VII. Uplifting Songs of the Great Revival

Just as it was the Great Awakening that turned the American churches from the metrical psalms to Watts, and prepared the way for Wesley, so it was the renewed warmth of the Great Revival, after 1790, that made evangelical hymnody generally acceptable. With this type of song, great singing throngs became one, as the rhythmic lines swelled in unison, and revival response was inevitable. ^{48Ibid., pp. ll3, 115.} The tunes had strong emotional appeal, creating an atmosphere favorable to conversion. From 1790 to 1832 a flood of popular hymns spread to the utmost bounds of the country, chiefly as a result of the zeal of the hardy Baptist preachers and the itinerant Methodist circuit riders, who penetrated wherever there was a settlement, visiting solitary cabins as well as assembling vast throngs in the open. Often the preacher had the only hymnbook, and he would have to “line,” or give out the words, a line or two at a time, set to simple and easy tunes. ^{49L. F. Benson, op. cit., pp. 284, 285, 291, 292; George P. Jackson, op. cit., chaps. 3, 4.}PFF4 49.2

1. DISTINCTIVE CAMP MEETING SONG APPEARS (c. 1800)

The earlier church hymns had come from across the sea, but in the frontier camp meetings a new type of “spiritual songs,” springing from frontier American hearts, was introduced when the Methodists took over the camp meeting. The staid old hymns, and even the folk hymns and religious ballads, were too sedate to express the tumultuous enthusiasm of the throngs under the open sky.PFF4 50.1

Sometimes the revival hymns were popularized by the insertion of refrains in which all could join. These were at times set to folk tunes with pulsating rhythm, emotional repetition, and ejaculatory refrains, whose crude doggerel would often be caught up by the throngs, and mighty choruses would roll through the forest clearings. Sometimes a “singing ecstasy” would seize the worshipers. At other times their feelings would be expressed by a chant of mourning, or again by a thunderous jubilation. Spontaneous song broke forth in rough and irregular couplets, combined out of Scriptural phrases and everyday speech, with many hallelujahs and refrains interspersed. ^{50G. P. Jackson, op. cit., chap. 6; G. C. Loud, op. cit., p. 119.}PFF4 50.2

This indigenous type of song, at first transmitted orally, came to be printed in the simple camp meeting songbooks of the time. And later these “spiritual songs” (in contradistinction to “psalms and hymns”) appeared in the back-country “shape note” songbooks, with the spirit retained but with much of the crudity “simmered away.” These contagious songs presented “the prayer of the penitent and the hallelujah of the redeemed.” ^{51G. C. Loud, op. cit.. p. 110; L. F. Benson, op. cit., pp. 292, 293. The Englishman, Hugh Bourne, leader of the revivalist Primitive Methodist secession, which adopted the camp meeting from Lorenzo Dow, published and circulated his General Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs for Camp Meetings (1809). (G. P. Jackson, op. cit., chap. 7.) Six “Spiritual Songs” appear in Lorenzo Dow, The Dealings of God, Man, and the Devil, pp. 691-703.} They appealed to sinners, revealed the terms of salvation, and narrated personal experience.PFF4 50.3

2. REVIVAL SONGS IN THE CHURCHES

The churches that rose on the well-worn trails of those valiant Methodist circuit riders were imbued with their hardy spirit and energetic singing. And the new songs of Watts and the revivalists, used not only to stir emotion but to instruct and edify, overrode denominational lines and language barriers as well, and were shared by Dutch and German Reformed and Lutheran alike. The Dunkers and Mennonites also used them, to which their own compositions were added to accompany their footwashing rites. ^{52G. C. Loud, op. cit., p. 120; G. P. Jackson, op. cit., pp. 82, 83.} Nottingham says:PFF4 50.4

