Society Hymns

36 views
Skip to first unread message

Wade Kotter

unread,
May 2, 2024, 2:07:20 PMMay 2
to Fasola Discussions
I'd be interested in your observations of the following collection:

https://archive.org/details/societyhymnsorig00bost

There is no indication of a date in the book, but for some reason both Archive.org and Hymnary.org date it to 1790. The content is very interesting but it seems to me that it could be later. It does appear the Manning and Loring were in business in 1790; at least I found a few books printed by "Manning & Loring" that are said to date to 1790.

Thanks to anyone who can shed light on this.

Wade

Wade Kotter
South Ogden, UT
"Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord"

Gabriel Kastelle

unread,
May 2, 2024, 5:42:46 PMMay 2
to wadek...@yahoo.com, Fasola Discussions
Wade --

wow

this Society Hymns is an amazing collection.

page size and proportions and appearance, as well as the nice decorative typographic details feel like they could be latest 1700s as likely or more so than other times.

incredible density of texts with super-popularity unto the present among popular shape-note singing tunes.

which "Society" of Religion??

it is many-denominational, but has an extra Baptist feel to me
(incl. multiple texts made popular in Rippon's [Baptist] Selection first publ. 1787, which suggests something about publication dates for the Society Hymns...); (example: Edmund Jones' text in Soc. Hs. XXIX (29), apparently to match its use in the tune FAIRFIELD, 29t in the '91 Denson Sacred Harp, as well as in NEVER PART, '91 SH pp. 94-5!)

lotta Cowper and Newton texts stand out, first published in Newton's 1779 collection...  ...1779 to 1790 is rather quick re-publication turn-around time in those days...

also some earlier John Cennick and Robert Robinson texts, with some texts so popular still as to have Four tunes each in Denson '91 Sacred Harp (say Cennick "Jesus, my all, to Heav'n is gone", Soc. Hs. XXXI (31); and Robinson Soc. Hs. XLIII (43) "Come, thou fount of ev'ry blessing" (!) ).
I like the '91 Denson four-tune-grand-slam text from Dr. Watts in Society Hymns no XXXII (32) "Am I soldier of the Cross" for its NOT having come his Psalms paraphrases (1719) nor his earlier Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707?), but from his later 1724 Sermons,
especially for this detail:  The sermon he wrote this hymn for was about the text of I Cor. 16:13, which in fact is the epigraph scripture under the title in the '91 Denson edition tune CHRISTIAN SOLDIER, p. 57, vis a vis discussions of these details ;-), that is:
"Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong."   Good words.  I appreciate having them on the page.

then, shrewd note inside back cover comments on John Leland's (Baptist) text -- Soc. Hymns no. XXXIX (39), pp. 40-1:
"The day is past and gone" (cf. SH '91 209 EVENING SHADE) with comment that this is likely latest text in collection (I agree with that assessment in quick first skim with some lookups)-- but interestingly the traditional attribution year of 1792 given in that note and in Denson '91 has been upped by two years in Steel and Hulan's Makers of the Sacred Harp, where pp. 59-60 describe publication by Broaddus brothers of Virginia in 1790 of a Collection of Sacred Ballads including this text of Leland...  More on pp. 61-2 about Goddard the compiler and his addition of attributions, incl. Leland attributions... 

1790 is possible, barely.  from Virginia to Boston within months is a little bit against the current... 

seems pushing it a bit... 

but those physical publishing details described earlier don't let me think it much later...

1790s, 1800s, sure, but 1810s even I would hardly believe-- I'm not giving any good evidences, but just my feeling...
I've handled some of these old book originals from these decades in various collections-- this is an informed gut feeling I give, along with the other suggestive content details.

Really interesting collection, thanks Wade!
I'm still blown away by the "batting average", so to speak, of how many of the texts in that modest collection are really excellent and/or supremely popular even still today.

It would be good to know more about this collection "Society Hymns" and who might have had and used copies of it!!
Feels truly important and influential... 

My few cents worth...

LA!

-- A. Gabriel Kastelle --
Kalapuya Ilihi -- unceded homeland of Kalapuyan peoples -- a.k.a. Eugene, OR


--
--
Google Groups "Fasola Discussions" Email List
FAQ: http://ej345.com/fasola/Fasola-Discussions-FAQ.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fasola Discussions" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to fasola-discussi...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/fasola-discussions/167766570.6396566.1714671037598%40mail.yahoo.com.

