William Billings

7 October 1746—26 September 1800

WILLIAM BILLINGS was a giant among the group of composers of church music who flourished in New England during the period of the Revolutionary War. . . . He was self-educated in his art, yet his genius dominated the singing of his age, and he introduced a new style of so-called fuguing pieces which held sway among the leaders of church music for many years. He was not the inventor of this new class, it having been used in England for a few years before his time, but in Puritan New England the churches hesitated to depart from their long-established ways till the energy of Billings compelled a change. He was a master of self-praise, and this had much to do in pushing his music to the front and making it popular. His compositions were in many ways far in advance of those which he found in the churches, and we are led to wonder what changes he would have wrought could he have had the training of some of the masters in England. Still, we must grant him high honor in accomplishing such improvements in church singing and in arousing the public mind to the importance of music in the sanctuary. . . .

The musician was the son of William and Elizabeth, and was born in Boston, October 7, 1746. The maiden name of Elizabeth is not stated [in his family Bible], but we find in the records of Boston that one William Billings was married to Elizabeth Clark August 6, 1736, by the Rev. Charles Chauncey, and this Elizabeth was the daughter of William and Rebecca Clark, born March 7, 1706. It may be that she was the mother of the William in whom we are interested.

William Billings was a tanner by trade, but could not resist the drawings of his art and devoted much of his time to teaching music and directing singing schools. Some years ago an interesting paper was found among the effects of one of the old residents of Stoughton, giving the names of those who attended one of his singing schools kept in that town in the year 1774. This group of people was the germ of the oldest musical association in the United States, the Stoughton Musical Society. It was on the seventh of November, 1786, that a number of the persons whose names appear upon the list formed the society, which is still in existence and which has done so much to keep alive an interest in the old hymns and songs so dear to our New England ancestors in Colonial times. This society published a collection of old church tunes in 1829 called the Stoughton Collection. Among the names on the list of that old singing school of 1774, Lucy Swan heads the singers of the treble. She was the daughter of Major Robert Swan and Rachel Swan of Stoughton, and became the second wife of William Billings, July 26, 1774. William Billings had married Mary Leonard on December 13, 1764, and was married to Lucy Swan at Stoughton by the Rev. Jedediah Adams.

Although William Billings was such an active leader in church music, the notice accorded him by the newspapers of the day at his death was very meager. The Columbian Centinel for September 27, 1800, has the following:

Died. William Billings, age 60, the celebrated music composer. His funeral will be held to-morrow, [Sunday, September 29], at 4 p.m. from the home of Mr. Amos Penniman, in Chamber Street, West Boston.

The date of his death is not given, but it was September 26. He was buried in the inclosure on the common in an unmarked, and now unknown grave.

He taught the singers of the Brattle Street Church in 1778 with great approbation, and in 1785 he was interested in the music in the Old South Church. The following notice appeared in the Boston Centinel for November 26, 1785:

Singers of every denomination, both male and female, are desired to attend and give their assistance at the Old South on the first Lord’s Day in December. The intent of said meeting is for the purpose of relieving the distressed. Your compliance with this will oblige many. But none more than your humble servant, William Billings.

The distress which this charity was to relieve was very great among the poorer classes, and was due chiefly to the depreciation of the continental currency. Billings was an intimate friend of Samuel Adams, the patriot, and together they liked to sing the 187th Psalm, which had been put into political paraphrase. The Revolutionary War gave opportunity to express in music his feelings toward the mother country, and the tune “Chester” was called his patriotic song. The words set to it were also of his composition, and the first stanza will indicate his patriotism:

Let tyrants shake their iron rod,
And slavery clank her galling chains;
We fear them not. We trust in God.
New England’s God forever reigns.

The following contemporary estimate of Billings is quoted from the diary of William Bentley, for many years an editor and a pastor in Salem, Massachusetts. The entry was written on Sunday, September 28, 1800, two days after the death of the musician, and is as follows:

William Billings, age 60, died in Boston. This self-taught man thirty years ago had the direction of all the music of our churches. His “Reuben,” as he whimsically called it, with all its great imperfections, had great fame and he may justly be considered as the father of our New England music. Many who have imitated have excelled him, but none of them had better original power. His late attempts, and without a proper education, were the true cause of his inferior excellence. He taught the singers at the Brattle Street Church in 1778 with great approbation, and his fame was great in the churches. He was a singular man, of moderate size, short of one leg, with one eye, without any address, and with an uncommon negligence of person. Still he spake and sang and thought as a man above the common abilities. He died poor and neglected and perhaps did too much neglect himself.

