Our Songleading Roots
“Congregational Singing. This subject seems to be exciting an unusual degree of interest everywhere.”
-Christian Inquirer, March 3, 1846
I learned community singing and songleading in youth worship as a teenager. I remember watching confident older teens standing up in front of our community and teaching songs one line at a time. As an adult, I’ve tried to bring some of that songleading tradition into Sunday mornings. What I didn’t know until diving down this rabbit hole, was that songleading is in some ways an older tradition in our UU congregations than hymn-singing.
UUs have many theological ancestors. One of our primary cultural ancestors though, particularly for our Unitarian side, are the Puritans of New England. Singing in Puritan congregations was a specific kind of oral tradition, called ‘lining out.” “Lining Out” for the Puritans wasn’t exactly like the call and response song teaching you might hear today. The deacon leading the song would chant out the words to the psalm, and the congregation would respond by singing that line of the verse. For each psalm there were probably a few familiar, likely tunes that might be attached to it. The leader would indicate by their ‘lining out’ which was the melody for that service. Lining out was not only an inherited cultural tradition, but also solved the problem of lower literacy rates and the expense of book publishing.
The descriptions of the deacon’s songleading reminds me a bit of the Shabbat services I’ve attended in some Jewish communities. Large parts of the service are reciting the psalms and each psalm has a few different melodies that might be used for it in a given community. The cantor or service leader might begin to sing the verse, or maybe sing a couple measures of a niggun (a wordless melody) to get started and it only takes a few notes for the congregation to recognize which melody they’re using for the psalm that evening.
This tradition of lining out the psalms through a kind of call and response began well before the Puritans. For centuries before that the Catholic church had chanted psalms, a tradition that ebbed and flowed in popularity in different places and times. Then the Reformation came along in the 1500s, shifting the music culture as well as just about everything else. Different Protestant leaders staked out different positions on congregational singing. Martin Luther loved hymn singing and wrote many hymns to encourage it. John Calvin, however, imposed a return to psalm-only singing. Calvin’s influence was significant and psalm-chanting by rote (without written music) traveled to Scotland, England, and eventually, the New England colonies. Some historians have even suggested that the Catholic Church moved away from psalm chanting at this time, in order to keep their distance from Calvin and the reformers!
The New England Puritans were Calvanists through and through in both their theology and music. So much so that the first book ever published in the Colonies was the “The Whole Book of Psalms,” known more commonly as the Bay Psalm Book. It was published in 1640, and the lining-out songleading that it was used for were dominant in the congregations of our Puritan spiritual ancestors for 100 years. It was such a mainstay that 27 editions were printed before 1762, which is stunning given how few books were published in the 1700s compared to today.
Despite the reputation that Puritans have sometimes had for disliking all music, the fact that the first book published in the colonies was for singing, speaks to their love of congregational singing… as long as it’s done “right.” In fact, one of the first records we have of First Church Boston, is of a congregant being excommunicated in 1651 for speaking out against baptism, the covenant… and singing.
Our brother John Spurre was…excommunicated from the fellowship of the church; …he professed he could hold noe more communion with the church as it stood and also questioned baptisme, singing of psalmes and church covenant as being but humaine Inventions and thereby charged the church as supersticious idoliters and our officers as hipocrits…
Just a few years later First Church Boston excommunicated another member, Sister Hogge, for “disorderly singing!” Both Spur and Hogge had other more theological accusations made against them, but it’s striking that the record in both cases mentions their singing infractions, one for not singing enough and the other for singing “disorderly” -perhaps too much?
The questions of who gets to sing, how much, and in what way, haven’t resulted in many excommunications lately, but similar debates are still very much with us.
Eventually there was a call for change though as the New England Ministers began to complain about the quality of the psalm-singing. Either the psalm chanting had gotten worse or the standards got higher. One theory is that the original melodies for the psalms may have been taken from folk tunes that were catchy, popular and perhaps even rhythmic. But over the decades they lost their rhythmic feel, slowed down, and became drawn out, until they were a mumbling dissonant drone.
It might also be that ministers wanted their congregations to sound more like the respectable choirs of Europe. Either way, in 1720, Thomas Symmes kicked off the first of pamphlet wars about singing, calling for a revolution in music literacy. His pamphlet, by the way, had a title too good not to share:
“The Reasonableness of Regular Singing, or Singing by Note. In an Essay to revive the true and ancient mode of singing psalm-tunes according to the pattern of our New England psalmbooks, the Knowledge and practice of which, is greatly decayed in most congregations. Writ by a Minister of the gospel. Perused by several ministers in the town and country, and published with the approbation of all who have read it.”
Symmes’ pamphlet was the beginning of the end for lining out in the New England congregations. The solution to Symme’s problem was the Singing School movement. Congregations hired semi-professional teachers to lead classes on vocal technique and music reading. As the ministers wanted a big change in congregational singing, but surely they couldn’t have guessed what a difference the Singing Schools would make. The Singing School movement was the first domino that knocked over a dozen other cultural touchstones in New England congregations. They changed the ‘how’ of congregational singing, which then changed the ‘what.” As more people became trained in singing music in parts, they transitioned from groups leading the congregation in singing, to choirs performing to the congregation. This eventually changed the liturgy and even the physical architecture of our church buildings.
These changes each brought their own round of debates about the role of congregational singing. These next four essays will explore some of the questions that defined and divided our people over the next 250 years:
#1. What to Sing: Psalms vs. Blasphemy & a Question of Content
#2. How to Sing: : Chants vs. Hymns & a Question of Form
#3. Who should Sing: Performance vs Participation
#4. With What to Sing: Adding Instruments or Going Acapella
Stay tuned…
In the meantime, it seems the lining-out tradition has survived in some places though, perhaps closest to its original form in the Scottish Highlands and also in a few baptist churches, particularly in Appalachia.
Here’s an example of an African-American congregation using a version of it in the 1920’s.
Here’s an example of a contemporary lesson in lining-out
Here’s an example of a contemporary Scottish congregation.
Here’s a 2018 recording of Baptists and one from 1983.
Perhaps the tradition of lining out is having a revival, as congregations are expanding their musical repertoire, and increasingly putting down the hymnal to learn a song by ear. In all the different ways I’ve heard it described, it points in the “Lining Out” tradition sometimes meant singing the melody of each verse before the congregation responded, sometimes singing a slightly different melody for the call than the response, sometimes just getting the melody started for the whole chant, and sometimes just reading the words aloud and hoping that the congregation responds with agreement on which melody to use (which they didn’t always do). So as the saying goes, “there’s more than one way to lead a song!”
As we re-learn this spiritual practice, some songleading advice from the 1698 edition of the Bay Psalm Book still holds today:
“Place your first note so… that the rest may be sung in the compass of your and the people’s voices, without squeaking above, or grumbling below.”
Amen!
For more on Our Songleading Roots, check out:
- History in the Meeting House, by Eleanor Billings. 1986 Link here
- The Old Way of Singing: Its Origins and Development, by Nicholas Temperley. 1981. Link here
- The Lined-Hymn Tradition in Black Mississippi Churches, by Ben E. Bailey. 1978. Link here
- The Regular Singing Controversy, By Linda R. Ruggles. Link here
- Lining out, Wikipedia article. Link here
- Timeline of First Church Boston Music Program. Link here