Academic literature on the topic 'Hymnal of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1878)'

This chapter describes events in the life of Anna Howard Shaw from 1871 to 1880. Shaw had a vision that God had called her to a larger life. However, with no independent means of wealth, her choices appeared to be limited to marrying or resigning herself to struggle along as an impoverished schoolteacher, living in her parents' home. To gain access to any formal education for herself, she would have to leave that home. At this point Anna turned to the only resource she did have beyond her own dreams, ingenuity, and determination—her sister Mary, who had married a successful entrepreneur. So it was that Anna made the difficult and seemingly selfish decision to leave her parents' home and move in with her sister to seek her options in the small town of Big Rapids, Michigan. On August 26, 1873, the Big Rapids District Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church enthusiastically licensed twenty-six-year-old “Annie Howard Shaw” as a local preacher. In June 1878 Shaw sailed for Europe. By then she had earned her education and possessed her first investments. This thirty-one-year-old daughter of impoverished immigrants returned to tour the great sights of the continent.

This chapter’s central claim is that the notion of freedom, in the context of theology, music, and modernity (1740–1850), is incomplete if it does not address the sacred music of the enslaved people of North America during this period—a population for whom theology, music, and freedom were of enormous personal and social consequence. The central figure in this regard is Richard Allen (1760–1831), who in 1816 founded the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first independent black religious denomination in the United States. Allen was born enslaved, in Philadelphia or Delaware, but was able to purchase his freedom in 1783. He had already had a conversion experience in 1777, and once he gained his freedom, he became an itinerant preacher, ultimately settling in Philadelphia, where he preached at St George’s Methodist Church and a variety of venues in the city. In 1794 he led a walkout of black members at St George’s, in protest of racism; and over the course of a number of years he founded Mother Bethel, which would become the original church of the AME. This chapter situates Allen in the development of black sacred music in the US: first, as the publisher of hymnals for his church (two in 1801, and another in 1818); and second, as an important arbitrator between the traditions and performance styles of Protestant hymnody as inherited in the British colonies, and an evolving oral tradition and performance style of black sacred music.