Wade Kotter

unread,
May 2, 2024, 5:42:55 PMMay 2
to Gabriel Kastelle, Fasola Discussions
Thanks, Gabriel. One of the things that led me to this collection is Hymn 37, "That glorious day is drawing nigh" (Millennium). This text is, I believe, most often traced back to 1801 in both of Richard Allen's collections from that year and in the 1801 "Baltimore Collection." I'm going to try looking for advertisements for Society Hymns in  Massachusetts newspapers around that time. This collection comes from the (Louis F.) Benson Collection of Hymnals and Hymnology at the Princeton Theological Seminary and I suspect that the note inside the back cover is by Benson. I've seen similar notes in other hymnals in the Benson Collection. Princeton Theological Seminary deserves may kudos for digitizing the books in Benson's collection and making them freely available on the web.

https://commons.ptsem.edu/id/societyhymnsorig00bost

Fulton, Erin

unread,
May 4, 2024, 2:17:58 AMMay 4
to Gabriel Kastelle, Wade Kotter, Fasola Discussions
Addresses, of course! All the eighteenth-century city directories to which I have access, as well as the 1800 one, list Manning & Loring on Spring Lane. AAS doesn't have 1801-2, but in 1803 they show up at 2 Cornhill.


Best,

E. Fulton.
From: Wade Kotter <wadek...@yahoo.com>
Sent: Friday, May 3, 2024 1:11 PM
To: Gabriel Kastelle <gabrie...@gmail.com>; Fulton, Erin <erinf...@uky.edu>
Cc: Fasola Discussions <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [fasola-discussions] Society Hymns
 
CAUTION: External Sender

No luck yet with advertisements and I'm not holding out much hope. However, Chris Brown pointed out off-list that three of the texts in Society Hymns are attributed in later sources to Oliver Holden:

Hymn V: "With conscious guilt and bleeding heart"
Hymn XI: "While journeying through this humble vale"
Hymn X1V: "How sweet is the language of love"

All three of these are found in Holden's The Young Convert's Companion from 1806:


 According to Music & Richardson in I Will Sing the Wondrous Story, at least 19 of the 144 texts in this collection are attributed to "H.", which presumably is a reference to Oliver Holden. So if we can see that these three texts were attributed to "H." in The Young Convert's Companion, it would go a long way towards answering my original question. Unfortunately, my copy of The Young Convert's Companion is "in storage" right now and it would take a while for me to "dig" it out. Does anyone own a copy of The Young Convert's Companion who could check if these texts have the "H." attribution (I don't find a scan online)? Of course, even if Holden does claim them, this doesn't necessarily mean that Society Hymns must date to 1806 or later since Holden could have written and circulated them in other ways prior to 1806. It may also be of interest that The Boston Collection from 1808 was also published by Manning and Loring, but the publication information is somewhat different:

Society Hymns https://archive.org/details/societyhymnsorig00bost/page/n1/mode/2up "Printed and Sold by Manning & Loring, No. 2, Cornhill, Boston"
The Boston Collection https://archive.org/details/bostoncollecti00bost/page/n1/mode/2up "Boston: Published by Manning and Loring, No. 8, Cornhill, 1808"

This may not mean anything, but the earliest books I could find by Manning & Loring that predate 1808, when Holden's collection was published, have publication information that more closely matches that of Society Hymns than that of The Boston Collection. The decorative nature of the tile page of Society Hymns is, from my experience, more typical of the 1790s than the 1810s. The lack of a publication date for Society Hymns also seems more typical of the 1790s, It would be interesting to see when Manning and Loring were in business at No. 2 Cornhill and when they were at No. 8 Cornhill. I should add that The Boston Collection does include two texts to Holden, but they are different from the three possible Holden texts in Society Hymns. 

Wade

Wade Kotter
South Ogden, UT
"Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord"


On Thursday, May 2, 2024 at 04:31:07 PM MDT, Fulton, Erin <erinf...@uky.edu> wrote:


I already tried to search for adverts for this songster, which I had indexed for my dissertation, without any luck a few years ago. (With access to different databases and the contents of those databases changing, though, I'd be very interested to know if you find anything "new," Wade.) What I did turn up were adverts for this similarly titled collection published in NYC in 1797. The subtitle of the latter book gives a more vivid sense of the context of use: "intended to assist the devotion of private societies among Christians for prayer, praise, and conversation." In other words, we're in the world of non-church-affiliated devotional societies, what would come to be called "conference meetings" a couple of decades later. Shelby M. Balik writes about the role of groups like these in organizing religious life in Upper New England at the turn of the nineteenth century in her Rally the Scattered Believers.

Gabriel, your instinct was correct: besides the strong overlap in text with RI Baptist collections, Manning and Loring were the friendliest MA publisher towards Baptists in this era. They published many of Isaac Backus's works.

My personal interest in this volume, besides my trying to get overall decent coverage of pre-1840s social worship texts published in New England, is the "evangelical and experimental" formulation. The same phrase crops back up, of all places, in Mason's Chapel Hymns in 1842. I'm always attentive to discussion of experimental religion from around this time, when it had become a rather old-fashioned phrase. Leonidas Rosser wrote a very interesting treatise from the Methodist perspective in the early '50s.


