hymnals striking out ‘royalist references.’
Luckily, the hymnals haven’t been our only source of songs. Not only can the language in a hymnal go out of date quickly, but as soon as it’s printed, new songs are written that are too late for the latest edition. The UU World published an article about the effort to include “Spirit of Life” in Singing the Living Tradition, because the song was already being used so often, by so many congregations.
The committee assembling “Singing the Living Tradition” thought it necessary to include Carolyn McDade’s “Spirit of Life,” which had become one of the most popular songs in use in our congregations. McDade wasn’t excited about the idea of calling it a ‘hymn’ though. “Among ourselves,” recalls the Rev. Mark Belletini, who chaired the commission, “we thought, if we don’t put ‘Spirit of Life’ in the book, we’ll all be killed. We took her hesitation very seriously and wanted to address it.” They agreed to place the song (#123) under the “Love and Compassion” heading rather than “Worship.”
Some songs clearly come into use through the hymnal, but perhaps, just as often, songs come into the hymnal through popular use. It used to be that adding a song to a hymnal meant publishing a new book, but adding to the new virtual hymnal will only require an upload.
#2. Alternative books
UU hymnody has never been contained in one hymnal or even one at a time. Religious education through music has long been a value of our tradition, which dates back to the Sunday School Movement of the late 1800s. Our movement at that time saw a blossoming of songbooks specifically for this religious education. Johnson’s book, “A Pilgrimage in Song” lists sixty-one “Sunday school hymnals” in our UU tradition. These RE hymnals were influenced by and influenced Sunday morning worship music, as well.
Hymnals for worship have been just as diverse. Throughout the 1800s parish ministers regularly published hymnals for their specific congregations. A hymnal wasn’t the voice of a denomination, it was a local resource. There was an ecosystem of songs and books being shared for specific communities on specific occasions.
The American Unitarian Association (AUA) was formed in 1825, but didn’t publish their first hymnal until 1867. The “Hymn and Tune” book got its name because it was the first Unitarian hymnal to include notated music on the same page as the lyrics. UU music historian Henry Wilder Foote talks about the variety of hymnals in the Unitarian tradition throughout the 1800s,
It will be noted that in the course of the 19th century no less than thirty-six different hymn-books appeared, a far larger number than any other American denomination can show for the same period, and illustrative of the extreme individualism of the Unitarian churches.
How local were the early hymnals? Well, the title of the first Unitarian hymnal, published in 1782, gives a sense of it: A Collection of Hymns, more particularly designed for the Use of the West Society in Boston, 1782;
Other titles include:
- The Springfield Collection of Hymns for sacred worship, 1835
- Services and Hymns for the use of the Unitarian Church of Charleston, 1854
- The Soldier’s Hymn Book for Camp and Hospital, 1863
- Isles of Shoals Hymn Book and Candle Light Service, 1908 (A Star Island hymnal)
The committee responsible for creating Singing the Living Tradition understood this, because they widely surveyed the denomination to learn which hymns were most used. They wanted to prioritize the hymns that were most useful and popular, rather than which ones they thought were important according to some imagined objective measure.
The Hollis Street Church archive includes a list of twenty-four different singing books the church owned in the early 1800s. Even now, in the era of seeming dominance for “Singing the Living Tradition,” the UUA keeps a list of additional hymnals and songbooks currently in use, and the list isn’t short!
#2. Secular Influence
Sacred music has never been insulated from the secular. Isaac Watts, considered the founder of modern hymnody, published his first hymnal in 1707. “Not being a musician, he [Watts] matched his creations to familiar and popular folk tunes, and thus a revolution in hymnody was set in motion on both sides of the Atlantic (David Johnson).” Of course, the tradition of church music using folk melodies goes back long before that as well.
There’s also the influence of sacred music outside the churches — parallel traditions that seeped into Sunday mornings. Sacred Harp singing has always been religious, but it was also outside the church. Shape note sings were (and are) community gatherings to sing praises and lamentations to the Lord God, but they aren’t worship services and they aren’t church. The words and melodies of shape note music flowed back and forth into the canon of Sunday morning music. Shape note is a tradition outside the church, but parallel to it. Perhaps we can call it “spiritual, but not religious?”
The 1964 hymnal of the newly formed UUA was the first to more explicitly invite folk music into the Hymnody cannon. The 1993 hymnal invited folk traditions, African American spirituals, and world music. But perhaps the shift here was only in naming the influence.
Wondrous Love, #18 in Singing the Living Tradition, is a story that brings together secular folk music, shape note music, and hymnody. The song was originally a pirate’s murder ballad, called “Captain Kidd.” In the original, the pirate brags about his fearsome crimes:
I murdered William More
As I sailed, as I sailed.
The melody may have been used in Camp Meeting revivals that often drew on popular tunes. But the lyrics were changed to something more a bit reverent:
What wondrous love is this!
Oh, my soul! Oh, my soul!
The melody and the new words were first printed together in a shape note book in 1840. Through the popularity of shape note singing, the song was eventually included in hymnals.
The story of hymnody that I thought I knew was that our UUism had one hymnal at a time and that hymnal was the primary container for the music in our congregations. But it turns out the story, like many things in UUism, is more complex than that. Our hymnody isn’t a tree, it’s an ecosystem.
The next hymnal for Unitarian Universalism isn’t going to be a printed book. It’ll be an online subscription service. This means it’ll be the first hymnal that can be updated with new language, new arrangements, and new songs as our tradition grows. I’m curious to see how we’ll use this new resource to keep cultivating the ecosystem that is our music tradition as we share more kinds of music in more kinds of ways.
Sources & Resources for Grassroots Hymnody
- The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music, By Buell E. Cobb, Jr. 1978, 1989. Link here
- Changing the Words: An Historical Introduction to Unitarian Universalist Hymnody, By Jason Shelton Link here
- Carolyn McDade’s Spirit of Life, Kimberly French. 2007. Link here
- Camp Meeting Hymnody, by Charles A. Johnson. 1952. Link here
- A Pilgrimage in Song: Unitarian and Universalist Hymnody: A history of Universalist and Unitarian hymn writers, hymns, and hymn books. By Rev. David A Johnson. 2016.
- A list of singing books owned by Hollis St Church. Ealy 1800s.
