Baptist Offspring, Southern Midwife--: Jesse Mercer's Cluster of Spiritual Songs (1810): A Study in American Hymnody (review)

Jesse Mercer's hymnal The Cluster of Spiritual Songs was the most important hymn collection in the lower South from 1800 to 1835. Through its longevity—it passed through eleven editions—and its combination of classic English Evangelical hymns with rough-hewn American spiritual ballads and revival songs, Mercer's Cluster became a classic of southern hymnody in the early republic. In Baptist Offspring, Southern Midwife, Kay Norton offers an important new interpretation of this historic hymnal. While retaining standard hymnological inquiries into biographical, bibliographical, and literary matters, Norton sets those interests in a much wider context that also includes race, class, gender, religious and regional history, and musical resources. By her construction and pursuit of this ambitious agenda, Norton provides a reading that significantly advances the study of this complex religious, musical, and cultural text.

Mercer (1769-1841), a nationally known Baptist elder from Powelton, Georgia, published the first edition of The Cluster around 1800 as a collection of roughly 150 hymns and added a small supplement to the 1804 edition. No copies of these first two editions have survived. Mercer appended another supplement in 1810, bringing the total number of hymns in the third edition to 199. The hymnal's success encouraged Mercer to expand it, but the next edition in 1823 emerged as a fundamentally different work, containing 664 hymn texts with an additional section of 13 "miscellaneous poems" and an appendix of 14 more hymns. This enlarged 1823 edition has been reprinted and interpreted in C. Ray Brewster's The Cluster of Jesse Mercer (Macon, Ga.: Renaissance Press, 1983), the only previous book-length study of the hymnal.

Norton argues that the 1810 edition deserves special attention because it is the definitive source for the earliest stratum of Evangelical hymnody in the lower South and it served as textual "midwife" for later southern singing school tune books such as William Walker's Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (New Haven, Conn.: Nathan Whiting, 1835) and B. F. White and E. J. King's The Sacred Harp (Philadelphia: the authors, 1844). Her book presents these two dimensions sequentially, focusing first on how Mercer's religious, social, and cultural contexts shaped his Baptist hymnodic "offspring," then turning to the texts of the 1810 edition and providing a tune repertory for them from eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century singing school tune books.

Norton initially places Mercer's work in its Baptist hymnological context as heir to a half dozen regional hymnals printed in New England, the middle states, and the upper South before 1810. Her primary effort, however, is to seek new meanings for the collection by exploring dimensions of race, gender, and class in Mercer's career and his Georgia environment. Her cultural interpretation of The Cluster rests on the claim that Mercer's moderate Calvinist theology of "free grace" was the source of heightened sensitivities to the plight of marginalized people in his society—slaves, women, and Native Americans—that his hymnal articulated. This sanguine case, however, rests on slim evidence and much inference, and Norton's effort to extend Mercer's "free grace" theology into the spiritual dictum for what we would now call an inclusive hymnal runs afoul of both doctrinal and hymnodic examination.

"Free grace" was not the likely source of Mercer's alleged social attitudes. The doctrine refers to the freedom with which God gives salvation to sinful humans as an unmerited gift. All Evangelicals affirmed free grace, but they drew different theological inferences from it. Norton has unfortunately confused "free grace" as understood by Calvinists such as Mercer, who taught that God used his freedom to choose in advance all who would be saved, for...