Best,

E. Fulton.





From: 'Wade Kotter' via Fasola Discussions <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 2, 2024 5:38 PM
To: Gabriel Kastelle <gabrie...@gmail.com>
Cc: Fasola Discussions <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [fasola-discussions] Society Hymns
 
CAUTION: External Sender



Thanks, Gabriel. One of the things that led me to this collection is Hymn 37, "That glorious day is drawing nigh" (Millennium). This text is, I believe, most often traced back to 1801 in both of Richard Allen's collections from that year and in the 1801 "Baltimore Collection." I'm going to try looking for advertisements for Society Hymns in  Massachusetts newspapers around that time. This collection comes from the (Louis F.) Benson Collection of Hymnals and Hymnology at the Princeton Theological Seminary and I suspect that the note inside the back cover is by Benson. I've seen similar notes in other hymnals in the Benson Collection. Princeton Theological Seminary deserves may kudos for digitizing the books in Benson's collection and making them freely available on the web.


>
> There is no indication of a date in the book, but for some reason both Archive.org and Hymnary.org date it to 1790. The content is very interesting but it seems to me that it could be later. It does appear the Manning and Loring were in business in 1790; at least I found a few books printed by "Manning & Loring" that are said to date to 1790.
>
> Thanks to anyone who can shed light on this.
>
> Wade
>
> Wade Kotter
> South Ogden, UT
> "Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord"
>
> --
> --
> Google Groups "Fasola Discussions" Email List

> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fasola Discussions" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to fasola-discussi...@googlegroups.com.

>

--
--
Google Groups "Fasola Discussions" Email List

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fasola Discussions" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to fasola-discussi...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit

Fulton, Erin

unread,
May 4, 2024, 2:17:58 AMMay 4
to Gabriel Kastelle, Wade Kotter, Fasola Discussions
Well, until somebody digs up a copy of the 1801 or 1802 Boston directories, there's some fuzziness around those years. But I certainly feel better about the dating than when I first indexed this book! Dissertation footnote amended ( ;


Best,

E. Fulton.
From: Wade Kotter <wadek...@yahoo.com>
Sent: Friday, May 3, 2024 2:04 PM

To: Gabriel Kastelle <gabrie...@gmail.com>; Fulton, Erin <erinf...@uky.edu>
Cc: Fasola Discussions <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [fasola-discussions] Society Hymns
 
CAUTION: External Sender

That seals it; Society Hymns dates to no earlier than 1803. Thanks, Erin!

Wade

Wade Kotter
South Ogden, UT
"Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord"

Fulton, Erin

unread,
May 4, 2024, 2:17:58 AMMay 4
to Gabriel Kastelle, wadek...@yahoo.com, Fasola Discussions
I already tried to search for adverts for this songster, which I had indexed for my dissertation, without any luck a few years ago. (With access to different databases and the contents of those databases changing, though, I'd be very interested to know if you find anything "new," Wade.) What I did turn up were adverts for this similarly titled collection published in NYC in 1797. The subtitle of the latter book gives a more vivid sense of the context of use: "intended to assist the devotion of private societies among Christians for prayer, praise, and conversation." In other words, we're in the world of non-church-affiliated devotional societies, what would come to be called "conference meetings" a couple of decades later. Shelby M. Balik writes about the role of groups like these in organizing religious life in Upper New England at the turn of the nineteenth century in her Rally the Scattered Believers.

Gabriel, your instinct was correct: besides the strong overlap in text with RI Baptist collections, Manning and Loring were the friendliest MA publisher towards Baptists in this era. They published many of Isaac Backus's works.

My personal interest in this volume, besides my trying to get overall decent coverage of pre-1840s social worship texts published in New England, is the "evangelical and experimental" formulation. The same phrase crops back up, of all places, in Mason's Chapel Hymns in 1842. I'm always attentive to discussion of experimental religion from around this time, when it had become a rather old-fashioned phrase. Leonidas Rosser wrote a very interesting treatise from the Methodist perspective in the early '50s.


Best,

E. Fulton.





From: 'Wade Kotter' via Fasola Discussions <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 2, 2024 5:38 PM
To: Gabriel Kastelle <gabrie...@gmail.com>
Cc: Fasola Discussions <fasola-di...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [fasola-discussions] Society Hymns
 
CAUTION: External Sender


Thanks, Gabriel. One of the things that led me to this collection is Hymn 37, "That glorious day is drawing nigh" (Millennium). This text is, I believe, most often traced back to 1801 in both of Richard Allen's collections from that year and in the 1801 "Baltimore Collection." I'm going to try looking for advertisements for Society Hymns in  Massachusetts newspapers around that time. This collection comes from the (Louis F.) Benson Collection of Hymnals and Hymnology at the Princeton Theological Seminary and I suspect that the note inside the back cover is by Benson. I've seen similar notes in other hymnals in the Benson Collection. Princeton Theological Seminary deserves may kudos for digitizing the books in Benson's collection and making them freely available on the web.


