Windham: A Song History

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Daniel Read was born in 1757 in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, but his working life centred on Connecticut, where he made ivory combs and, after settling in New Haven, went into book publishing and selling in partnership with the engraver Amos Doolittle.[1] His first tunebook, The American Singing Book, was printed in New Haven in 1785 for Read himself, who also sold it.[2] Demand in New England kept it in print, and a fifth edition had appeared by 1796.[1] “Windham” made its first appearance in that 1785 collection.[3]

Photograph of a white meeting house with a tall steeple among bare trees in Brooklyn, Connecticut

The Meeting House, Brooklyn, built 1771, postcard, Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution, 1935. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. A Connecticut meeting house of Read's era, shown for its setting; it has no known connection to the tune.

Hymnary.org gives Windham as the tune for Isaac Watts’s hymn “Broad is the road that leads to death,” from Book II of his Hymns and Spiritual Songs, which it indexes as “The Almost Christian.”[4] The same site lists Windham as a long-meter tune in a minor key and finds it in hundreds of hymnals.[5] In American Writers and Compilers of Sacred Music (1925), Frank J. Metcalf named Windham and “Lisbon” as the most popular of Read’s tunes, noting that they turned up in seven of the recent books surveyed.[1]

The 1854 edition of The Southern Harmony prints it as number 48, set to Watts’s words.[6] In The Sacred Harp it stands on page 38b of the 1991 edition, credited to Read with a 1785 date, and keeps the same page in the 2025 edition.[7][8] The 2012 revised Cooper edition of The Sacred Harp also places it at 38b,[9] and hymnary.org records it in more recent hymnals such as Lutheran Worship (1982) and the Psalter Hymnal (1987).[5]

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Sources

  1. Hymnology Archive: "Daniel Read".
  2. Yale University Library, Musical Roots of the Elm City: "The American singing book, or, A new and easy guide to the art of psalmody".
  3. Anthology of the American Hymn-Tune Repertory: "Windham".
  4. Hymnary.org: "The Almost Christian (Broad is the road that leads to death)".
  5. Hymnary.org: "WINDHAM (Read)".
  6. Hymnary.org: "The Southern Harmony, and Musical Companion (1854), no. 48".
  7. fasola.org: "Indexes for The Sacred Harp, 1991 Edition: 38b Windham".
  8. fasola.org: "Indexes for The Sacred Harp, 2025 Edition: 38b Windham".
  9. Hymnary.org: "The Sacred Harp: Revised Cooper Edition (2012), 38b".