8 - From Newcastle upon Tyne to Colonial Carolina: Transatlantic Tune Transmission and Durham Hills’s The Cashaway Psalmody (1770)

Summary

A recently recovered sacred music manuscript reveals that the eighteenth-cen-tury composer-compiler Durham Hills (1730–1771), from Newcastle upon Tyne, transmitted the largest trove of psalm tunes yet documented from England to colonial America. This finding is documented in Hills's manuscript tune book, The Cashaway Psalmody, compiled in 1770 in the remote Cheraws region of backcountry South Carolina. Its full title is THE CASHAWAY PSALMODY: Being a curious Collection of Psalm-Tunes in the Tenor-Part: Suited to all the Variety of Metres, in every different Version of the Psalms. Together with a Set of Particular Psalms and Hymns for various Occasions; as the Festivals of Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide, etc. also for Fasts, Weddings, Burials, the Sacrament, and Musical Meetings. With large and plain Instructions for Singing by Notes. Collected from the Works of the best Composers of PSALMODY. By DURHAM HILLS, Teacher of Psalmody, 1770.

This robust period formulation introduces a complete professional English tune book, meticulously prepared by Hills as a fair copy ready for printing. Cashaway presents twenty-eight octavo pages of instructions on the gamut and clefs, notation, musical time, ‘pitching and gracing a tune’ and ‘concords and discords’, along with eighty-seven common psalm tunes without text, nineteen ‘particular psalms’ with text, forty-five texted ‘occasional hymns’ divided into Anglican liturgical and Evangelical devotional groups, and an index. Hills's collection of 152 tunes and sixty-three texts is a palimpsest of his musical experience, style and taste as accumulated in Newcastle, colonial Carolina and elsewhere. It embraces a great range of music and texts from the traditional Anglican psalters through the English country psalmody of the early eighteenth century, much of it from the North, and ultimately a new London theatrical style of hymn tune employed by Methodists and Dissenters in the Evangelical Revival. Each of these strands had its own story and consequent effect in enabling Hills to transmit through Cashaway no fewer than seventy-seven tunes from England into American colonial use, making it the largest single source of transatlantic tune migration yet documented.

❧ Durham Hills and The Cashaway Psalmody

Hills's parents were of unequal social standing.