A Collection of Sacred Hymns

The making of this book was a commission rather than a project. A revelation given to Emma Smith in July 1830, within months of the church's founding, directed her to make a selection of sacred hymns for its use, and the resulting volume appeared five years later. That is an unusual origin for a hymnal. Most are compiled by committees or by musicians; this one exists because the church's scripture told a particular woman to make it, and her name stands on the title page.

The work of preparing it fell substantially to William W. Phelps, a printer and editor who put the texts into shape, and who wrote several of the strongest new hymns in the collection himself. The delay between commission and publication was not idleness. The church moved twice in those years, lost a press to a mob in Missouri in 1833, and was building the Kirtland temple while the hymnal went through the press.

What resulted is a small book, ninety texts, and its contents show a movement working out what it was. Roughly a third are new, written inside the church and dealing with its own claims: restoration, gathering, a temple, the imminence of the millennium. The rest are borrowed from the Protestant hymnody its converts already knew, and a good many of those were edited, sometimes lightly and sometimes heavily, to remove what the church did not teach and to insert what it did. Reading the alterations is one of the better ways of seeing early Latter Day Saint theology take shape.

The 1835 collection contains no notation whatever. That was ordinary for American hymnals of the period and it shaped how the book was used: a hymn was named, a tune of the right metre was chosen from what the congregation already knew, and the two were joined on the spot. The consequence is that no single melody is authoritative for these texts, and a hymn from this book has often been sung to several different tunes across its life. It also meant the book was cheap to print and easy to carry, which mattered a great deal to a church that kept moving.

The succession splits after Joseph Smith's death in 1844. The larger body that went west with Brigham Young produced its own hymnals in Utah, growing from this root through the nineteenth century and eventually acquiring printed music. Emma Smith did not go west. She remained in Nauvoo, and the church that reorganised around her son in the 1860s, now Community of Christ, traced its own hymnody through her and issued hymnals of its own. Both lines are genuinely descended from the 1835 book, which is unusual: most schisms do not leave the compiler on the smaller side.

Some of its texts have proved durable well beyond either institution. Phelps's hymns in particular, written for a movement that expected the world to end shortly, are still sung weekly by millions of people who do not, and their survival is one of the quieter measures of what a good hymn text can outlast.