(b Somerset, 1708; d Philadelphia, 14 Sept 1781). English singer, teacher and composer. He was parish clerk of St Mary le Port, Bristol, and was a lay clerk in the cathedral choir from 1748 to 1752. He then emigrated to New York, where he remained from 1753 to 1773. He served as clerk of Trinity Church (1753–6), where he introduced, probably for the first time in North America, something like a full choir service on Anglican lines, using a choir of charity children. On 29 December 1755 he and William Cobham gave a concert of secular vocal and instrumental music for their own benefit – the first of many such events that Tuckey organized. In 1761 he directed an anthem on the death of George II. He appeared on 1 January 1762 as Mr Peachum in a performance of The Beggar’s Opera at the New Theatre in Chapel Street, ‘for his diversion’. On 16 January 1770 he put on a concert for his own benefit, whose second half was ‘the Overture and sixteen other Pieces’ from Handel’s Messiah, the work’s earliest American performance.
In 1773 Tuckey tried unsuccessfully to publish by subscription ‘a compleat set of church service’ for the Anglican Church. Some time after that he left New York and moved to Philadelphia, where in 1778 at the age of 70 he was engaged as clerk of St Peter’s Church. At least nine of Tuckey’s compositions circulated in American tune books; the popular tune ‘Psalm 33’, first printed in James Lyon’s Urania (Philadelphia, 1761/R), is convincingly attributed to him. His anthem Jehovah Reigns, from the same source, shows his control of composition techniques.
Bristol Cathedral chapter accounts (MS, Bristol Record Office)
A.H. Messiter: History of the Choir and Music of Trinity Church, New York (New York, 1906), 19
O.G. Sonneck: Early Concert-Life in America (1731–1800) (Leipzig, 1907/R), 160–62, 176–81
G.D.C. Odell: Annals of the New York Stage, i (New York, 1927)
L.W. Ellinwood: The History of American Church Music (New York, 1953), 51, 87–8
R.T. Daniel: The Anthem in New England before 1800 (Evanston, IL, 1966)
A. Aaron: ‘William Tuckey, a Choirmaster in Colonial New York’, MQ, lxiv (1978), 79–97 [incl. work-list]
N. Temperley: ‘First Forty: the Earliest American Compositions’, American Music, xv (1997), 1–25, esp. 14, 16
RICHARD CRAWFORD/NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY