Title page
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Old Hundred
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In his preface to this second edition of the Kentucky Harmonist (the first appeared in 1817), Samuel Metcalf (1798-1856), a medical student at what is now Transylvania University in Lexington, expresses the hope that his compilation will "contribute to the improvement of Sacred Harmony in the Western Country." Further, he writes that "one principal object of this slection has been to check the present reigning passion for light and frivolous music, and to inspire a taste for that sublime simplicity of expression which characterizes the melodies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries." Although he likes fuguing tunes, Metcalf believes that "it is the solemn, the chaste, the simple music, which recommends itself to the lovers of classical harmony, and which alone is worthy of being practised in out churches." Appropriately, then, the book, printed with the four shaped-notes, is open to "Old Hundred"; beneath it is a setting by the New England composer William Billings (1746-1800), but not one of his numerous fuguing tunes. The title of Metcalf's collection, incidentally, is similar to that of the better-known Kentucky Harmony, which the Presbyterian elder Ananias Davisson edited and published in 1816.