Camp Meeting - Music and Hymn Singing

Music and Hymn Singing

The camp meeting tradition fostered a tradition of music and hymn singing with strong oral, improvisatory, and spontaneous elements.

Hymns were taught and learned by rote and a spontaneous and improvisatory element was prized. Both tunes and words were created, changed, and adapted in true folk music fashion:

Specialists in nineteenth-century American religious history describe camp meeting music as the creative product of participants who, when seized by the spirit of a particular sermon or prayer, would take lines from a preacher's text as a point of departure for a short, simple melody. The melody was either borrowed from a preexisting tune or made up on the spot. The line would be sung repeatedly, changing slightly each time, and shaped gradually into a stanza that could be learned easily by others and memorized quickly.

Spontaneous song became a marked characteristic of the camp meetings. Rough and irregular couplets or stanzas were concocted out of Scripture phrases and every-day speech, with liberal interspersing of Hallelujahs and refrains. Such ejaculatory hymns were frequently started by an excited auditor during the preaching, and taken up by the throng, until the meeting dissolved into a "singing-ecstasy" culminating in general hand-shaking. Sometimes they were given forth by a preacher, who had a sense of rhythm, under the excitement of his preaching and the agitation of his audience. Hymns were also composed more deliberately out of meeting, and taught to the people or lined out from the pulpit.

Collections of camp meeting hymns were published, which served both to propagate tunes and texts that were commonly used, and to document the most commonly sung tunes and texts. Example hymnals include The Pilgrams' songster; or, A choice collection of spiritual songs (1828), The Camp-meeting Chorister (1830) and The Golden Harp (1857)

The 20th century American composer Charles Ives used the camp meeting phenomenon as a metaphysical basis for his Symphony No. 3 (Ives). Hymn tunes and American Civil War area popular songs (which are closely related to camp meeting songs) as part of the symphony's musical material. Although the piece was not initially performed until 1946, almost 40 years after its composition, the symphony was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year in 1947.