“The whole character of frontier hymnody was a direct outgrowth of the revival meeting. It is redolent of the very flavor of pioneer life—its emotionalism, its fighting spirit, its ever-present sense of the reality of hell fire, and its fervid sectarianism. Not only is revival hymnody a veritable mine of material for those who would understand the social history of the frontier but the type of singing there evolved became characteristic of religious singing for years afterwards. Gone were the stately hymns of the eastern seaboard, hymns that had been brought from Europe, and in their place were substituted rough and ready rhymes set to rousing popular tunes.” ^{53E. K. Nottingham, op. cit., p. 26. Camp meeting songbooks include Hymns on Selected Passages of Scripture ... usually Sung at Camp Meetings (1811), John Harrod’s Social and Camp Meeting Songs for the Pious (1817), The Camp Meeting Chorister, and Songs of Zion ... for the Use of Christians (1818). (L. F. Benson, op. cit. [1827], pp. 291-296.)}PFF4 51.1

3. NEGRO SPIRITUALS-VOICE OF THE OPPRESSED

To all this must be added the Negro spiritual—the music of an oppressed people, with its constant overtone of death and heaven and the hope of more joy in the world to come than in this world. They adapted the camp meeting message and song to their own needs, and their response in song formed an “overflowing stream of swinging cadences and crooning melodies,” with meaningful words such as, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “All Over God’s Heaven,” “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” “It’s Me, Standing in the Need of Prayer. “These expressions of deep feeling, blended with matchless melodies in pathetic strains, were also an integral part of the revival music. ^{54H. B. Marks, op. cit., pp. 246-248; L. F. Benson, op. cit., p. 204; G. P. Jackson, op. cit., part II.}PFF4 51.2

4. REVIVAL SONGS WANE AS REVIVAL PASSES

But when the Great Revival became quiescent, between 1830 and 1857, its distinctive type of songs of the heart waned. Yet the Millerites in the 1840’s adapted and adopted many of the best of these melodies for their own use.PFF4 51.3

Contemporary with the camp meeting era, but at the opposite extreme of the revolt against Calvinism, was the emergence of the “literary hymn” ^{55“A hymn may or may not happen to be great literature; ... it is something more ... it belongs with the things of the spirit, in the sphere of religious experience and communion with God.” (Benson, op. fit., p. viii.) Its test is its power to move and mold men.} of progressively high poetic quality and devotional tone. ^{56Among the pioneer writers of this type were Unitarian literati such as Oliver Wendell Holmes (“Lord of All Being”), Samuel Longfellow (“Beneath the Cross of Jesus”), James Ruwell, Lowell, and others. There were also John Greenleaf Whittier (Quaker) with his “We May Not Climb the Heavenly Steeps” (1806), Ray Palmer (Congregationalist) with his moving “My Faith Looks Up to Thee” (1830) Phoebe Cary (Universalist). “One Sweetly Solemn Thought” (1852) Harriet Beecher Stowe (Congregationalist) “Still, Still, With Thee” (1855), and many others.} But as the Great Revival and the camp meeting waned, and as the urban type of church spread westward, the doctrine and experience of Watts’s and Wesleys’ hymns faded out. The trend was toward the formal, stately, and objective, and toward the reserved and ritualistic, as exemplified by the fact that in the 1840’s the Congregationalists had little or no congregational singing. ^{57L. F. Benson, op. cit., p. 470.} As Jackson points out, by the second half of the century the old-time individualistic, emotional, and anti-institutional religion of the early frontier camp meetings was outmoded, and the old-time folk songs were pushed aside in favor of a more urbanized type of hymnody. ^{58G. P. Jackson, op. cit., chaps. 12, 13.}PFF4 52.1

But the old revival hymns and camp meeting spirituals survived in the upland rural “singing schools” and in the Negro spirituals. ^{59H. W. Foote, Three. Centuries of American Hymnody, pp. 171-173.} And some of the best of the folk-type songs found their way into church hymnals. Later, says Benson, for the class-both inside and outside the church—not reached by the more elevated literary and musical tone of church hymnody, there developed the “gospel songs” ^{60H. B. Marks, op. cit., pp. 207, 208; L. F. Benson, op. cit., pp. 482 ff.} that are quite familiar today in revivals and Sunday schools, the descendants, in part, of the camp meeting songs of the early decades of the nineteenth century, but in more refined form. They were evangelical in spirit and evangelistic in objective—focusing on winning souls through conversion.PFF4 52.2