Term used from the 18th century for a slow, heterophonic style of unaccompanied congregational hymn singing found in rural Protestant churches in Britain and the USA. It is also variously called the ‘Common Way’ or the ‘Usual Way’, to distinguish it from ‘Regular Singing’. The practice is orally transmitted. The tempo is extremely slow, lacking rhythmic drive and precision. Singers may diverge on their way from one tune note to the next, resulting in heterophony that is sometimes perceived as conscious embellishment. In some cases a harmonic element is present.
The origins of the ‘Old Way’ are uncertain. Similar practices have been noted among German-speaking groups tracing their descent from the 16th-century Anabaptists (see Amish and Mennonite music), and in several Scandinavian countries. This gives rise to the possibility that it preserves an ancient, pre-Reformation mode of popular singing that was once prevalent in northern Europe. In Britain and North America it has generally been associated with Lining out: the practice of reading (or later, chanting) each line of a hymn or metrical psalm by a parish clerk or precentor before it was sung by the congregation. Lining out was first discussed in the 1640s but may have existed before. Contemporary descriptions of the ‘Old Way of Singing’ tend to be pejorative. The earliest representation in music notation dates from 1686.
The ‘Old Way of Singing’ was quickly suppressed when organs, rehearsed choirs, or band instruments were introduced into worship, as they were in most denominations during the 18th century. It had probably disappeared from Anglican churches by about 1770. The practice survived longest in remote areas where such facilities were not available, and in theologically conservative sects that still maintained the Puritan ban on all aids to singing in worship. It can be heard today in Free Presbyterian churches in the Western Isles of Scotland and in Primitive and Regular Baptist churches in southern Appalachia.
GroveA (N. Temperley)
J. Cotton: Singing of Psalmes, a Gospel-Ordinance (London, 1647)
A New and Easie Method to Learn to Sing by Book (London, 1686)
N. Chauncey: Regular Singing Defended (New London, CT, 1728)
J. Mainzer: The Gaelic Psalm Tunes of Ross-shire (Edinburgh, 1844)
W.H. Tallmadge: ‘Baptist Monophonic and Heterophonic Hymnody in Southern Appalachia’, YIAMR, xi (1975), 106–36
N. Temperley: ‘The Old Way of Singing: its Origin and Development’, JAMS, xxxiv (1981), 511–44
NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY