Missouri Harmony - The Original Editions: 1820 Through 1850s

The Original Editions: 1820 Through 1850s

For a while in the early 19th century, St. Louis and the Mississippi Valley frontier set the standard for popular sacred music in America. It began in 1820 with the publication of The Missouri Harmony, and it lasted for some thirty years, until the folk harmonies of its old spirituals were replaced in popular taste by the parlor songs and stolid Sunday School hymns of the Victorian era. Compiled by Allen D. Carden (1792–1859), The Missouri Harmony went through ten editions and at least twenty-three printings between 1820 and 1857, a phenomenal number for the day. Carden biographer David Crouse has called the book “the most popular tune book of the South and West until the Civil War.”

Included in these tune books were ancient psalms like “Old Hundred,” congregational hymns like “All hail the power of Jesus’ name,” vernacular New England choral works by eighteenth-century tunesmiths like William Billings, and a welter of folk hymns out of the Anglo-Celtic oral tradition, including two early settings of “Come thou fount of ev'ry blessing.”

The Missouri Harmony reached out throughout the old West, from St. Louis as far upriver as Wisconsin and southeast into Tennessee and what is now called the Deep South. Its popularity began in St. Louis with an ad in The Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser on May 30, 1820, saying that Carden would hold “a School for teaching the theory and practice of Vocal Music” that day in the city’s Baptist church “at 3 o’clock P.M. and by candlelight the same evening.” He had his new tune books with him. The full title of the volume read THE MISSOURI HARMONY, OR A CHOICE COLLECTION OF PSALM TUNES, HYMNS, AND ANTHEMS, SELECTED FROM THE MOST EMINENT AUTHORS, AND WELL ADAPTED TO ALL CHRISTIAN CHURCHES, SINGING SCHOOLS, AND PRIVATE SOCIETIES (original capitals).

Carden, the compiler of the first edition of 1820, was also listed as the publisher. In 1831 Cincinnati booksellers and publishers Morgan and Sanxay received a copyright on May 21, 1831 as proprietors of The Missouri Harmony. Except for one correction from the first edition to the second, there is no evidence that the book was revised until 1835, when the publishers hired an anonymous “amateur” to add a thirty-eight-page supplement. The supplement began its pagination at number 1 and had its own index.

In 1850 a new edition appeared, with harmonies revised by “scientific musician” Charles Warren of Cincinnati, who purported to correct “several errors in the harmony.” While Warren tried to preserve the “old melodies . . . which re identified with our most hallowed emotions, and which re undoubtedly more suited to solemn worship than perhaps any other selection,” some of the perceived errors he corrected were simply the harmonies that had given the old songs much of their character. The melodic nature of each vocal line was far more interesting to the individual singer, which the Warren edition changed to dullness. The revised Missouri Harmony went through three or four more printings in the 1850s, then lapsed out of print entirely. By attempting to modernize the book, and thus extend its life, the Warren-ization sounded its death knell.

Carden, a Tennessean, didn’t stay in St. Louis for long. By 1822 he was back at home, peddling tune books and conducting singing schools in Nashville. The Missouri Harmony was actually printed in Cincinnati (because of access to the specialized shape-note type fonts), so in a way its title is a misnomer. But it put Missouri squarely on the map of American musical history. The Missouri Harmony was the most popular collection of sacred music among the settlers who pushed the frontier up the Mississippi and its tributaries. Many of the songs were already old by 1820, and the music was deeply American. In time, composer Virgil Thompson would find in the old shape-note hymns “the musical basis of almost everything we make, of Negro spirituals, of cowboy songs, of popular ballads, of blues, of hymns, of doggerel ditties, of all our operas and symphonies.” Certainly their vernacular idiom was absorbed into the sinews and marrow of midwestern culture.