A recent writer has said, “Billings was an uncouth but forceful personality, and neglected his tanning to lead choirs with a voice that drowned all others; to publish psalm books that had a wide sale, and to compose music that had a certain crude worth.” Ritter says of him: “Billings taught his choir, so far as he could, to sing musically, that is, in time and with a certain swing and warm expression, He gave it in the best way he was able and he gave his own. He was an honest though poor composer.” He did not adapt other writers’ tunes, but all his publications were original. Whatever may be said of the style that he adopted, especially the fuguing pieces, which had been recently introduced from England, this style captured the hearts of the people of his day, and drew them away from the solemn and unmusical tunes then in use. Musical taste has changed during the last century, and new composers have arisen to crowd out the old, but it cannot be denied that musical development was given an important start by the energy and persistence of William Billings.

by Frank J. Metcalf
American Writers and Compilers of Sacred Music (1925)

Collections of Tunes:

The New England Psalm-Singer (1770)

The Singing Master’s Assistant (1778)

Music in Miniature (1779)

The Psalm Singers’ Amusement (1781)

The Suffolk Harmony (1786)

The Continental Harmony (1794)

Additional Resources:

“An account of two Americans of extraordinary genius in poetry and music,” Columbian Magazine, vol. 2 (1788), p. 211.

Frank J. Metcalf, “William Billings,” American Writers and Compilers of Sacred Music (NY: Abingdon Press, 1925), pp. 51–64: Archive.org

C. Lindstrom, “William Billings and his times,” Musical Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4 (1939), pp. 479–97.

Henry W. Foote, Three Centuries of American Hymnody (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940).

R. Morin, “William Billings: Pioneer in American Music,” New England Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 1 (1941), pp. 25–33.

Richard Crawford & David P. McKay, “The Performance of William Billings’ Music,” Journal of Research in Music Education, vol. 21, no. 4 (1973), pp. 318–30.

Richard Crawford & David P. McKay, “Music in manuscript: A manuscript tunebook of 1782,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 84 (1974), pp. 43–64.

Richard Crawford & David P. McKay, William Billings of Boston (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1975).

Hans Nathan, William Billings: Data and Documents (Detroit: published for The College Music Society by Information Coordinators, 1976).

Karl Kroeger and Hans Nathan, The Complete Works of William Billings, 4 vols. (Boston: The American Musicological Society & The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1977–90).

Karl Kroeger, “William Billings’s music in manuscript copy and some notes on variant versions of his pieces,” Notes, vol. 39, no. 2 (1982), pp. 316–45.

Karl Kroeger, “William Billings and the hymn tune,” The Hymn, vol. 37, no. 3 (July 1986), pp. 19–26: HathiTrust

Karl Kroeger, Catalogue of the Musical Works of William Billings (NY: Greenwood Press, 1991).

M. Fawcett-Yeske, “Stylistic development in the fuging tunes of William Billings,” The Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning, vol. 7 (1996), pp. 32–46.

Karl Kroeger, “Two unknown Billings compositions in John Norman’s The Massachusetts Harmony (1784),” The Hymn, vol. 47, no. 3 (July 1996), pp. 44–49.

Suzanne L. Edwards & Christine Glick, “William Billings: Pioneer American composer of congregational music,” The Hymn, vol. 47, no. 4 (Oct. 1996), pp. 6–7: HathiTrust

Karl Kroeger, “William Billings sets the tune,” The Hymn, vol. 47, no. 4 (Oct. 1996), pp. 8–13: HathiTrust

David W. Music, “William Billings in the southern Fasola tunebooks, 1816–1855,” The Hymn, vol. 47, no. 4 (Oct. 1996), pp. 14–25: HathiTrust

C.J. Redden-Liotta, “Singing Colonial Musick,” The Hymn, vol. 73, no. 1 (Winter 2022), pp. 12–16.

William Billings, Hymnary.org: https://hymnary.org/person/Billings_William

Karl Kroeger, “William Billings,” American National Biography (1999): ANB

Karl Kroeger, “William Billings,” Oxford Music Online (2013, rev. 2024): Oxford

Karl Kroeger, “William Billings,” The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology: http://www.hymnology.co.uk/w/william-billings

Nym Cooke, Early American Sacred Music: https://earlyamericansacredmusic.org/

Hymn Tune Index: https://hymntune.library.illinois.edu/