Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: Hymnody in the History of North American Protestantism. Edited by Edith L. Blumhofer and Mark A. Noll. University of Alabama Press, 2004. 260 pages. $52.50. Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in American Protestant History and Theology. Edited by Richard J. Mouw and Mark A. Noll. William B. Eerdmans, 2004. 288 pages. $18.00.

Abstract

Much of American religion and spirituality has been shaped, defined, and promoted through its hymnody, but studies of American religious life have not always acknowledged or examined in detail the significance of these songs of faith, theology, life, and worship. All three books under review are contributions that go some way to redress the balance. The main titles of all three are, appropriately, quotations of primary hymns of the American experience: P. P. Bliss’s Wonderful Words, John Newton’s Amazing Grace, and King David’s “hymn,” Psalm 137[:4]. Although issued by different publishers, the first two titles are closely related in that they both grew out of the three-year project on the history of American hymnody sponsored by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (ISAE), based at Wheaton College and funded by the Lilly Endowment. Each of these two volumes is a collection of essays by different authors associated with the ISAE project, though not all the contributions appear in print for the first time. The relationship between the two books is underscored by the first chapter in Singing the Lord’s Song and Appendix 1 of Wonderful Words of Life, both contributed by Stephen Marini. The former is based on the database compiled by Professor Marini, a statistical analysis of the most widely published hymns in American evangelical hymnals published between 1737 and 1970; the latter is a listing, culled from the same database, of the 266 most frequently published hymns during the period—from the top-ranking All hail the power (Perronet, 1779), which appears in 160 different hymnals, to the bottom-ranking (seventy-sixth) To God the only wise our Savior (Watts, 1707), which is found in thirty-five American hymnals. On the evidence of the database, Marini can make the following statement: “American evangelicals have proven to be quite conservative about their hymn texts, retaining much of the classical canon through the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries” (Singing the Lord’s Song, 18). However, the time period is somewhat wide—approaching two and a half centuries—which means that hymns that were in vogue and fairly widely used for a short time either appear low in the ranking or may not be included at all. Thus the basic database needs to be augmented with other, genre-orientated databases that cover a more restricted time period to demonstrate the hymnodic publication and practice within a narrower historical frame. This is exactly the methodology of Chris Armstrong’s study of camp-meeting hymns in Singing the Lord’s Song.