Holy Manna: A Song History

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HOLY MANNA is an American folk hymn tune traditionally credited to William Moore, a composer and tunebook compiler who may have been born in Tennessee.[1] Its earliest known printing is in Moore’s Columbian Harmony, a four-shape tunebook issued in Cincinnati in 1825 and associated with Tennessee.[2][3] William Walker included it in Southern Harmony (1835),[1] and C. Michael Hawn traces the hymn on into The Sacred Harp of 1844, describing melodies like this one as “distinctly American in flavor.”[3] Hymnary.org notes that the pentatonic tune works either at an easy four-beat pace or briskly in cut time.[4]

Lithograph of a crowded outdoor revival: a preacher at a wooden stand, worshippers on benches and kneeling, tents behind

Camp-meeting, lithograph by H. Bridport after A. Rider, Kennedy & Lucas, c. 1829. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The tune is almost always paired with a camp-meeting hymn about worshippers gathered for a revival.[1] Who wrote the words is unsettled: the hymn is traditionally assigned to George Atkins, but Hymnary.org says no author has been positively identified.[4] Hawn reports that Sacred Harp scholar Richard H. Hulan credited the text to George Askins, an Irish-born Methodist preacher who died in Frederick, Maryland, in 1816, and that it was printed in Baltimore in 1817 in John J. Harrod’s Social and Camp-Meeting Hymns for the Pious.[3] Its stanzas speak in turn to different members of a revival congregation, among them seekers kneeling at the mourner’s bench.[3] The 1991 edition of The Sacred Harp prints the song on page 59, crediting the music to Moore (1825) and the words to Atkin (1819).[5]

HOLY MANNA remains a fixture of shape-note singing; at the annual Big Singing in Benton, Kentucky, which sings from Walker’s Southern Harmony, it traditionally leads off both the morning and the afternoon sessions.[3] It has also spread well beyond the singing schools, with Hymnary.org counting it in more than three hundred hymnals across many denominations.[1] Mountain dulcimer players will find it in Stephen Seifert’s Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[6]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "HOLY MANNA".
  2. IMSLP: "Columbian Harmony (Moore, William B.)".
  3. Discipleship Ministries (C. Michael Hawn): "History of Hymns" article on the text sung to HOLY MANNA.
  4. Hymnary.org: text page for the hymn sung to HOLY MANNA.
  5. fasola.org: "The Sacred Harp, 1991 Edition, page 59: Holy Manna".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Gospel Edition".