"Every Composer to be his own Carver": The manliness if William Billings

Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Summer 1999 by Miller, Eben Simmons

"I recommend to you the resolution (tho' not the impudence) of a discarded Actor, who after he had been twice hissed off the Stage, mounted again, and with great Assurance, he thundered out these words: 'I will be heard."'

- William Billings, The Singing Master's Assistant1

A favorite story about William Billings (1746-1800) depicts the young man, apprenticed to a tanner, composing psalms on leather hides. Self-taught, having read independently on musical theory from youth (though with occasional instructions from local singer and New South Church choir leader, John Barry), Billings was a lively young genius, his exuberance for song "so great that the walls of the [tanning] shop and many sides of leather became covered with his earliest attempts at musical composition." Nathaniel Gould, a nineteenth-century commentator, knew several of Billings' acquaintances; he, too, invoked this vaguely heroic image when describing early America's foremost psalmist, noting that Billings "wrote his first tunes with chalk, on the walls of the [tannery], while tending the mill to grind bark."2

The early death of his father left Billings' family in an impecunious position. Taking up tanning as an adolescent, he likely worked in order to support his mother and younger siblings. And despite physical disabilities that must have proven inhibiting at some point -- a stunted leg, withered arm, and blind eye could not be shrugged off when a job entails such arduous labor -- Billings was involved with the tanning industry for the greater part of his life.3 Apparently, however, the love of music (of psalmody in particular) competed for the young man's attention.

Tanning was not Billings' love. It was an honest trade -- employment that, while grimy, fetid, and demanding, was honorable nonetheless. And to an extent, overcoming his handicaps probably reinforced Billings' self-esteem and garnered an additional amount of respect from his community. But it was singing that Billings felt most passionate about; the composition and performance of psalmody, both sacred and secular, was the endeavor he most heartily pursued. In a compromise between duty and passion, the tannery, then, also served as the young Billings' composing studio.

As one contemporary remembered, Billings was a man "with an uncommon negligence of person," his mind "as eccentric as his person was deformed to say nothing of the deformity of his habits." Yet Billings, that one-eyed, crooked-legged, withered-armed, snuff-sniffing tanner was also a "singular man... [and the] father of new [sic] England music."4 In addition to the regard he commanded as an artisan, Billings was also a popular singing-school master and a prolific writer of psalms, anthems, and fuguing tunes. Reputedly on friendly terms with Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and a sometimes music director at the fashionable Brattle Street Church, Billings also collaborated with Paul Revere in designing the frontispiece of his first collection of music (the first American songbook), The New-England Psalm-Singer. The esteem in which contemporary Bostonians held Billings was thus generally high. Today his reputation is that of a Yankee tunesmith and the foremost American composer of the eighteenth century.5

This essay about William Billings illustrates that he was more than a one-armed tanner and colorful musician who enjoyed a small share of late eighteenth-century celebrity. His biography offers a unique opportunity to explore Revolutionary era masculinity. Billings did not leave explicit written records explaining the extent to which gender shaped his life experiences. Yet, like other white men in late eighteenth-century New England, Billings lived during an historical moment and in a place with explicit standards of manhood representing a range of acceptable masculinities. From his individual experience, it is possible to demonstrate how these manly ideals shaped Billings, and alternately, how Billings himself authored his own individual sense of manliness. As this essay will explore, the publication of this "Musical Tanner's" first two songbooks, his tenure as a singing-school master, and his attempts to copyright his compositions offer clues as to how Billings' musical life and manhood intertwined.

In light of historians' recent considerations of gender, this essay seeks to understand William Billings' sense of manhood in the milieu of late eighteenth-century New England. Along the way, this essay also seeks to capture a bit of the complexity of late eighteenth-century masculinity and offer new direction in the study of early American manhood. Unfortunately, a gendered reading of Billings' life is made all the more conceptually challenging because of a general lack of "men's history." Although several historians have recently directed their research in this field, there remains relatively little in the study of early American manhood. While there is certainly no dearth of histories championing the heroic deeds of American men, this comparatively small batch of gender studies are not committed to making heroes out of men. The aim, rather, is to study men as gendered beings, to illustrate how manhood, like womanhood, was socially constructed, and to attempt to understand the consequences of masculinity. Glimpsing manliness, though, is further complicated by the fact that men did not as self-consciously document their conceptions of manhood in the eighteenth century as they would in the nineteenth. But this is not to imply that such conceptions went entirely unrecorded. As E. Anthony Rotundo writes, revealed in the written record of late eighteenth-century New Englanders -- in men's correspondence, sermons, magazines, popular literature are depictions of "what it meant to be a good man," and other "assumptions about the meaning of manhood."6