1. Irving Lowens, "John Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second: A Northern Precursor of Southern Folk Hymnody," Journal of the American Musicological Society 5 (Summer 1952): 114-131; reprinted in Irving Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), pp. 138-155. See also Lowens's introduction to the facs. reprint of the 2nd ed. of Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second (New York: Da Capo, 1964). Lowens here defines the folk hymn as "basically a secular folk-tune which happens to be sung to a religious text (p. v)."
2. Irving Lowens and Allen P. Britton, "The Easy Instructor (1798-1831): A History and Bibliography of the First Shape Note Tune Book," Journal of Research in Music Education 1 (Spring 1953): 30-55; reprinted in Lowens, Music and Musicians, pp. 115-137, see p. 134. See also Lowens's introduction to the facs. reprint of the 5th ed. of Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music (New York: Da Capo, 1974).
3. Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1936), vol. 20, pp. 575-576, "Wyeth, John."
4. American printers had printed music from movable type as early as 1750. However, the method was not firmly established until Isaiah Thomas brought out The Worcester Collection (Worcester, 1786). By the years 1800-1810, 72 per cent of all sacred tunebooks issued in the United States were printed typographically, including Wyeth's Repository. See Richard Crawford and D. W. Krummel, "Early American Music Printing and Publishing," in William L. Joyce et al., eds., Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), pp. 195-196.
5. John Wyeth, Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music (Harrisburg, Pa.: J. Wyeth, 1810), p. [2], confirms the deposit in the office of the clerk of the district of Pennsylvania:
the title of a book, the right whereof he claims as proprietor, in the words following, to wit. WYETH'S Repository of Sacred Music. Selected from the most eminent and approved authors in that science, for the use of Christian Churches of every denomination, Singing Schools and private Societies. Together with a copious and plain Introduction to the Grounds of Music, and Rules for Learners. By JOHN WYETH.
6. Lowens, Music and Musicians, p. 134.
7. The tune Dauphin may have been chosen for its title, which it shared with Wyeth's newspaper and the county in which Harrisburg is located.
8. This notation was invented by Philadelphia merchant John Connelly, who on 10 March 1798 signed over his rights to the system to Little and Smith. See William Smith, The Easy Instructor, Part II (Hopewell, N. J., 1803), p. [2], also Richard Crawford, Andrew Law, American Psalmodist (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 175.
9. As early as 1785, Benjamin Dearborn had published a musical notation requiring only letterpress characters to indicate pitch and duration, in A Scheme for Reducing the Science of Music to a More Simple State (Portsmouth, N. H.). Other systems introduced during the period 1800-1810 resembled that of Little and Smith in providing distinct symbols to indicate the four singing syllables currently in use in America. Andrew Law, Musical Primer (Cambridge, Mass., 1803) was the first of Law's collections to use a staffless notation with heighted note-heads similar to those in The Easy Instructor. Charles Woodward and John Aitken, Ecclesia Harmonia (Philadelphia, [1806]) is printed in four new shapes. Copies of Andrew Adgate, Philadelphia Harmony, 9th ed. (Philadelphia, 1807 and later) contain handwritten or printed strokes whose angles denote the singing syllables. Nathan Chapin and Joseph L. Dickerson, The Musical Instructor (Philadelphia, 1808; 2nd ed., 1810) combines the Little and Smith shapes with strokes distinguishing the two fa's, etc., in each octave. Timothy Olmsted found it necessary to justify his use of conventional notation in his Musical Olio (Northampton, Mass., 1805), p. [3]: "These characters are not only our old acquaintance, but that of the whole musical world, in which all nations can read and probably never will discard."
10. Smith, Easy Instructor, Part II, p. [2].
11. Crawford, Andrew Law, pp. 170-176.
12. Andrew Law, a litigious defender of his own claims to notational reform, considered even Woodward and Aitken's Ecclesia Harmonia to be an infringement on his own patent, and contemplated legal action against its publishers. See Crawford, Andrew Law, p. 174.
