The Hymn Book of the Free Methodist Church (1883)

Benjamin Titus Roberts left the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1860 over reformist convictions that would not fit inside it, plain preaching, free pews open to the poor without a rented seat, and firm opposition to slavery among them, and founded the Free Methodist Church the same year. A denomination built on those commitments needed a hymnal that carried them into weekly worship, and by 1883 the Free Methodist Publishing House in Chicago had produced one: The Hymn Book of the Free Methodist Church, reprinted again in 1896, the volume that served as the standard songbook for Free Methodist congregations through the end of the nineteenth century.

What survives of that hymnal's working life is unusually well documented. A copy held today at Greenville College belonged to Bishop W. T. Hogue, who covered its margins with handwritten notes years after its printing, marking hymns for exclusion, specifying which tunes belonged with which texts, and drafting revisions in the book's own margins. Those annotations were not idle marginalia. The 1907 General Conference commissioned a new, official hymnal, and Hogue used this heavily marked 1883 volume to guide that revision, which appeared in 1910. Some of his handwritten choices made it into the new book and some did not, which is itself the clearest evidence available that this was a working draft rather than a finished editorial statement, one bishop thinking on paper through what an entire denomination would sing next.

A hymnal revised by hand rarely survives to be read that way twice over, once as a book of hymns and once as a record of how a denomination decided what to keep singing. The 1883 Hymn Book of the Free Methodist Church is now legible in both registers, since Hogue's working copy preserves not just which hymns the church sang across the 1880s and 1890s but which ones a bishop, twenty years later, judged worth carrying forward into a new century of worship. His notes show him comparing Free Methodist practice directly against the Methodist Episcopal Church's own hymnal choices, a reminder that the Free Methodist break of 1860 was doctrinal and institutional far more than it was musical, and that shared Wesleyan hymnody kept crossing back and forth between the denominations even after their formal separation.

The 1910 hymnal that eventually replaced this one was the product of a General Conference mandate issued in 1907, a properly institutional process, but its actual drafting ran through one bishop's pencil marks in a book already a quarter century old. That layered history, an 1883 hymnal surviving into the twentieth century as raw material for its own successor, gives this particular copy a documentary value most surviving hymnals never acquire: it shows a denomination's worship life being actively reconsidered rather than simply reprinted.