Introduction

The following, from an unpublished article I wrote many years ago, perhaps best encapsulates my reasons for creating this blog:

Few books are as beloved by the Latter-day Saint people as their hymnbook. This is due, in part, to their belief that the book was divinely inspired. “Latter-day Saints revere their hymnbook almost as scripture,” explains Latter-day Saint hymnologist Karen Lynn Davidson, “because of their belief that the first LDS hymnal had its origins in divine commandment.” (Davidson, 667.) Three months after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized, Emma Smith, wife of the prophet Joseph, was instructed through revelation to compile a collection of sacred hymns. The first Latter-day Saint hymnbook was published in late 1835 or early 1836, and in the following decades several subsequent hymnbooks have been issued to meet the needs of the ever-growing church. The most recent edition was published in 1985, in commemoration of the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the first Latter-day Saint hymnbook.

Despite a long tradition of hymn singing by the Latter-day Saints, the field of Latter-day Saint hymnology remains largely unexplored by scholars. The only books written on the subject are the three official hymnal companions issued in conjunction with the current hymnal in use, published in 1939, 1963, and 1988. These hymnal companions, written by George Pyper, Spencer Cornwall, and Karen Davidson, respectively, are hardly scholarly in nature, with Davidson’s being by far the best of the bunch. Musicologist Michael Hicks’s Mormonism and Music: A History (1989), devotes three chapters to the history of Latter-day Saint hymnody, but these provide more of an overview than a comprehensive, in-depth study. Other works on the subject include approximately ten unpublished doctrinal dissertations and theses, and a handful of peer-reviewed articles published in scholarly journals.

In “The Singing Saints: A Study of the Mormon Hymnal, 1835-1950,” arguably the best of the doctrinal dissertations, Helen Hanks Macaré notes an “uncritical acceptance [by hymnal editors in 1948] of what had gone before” (Macaré, 530), resulting in mistakes that could have been corrected if the editors had not blindly trusted every attribution made by their predecessors. Nearly all the scholarly works written on the subject share this same common problem: if an author or composer’s name has been printed beside a hymn, this information is copied as fact with little or no attempt to verify that the information presented in the hymnal is correct.*

Unfortunately, this lack of scholarship in the area of Latter-day Saint hymnology is manifested in the 1985 hymnbook itself. Mistakes that should have been discovered years ago continue to be passed down through edition after edition, and the result is a hymnal today filled with errors, questionable attributions, and inconsistencies in the way sources are listed. Many hymns are lacking in such basic information as birth and death dates of authors and composers, and in many cases, author and composer names.

This blog, therefore, serves several purposes: to correct many of the errors that have crept into the Latter-day Saint hymnal over the years; to provide names and biographical information for as many of the missing authors and composers as possible; and to provide other relevant information concerning the hymnody of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, past and present.

Note:
*This is not strictly a Latter-day Saint problem. Leonard Ellinwood (1905-1994), hymnologist and head of the humanities section in the cataloging division at the Library of Congress, complained in1948 of the “deterioration in the quality of scholarship” on hymnology, and that “we have seen in the past 20 years a steady succession of handbooks to hymnals of various denominations put together by men who blithely and carelessly copy from each other as extensively as do our popular encyclopedists, who examine no sources, who feel that a glib phrase suffices for the lack of basic fact.” (Leonard Ellinwood, “Problems and Opportunities in Modern Hymnology,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 1, no. 2 [Summer 1948]: 41-47). In the age of the internet, this problem has only been exacerbated.

Sources:
Karen Lynn Davidson, “Hymns and Hymnody,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, vol. 2, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992), 667; Doctrine and Covenants 25:11-12; Helen Hanks Macaré, “The Singing Saints: A Study of the Mormon Hymnal, 1835-1950,” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1961).