Abstract
The Bay Psalm Book has been ignored because of erroneous attribution of authorship and because of its reputation fostered by Cotton Mather, Moses Coit Tyler, Harold Jantz, and Literary History of the United States. However, it was written for an American audience by John Cotton, John Wilson, Peter Bulkely, Nathaniel Ward, and others, in a fashionable seventeenth-century genre, and it made a significant contribution to the first indigenous American music. The Bay Psalm Book as the Bay Colony version of the Calvin-inspired metrical psalm, the touchstone of Puritan congregational practice. The sixteenth-century reformers of religion, John Hus, Martin Luther, and John Calvin, followed the teaching of Ambrose, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine, and established hymn- and psalm- singing as the "people's part" in worship: the songs were scriptural texts set to the melodies men sang at their work and women at their chores. The European tradition, shaped by Luther and Hus came to North America with the Germanic peoples who were protestant dissenters. The British tradition came with the exclusive Puritan Church in the institutionalized metrical psalm. From the first, the metrical psalm had a rival tradition in the rich British heritage of popular secular song brought by the three-fourths of the immigrants who were excluded from the church. This rivalry increased with the thousands of English, Scottish, and Irish dissenters migrating to the middle and southern colonies.
Stallings, Louise Russell (1977). The unpolished altar : the place of the Bay Psalm Book in American culture. Texas A&M University. Texas A&M University. Libraries. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /DISSERTATIONS -621370.