19th Century Gospel Hymnody

1. What is a gospel hymn?

2. Predecessors of gospel hymns:

- Late18th and early 19th cent. Evangelical hymns
- New England singing school songs, particularly FUGING tunes
- Southern folk hymnody
- Camp meeting songs/choruses from the early 19th cent. Am. frontier (KY, TN, etc.)
- Southern shaped-note sunday school songs, particularly FUGING tunes
- New England main-line hymns and collections of Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings
- Sunday school songs from early to mid-19th century

3. Specific influences on the MUSICAL STYLE of the 19th gospel song:

- Methodist hymn tunes (which tended to be more rhythmically diverse than psalm tunes)
- Singing school and shaped note tunes (particularly fuging tunes)
- Southern American folk tunes
- Settings of Lowel Mason and others which tended toward harmonic simplicity
- Simple sunday school song settings
- Popular (parlor) music of mid-19th century America
- Concert band music

4. Specific influences on the underlying theology of gospel hymns:

- A peculiar American amalgamation of Calvinism and Arminianism
- The 2nd Great Awakening
- American Revivalism
- The temperance movement [also see termperance]
- Evangelicalism as a social movement in 19th cent. America
- American romanticism
- A growing reaction against Liberalism by the late 19th century

5. Two centers for the development of the gospel song and gospel hymnal publishing:

- The NORTH (Mason and Hastings, Biglow and Main, et al)
- The SOUTH (Ruebush and Kieffer)