Six Hymns by Samson Occom

Samson Occom (1723–1792) was a Mohegan tribal leader, an ordained Presbyterian minister, a major fund-raiser for what is now Dartmouth College, the leader of an intertribal revitalization and resettlement movement, and the first published Native American author. His Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772), the first English-language text written and published by a Native American author, appeared in more than a dozen editions and reprintings—including a Welsh-language translation —before 1820. This sermon and a short autobiographical narrative drafted by Occomin 1768 have been inducted into American literature anthologies and reintroduced to contemporary scholars of early American and Native American literatures. Yet it is not widely known that Occom also wrote and published in poetic forms and that he maintained a lifelong interest in hymnody. In 1774, he compiled, edited, and published the groundbreaking and widely popular A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs; Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians, of All Denominations; he also wrote at least six hymn-texts published in his Collection and elsewhere. On the merits of the Collection, leading musicologist Robert Stevenson has declared Occom "the first Native American published composer" ("First Composer").More than that, Occom was a leader in the movement to develop an indigenous American hymn tradition. Occom's original hymn-texts also distinguish him as the first Native American to publish poetry in English, and they establish the historical beginnings of Native English-language poetry in the eighteenth century.

Occom's interest in hymnody arose from the intersection of Christian and Indian traditions in a context of social, cultural, and religious change. Song had long been an important element of community life and ritual among Occom's Mohegan and other southern New England tribes. During the eighteenth century, the continuity of tribal song traditions and tribal communities themselves came under tremendous threat. War, colonist population growth, poverty, land disputes, missionary colonialism, disruption of traditional aqua- and agriculture, and other factors caused population reduction and community relocation among the tribes. Many young Indian men and women were indentured as household servants, laborers, and sailors; others were placed by well-meaning parents in boarding schools such as Wheelock's Moor's Indian Charity School (see Silverman). In all of these situations, removal from family, clan, and tribe meant reduced exposure to traditional languages, songs, and stories.

The eighteenth century also brought great changes to American religious music, especially in New England where the Bay Psalm Book had long dominated congregational song. The advent of English hymnody and the introduction of works by Isaac Watts in the 1710s and 1720s challenged the dominance of psalmody and attracted adherents among New England clergy and elites. Cotton Mather admired Watts but nonetheless rejected his hymns for use in church worship; his nephew Mather Byles and other young New England poets emulated Watts as they did Alexander Pope. The 1720s also saw the rise of the regular singing movement, which advocated that the old practice of "lining out" psalms be abandoned for printed tunebooks. Thomas Walter, another nephew to Cotton Mather, helped lead the movement with his Grounds and Rules of Music Explained (1721) (see Beuchner). Colonial singing schools soon followed, as venues for instruction in new vocal techniques like fuguing and for the innovation of new tunes. The publication of American tunebooks such as James Lyon's Urania, or a Choice Collection of Psalm Tunes, Anthems, or Hymns (1762), Josiah Flagg's A Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes (1764), and William Billings's The New England Psalm Singer (1770) established this newly extensive tune repertoire. New Light partisans of the Great Awakening and later revivals disseminated and popularized these new developments in hymnody. More radical revivalists also promoted the use of American-composed hymn-texts, which were often paired with folk tunes. For example, the Separate Congregationalist James Davenport wrote his own hymns and led hymn-singing processions through the streets of New London, Connecticut.¹

While Davenport's practices scandalized conservative clergy, they were well received among nearby Indian communities. In his autobiographical narrative, Samson Occom credited Davenport and other "Extraordinary Ministers" with effecting the...