13. Before attempting to compete head-on with The Easy Instructor, Wyeth used his new shape-note font to print Joseph Doll's Leichter Unterricht in der Vokal Musik (1810), aimed at Pennsylvania's German-speaking population. Through this and three later tunebooks, Wyeth established a preference for shape notes among Pennsylvania Germans. German and bilingual tunebooks in shape notes appeared in Pennsylvania as late as 1870.
14. Crawford, Andrew Law, pp. 36-37.
15. David P. McKay and Richard Crawford, William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-Century Composer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 152-154.
16. The manuscript, signed John Mathias, 1789, is described in Richard Rosewell, "Singing Schools of Pennsylvania, 1800-1900" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1969).
17. A few continental tunes like Old Hundred were printed in popular American collections, but these had long been associated with English psalmody.
18. For example, Sansum, for Tans'ur, as the composer of St. Martins, and an attribution of Repentance to Peck (elsewhere Rollo).
19. See Karl Kroeger, "The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony and Sacred Music in America, 1786-1810" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1976).
20. Other sources for individual tunes in Wyeth's Repository include Supply Belcher, The Harmony of Maine (Boston, 1794) for Conversion, David Merrill, The Psalmodist's Best Companion (Exeter, N. H., 1799) for Claremont, Bartholomew Brown, Columbian and European Harmony (Boston, 1802) for Sardis, and John Cole, The Beauties of Psalmody, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 1805) for Baltimore. This information is derived from Richard Crawford's card-file index of compositions printed in American sacred tunebooks to 1810.
21. Richard Crawford, "Massachusetts Musicians and the Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody," in Music in Colonial Massachusetts, Vol. 2: Music in Homes and Churches, ed. Barbara Lambert, (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1985), pp. 583-629, contains a list of the tunes constituting the Core Repertory. The Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody, ed. Richard Crawford, Recent Researches in American Music, Vol. 11-12 (Madison, Wisconsin: A-R Editions, 1984), is an edition of all the music in the Core Repertory.
22. Information on first printings is from Allen P. Britton, Irving Lowens, and Richard Crawford, American Sacred Music Imprints, 1698-1810: A Bibliography (Worcester, Massachusetts: American Antiquarian Society, 1989), consulted in manuscript through the kindness of Richard Crawford.
23. James Downey, "The Music of American Revivalism" (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1968), pp. 43-45.
24. Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate, A New Version of the Psalms of David (Worcester: I. Thomas, 1788).
25. Isaac Watts, The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament and Hymns and Spiritual Songs, In Three Books (Exeter, N. H.: J. Lamson, 1794). American editions of Watts usually contained an appendix of "Select Hymns" by other British authors.
26. A representative early collection containing Separatist poetry is Joshua Smith and Samuel Sleeper, Divine Hymns, or Spiritual Songs (Portland, T. Clark, 1803). A tunebooks designed for Separatists is Jeremiah Ingalls, The Christian Harmony; or, Songster's Companion (Exeter, N. H.: H. Ranlet, 1805).
27. The figures represent the number of syllables in each line of a stanza.
28. An American reprint is John Rippon, A Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors, Intended to Be an Appendix to Dr. Watt's Psalms and Hymns (New York: W. Durrell, 1792).
29. McKay and Crawford, William Billings, pp. 23-24.
30. The fuging-tunes of 18th-century England and America generally consist of a homophonic opening section, followed by imitative entries in each voice-part, working up to a homophonic close. The spellings "fuge" and "fuging-tune" distinguish this form from the classical fugue. See Lowens, Music and Musicians, p. 237n. For condemnation of fuging-tunes, see Allen P. Britton, "Theoretical Introductions in American Tune-Books to 1800" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1949), pp. 357-362; also Richard Crawford, American Studies and American Musicology: A Point of View and a Case in Point, I. S. A. M. monographs, no. 4 (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1975), pp. 23-24.
31. Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 20, p. 575. Wyeth's Repository underwent relatively few thorough revisions. Editions numbered 2 to 5 appeared with various imprint dates from 1811 to 1823; 12 pages were added to the original 120-page volume in 1812, and 12 more pages in the stereotype editions of 1826-1834. See Richard J. Stanislaw, A Checklist of Four-Shape Shape-Note Tunebooks, I. S. A. M. monographs, no. 10 (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1978), pp. 42-43; also Irving Lowens's introduction to the facs. reprint of the 5th ed. of Wyeth's Repository, p. x.
32. Lowens, Music and Musicians, p. 143. Lowens suggests that E. K. Dare of Wilmington, Delaware, a Methodist minister, may have been the musical editor of Part Second.
33. Tunebooks normally underlaid a single stanza of text to each composition. While this was adequate for singing-schools, public worship required additional stanzas for each psalm or hymn, a requirement that was met by pocket editions of Watts or Select Hymns. Since these editions generally lacked the new revivalistic poetry, Wyeth's Repository, Part Second attempted to include the necessary texts, as had the Baptist-oriented Christian Harmony of Jeremiah Ingalls.
34. Based on George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933; reprint ed., New York: Dover, 1965), p. 25; Charles Hamm, "Patent Notes in Cincinnati" Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 16 (October 1958): 293-310; Stanislaw, Checklist.
35. Jackson, White Spirituals, pp. 29-30; Lowens, Music and Musicians, pp. 139-141.
36. Harry Lee Eskew, "Shape-Note Hymnody in the Shenandoah Valley, 1816-1860" (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1966), p. 30.
37. Ananias Davisson, Kentucky Harmony, 4th ed. (Harrisonburg, Va.: A. Davisson, 1821), p. 4.
38. Ananias Davisson, Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony (Harrisonburg, Va.: A. Davisson, 1820), preface, quoted in Eskew, "Shape-Note Hymnody," p. 45.
39. Eskew, "Shape-Note Hymnody," p. 46.
40. Alexander Johnson, Johnson's Tennessee Harmony (Cincinnati: Morgan, Lodge & Co., 1818), p. xiii; Allen D. Carden, The Missouri Harmony, stereotype ed. (Cincinnati: E. Morgan & Co., 1839), p. 12.
41. Jackson, White Spirituals, pp. 40-41.
42. Jackson, White Spirituals, pp. 161-163; Dorothy D. Horn, Sing to Me of Heaven (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1970), p. 19.
43. Two copies of this untitled sheet, containing sixteen tunes (eight attributed to Lucius and Amzi Chapin) were bound in a copy of Law's Harmonic Companion, 2nd ed. One copy is now in the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan. These tunes represent the first known attributions to the Chapin brothers, and the first publication of folk-hymns instigated by a Southerner. For correspondence about this publication, see Crawford, Andrew Law, pp. 215, 219-220. For more on the Chapins' pioneering rôle as singing-masters in the South, see James W. Scholten, "The Chapins: A Study of Men and Sacred Music West of the Alleghenies, 1795-1842" (Ed.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1972).
44. Ananias Davisson reprinted the tune in his Kentucky Harmony (1816), attributing it to "Moore," perhaps Josiah Moore, who contributed a set piece entitled Prodigal Son to the same collection.
45. A manuscript tunebook compiled by William Walker for Elizabeth Adams, now at Furman University, includes Jerusalem in a section of tunes dated 29 June 1833. See Milburn Price, "Miss Elizabeth Adams' Music Book: A Manuscript Predecessor of William Walker's Southern Harmony," The Hymn 29 (April 1978): 70-75. In his Christian Harmony (Philadelphia: Miller, 1867), p. 217, Walker claims to have "arranged" the tune in 1832. The MIDI file of Jerusalem is from the online version of Southern Harmony, by Harry Plantinga and Peter Irvine.
46. Conrad Speece, The Mountaineer, new ed. (Staunton, Va.: I. Collett, 1823), pp. 123-127. The three fuging-tunes mentioned by Speece are all in Wyeth's Repository.