Angels Hovering Round: A Song History

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Hymnary.org gives 1842 as the publication date of this short song.[1] One of its 1842 printings is Songs of Canaan, or the Millennial Harmonist, a small Boston collection compiled by J. B. Packard and S. Hubbard, which prints the song with a harmonized tune and no named author or composer.[2][3] In their preface the two compilers explain that they were answering repeated requests for simple, singable material suited to revivals and to social worship meetings.[3] In an introduction dated September 26, 1842, M. L. Scudder presented The Wesleyan Psalmist (Boston) as an expanded and improved successor to Songs of Canaan, and its subtitle names camp meetings, class meetings and prayer meetings as the places it was meant for.[4] Hymnary.org classes Scudder's book as a Methodist hymnal.[5] A note printed beneath the tune in that book recalls its effect on entire gatherings at moments of conversion and of rejoicing.[4]

Pen-and-ink drawing of a crowd of angels playing musical instruments around a central figure in the clouds

Albrecht Dürer, Music-Making Angels, pen and brown ink, 1521. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Hymnary.org now counts the song in more than two hundred hymnals.[1] It turns up, for example, as number 55 in The Christian Songster of 1858, a songbook whose subtitle names camp meetings, prayer meetings, social meetings and revivals.[6] That book was edited by Joseph Bever and printed at Dayton, Ohio, by the printing establishment of the United Brethren in Christ.[7] Voices Together, the 2020 hymnal of Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada, sets a nativity text keyed to Luke 2 to a tune named ANGELS HOVERING ROUND, credited only as "American traditional, 19th c."; the sources consulted here do not show whether this is the same melody printed in 1842.[8][9] Maureen Sellers includes the song in Simply Gospel, Book One, a 56-page collection of easy arrangements of spirituals, hymns and old-time gospel songs for mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[10]

Our book that contains the song "Angels Hovering Round"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Angels Hovering Round".
  2. Hymnary.org: "Songs of Canaan, or the Millennial Harmonist, #5: There are angels hovering round".
  3. Internet Archive: "The Songs of Canaan, or the Millennial Harmonist" (Packard and Hubbard, Boston, 1842).
  4. Internet Archive: "The Wesleyan Psalmist, or Songs of Canaan" (M. L. Scudder, Boston, 1842).
  5. Hymnary.org: "The Wesleyan Psalmist, or Songs of Canaan".
  6. Hymnary.org: "The Christian Songster, #55: There are angels hovering round".
  7. Hymnary.org: "The Christian Songster" (1858).
  8. Hymnary.org: "Voices Together, #251: There Were Angels Hovering Round".
  9. Hymnary.org: "Voices Together".
  10. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Gospel, Book One".
  11. Image: Albrecht Dürer, Music-Making Angels, pen and brown ink, 1521. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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