Song · A 1776 town · 1770
Chester
90Sit with it.Not an average of critics. Eight questions, one house.
Trust in God, sung in parts. The famous verse about a tyrant's iron rod was printed in 1778. This score is the hymn a child already had.
The glance
Industry is the thin one.
This phone
Set for a grown person, just me. Change the ages.
After the credits
Does anyone here do a real job, and does that job matter?
Billings published Chester in 1770. By 1776 the tune was in New England camps and meeting houses. People now quote a verse about tyrants and chains. That verse was printed in 1778. A child in 1776 knew the tune. He did not have those later words in a book yet.
The score is for the hymn as a meeting-house song of trust, not for the war lyric that came after.
Folio
Keep Chester in the record.
The date, your number, and one sentence.
No house has filed a sentence for this yet.
Where to listen
Finding the page.
The eight
Industry
9/10
A singable fuging tune. The labor is Billings's, and the congregation's.
Household
9/10
Sung with the town, in the meeting house. Not a parlor performance only.
Piety
9/10
The early hymn trusts God out loud. That is the piety.
Courage
9/10
To sing a bold sacred song in a war year is not nothing.
Republic
9/10
New England's public worship and New England's politics were the same room.
Temperance
9/10
A hymn has an end. It does not ask you to want the next one.
Truth
9/10
It is a hymn and it says so. The 1778 battle verses are a later text, and they are not in this number.
Stewardship
9/10
A child learned it from adults, in parts, and could still sing it years on.
Live historicallySing a verse through to the end. Do not add words from a later year and call them this one.