The Movements of the Old Hundredth Psalm Tune

I may safely presume, at the outset, that a very small proportion of my readers are in the unhappy position of a friend of mine, to whom I recently played the famous tune we are about to consider, and who surprised me with the remark, that he ‘could not say he had heard it before.’

[1] Anon., ‘The Old Hundredth Psalm Tune’, The Quiver 18, no. 877 (January 1883): 193.

Suppose we could name the most popular tune in Victorian Britain – what should we make of it, and how might we write its history? In this chapter I take up these questions by pursuing the case of the Old Hundredth psalm tune, which was, if not the most popular tune of the era, then certainly among the most widely known and performed. One measure of its success is found in my epigraph, the opening line of an 1883 article in The Quiver, an illustrated London periodical aimed at a broadly middle-class readership, founded by the evangelist and temperance supporter, John Cassell (1817–1865). What brings significance to this anecdote is not the author, who remains nameless, but the fact that it was also printed the same year on the other side of the Atlantic, in a Sunday Magazine founded by the English-born engraver Frank Leslie (1821–1880). As we shall see, the Old Hundredth was a truly international phenomenon. Its likely composer – a subject debated at some length in the nineteenth century – was the French music theorist and compiler of Calvinist hymns, Loys Bourgeois (c. 1510–c. 1560). Bourgeois’s tune was initially used to set the 134th Psalm. However, in the Anglophone world the melody came to be linked with a translation of the 100th Psalm by William Kethe (d. 1594), who worked on both the Geneva Bible (1560) and the Anglo-Genevan ‘metrical’ Psalter (1561), which contained settings of the Book of Psalms in rhyming vernacular poetry....