>
> There is no indication of a date in the book, but for some reason both Archive.org and Hymnary.org date it to 1790. The content is very interesting but it seems to me that it could be later. It does appear the Manning and Loring were in business in 1790; at least I found a few books printed by "Manning & Loring" that are said to date to 1790.
>
> Thanks to anyone who can shed light on this.
>
> Wade
>
> Wade Kotter
> South Ogden, UT
> "Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord"
>
> --
> --
> Google Groups "Fasola Discussions" Email List

> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fasola Discussions" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to fasola-discussi...@googlegroups.com.

>

--
--
Google Groups "Fasola Discussions" Email List

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fasola Discussions" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to fasola-discussi...@googlegroups.com.

Wade Kotter

unread,
May 4, 2024, 2:17:58 AMMay 4
to Gabriel Kastelle, Fulton, Erin, Fasola Discussions
No luck yet with advertisements and I'm not holding out much hope. However, Chris Brown pointed out off-list that three of the texts in Society Hymns are attributed in later sources to Oliver Holden:

Hymn V: "With conscious guilt and bleeding heart"
Hymn XI: "While journeying through this humble vale"
Hymn X1V: "How sweet is the language of love"

All three of these are found in Holden's The Young Convert's Companion from 1806:


 According to Music & Richardson in I Will Sing the Wondrous Story, at least 19 of the 144 texts in this collection are attributed to "H.", which presumably is a reference to Oliver Holden. So if we can see that these three texts were attributed to "H." in The Young Convert's Companion, it would go a long way towards answering my original question. Unfortunately, my copy of The Young Convert's Companion is "in storage" right now and it would take a while for me to "dig" it out. Does anyone own a copy of The Young Convert's Companion who could check if these texts have the "H." attribution (I don't find a scan online)? Of course, even if Holden does claim them, this doesn't necessarily mean that Society Hymns must date to 1806 or later since Holden could have written and circulated them in other ways prior to 1806. It may also be of interest that The Boston Collection from 1808 was also published by Manning and Loring, but the publication information is somewhat different:

Society Hymns https://archive.org/details/societyhymnsorig00bost/page/n1/mode/2up "Printed and Sold by Manning & Loring, No. 2, Cornhill, Boston"
The Boston Collection https://archive.org/details/bostoncollecti00bost/page/n1/mode/2up "Boston: Published by Manning and Loring, No. 8, Cornhill, 1808"

This may not mean anything, but the earliest books I could find by Manning & Loring that predate 1808, when Holden's collection was published, have publication information that more closely matches that of Society Hymns than that of The Boston Collection. The decorative nature of the tile page of Society Hymns is, from my experience, more typical of the 1790s than the 1810s. The lack of a publication date for Society Hymns also seems more typical of the 1790s, It would be interesting to see when Manning and Loring were in business at No. 2 Cornhill and when they were at No. 8 Cornhill. I should add that The Boston Collection does include two texts to Holden, but they are different from the three possible Holden texts in Society Hymns. 

Wade

Wade Kotter
South Ogden, UT
"Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord"
On Thursday, May 2, 2024 at 04:31:07 PM MDT, Fulton, Erin <erinf...@uky.edu> wrote:


Wade Kotter

unread,
May 4, 2024, 2:17:58 AMMay 4
to Gabriel Kastelle, Fulton, Erin, Fasola Discussions
That seals it; Society Hymns dates to no earlier than 1803. Thanks, Erin!

Wade

Wade Kotter
South Ogden, UT
"Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord"

Wade Kotter

unread,
May 4, 2024, 2:18:08 AMMay 4
to Gabriel Kastelle, Fulton, Erin, Fasola Discussions
Yes, of course. I'll see if I can find any books they published dated 1801 or 1802 and check the addresses.

Wade

Wade Kotter
South Ogden, UT
"Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord"

Barry Johnston

unread,
May 5, 2024, 1:00:28 PMMay 5
to Fasola Discussions
Wade,
I did find all three of the hymns you asked about in Ed. 1 of The Young Convert's Companion, Hymns 99, 102, and 104 on pp. 90, 93, and 94. All attributed to "H." in the index. Electronic copy courtesy of Hymnology Archive.

Barry Johnston

Wade Kotter

unread,
May 6, 2024, 2:52:49 AMMay 6
to Fasola Discussions, Barry Johnston
Thanks, Barry. I missed that link on the Hymnology Archive page. For those who want to go directly to PDF of this collection, here's a link:

https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/s/1806-YoungConvertsCompanion.pdf

The author attributions are in the index.

Wade

Wade Kotter
South Ogden, UT
"Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord"

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Fasola Discussions" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to fasola-discussi...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages