The Bay Pslam Book was the first book published in North America. It was compiled by thirty of the pilgrim ministers after the community came to the consensus that their current Psalter was not close enough to the original Hebrew. It appeared in 1640, just twenty years after their arrival.

The book’s creation represents a typically American scene: Northern European followers of a Middle-Eastern religion sitting in a New England cottage, pouring over songs written in dead language also from the Middle East, attempting to translate them into their own peculiar tongue (itself a mongrel mix of German, Latin-by-French, and Celtic) to bring it closer to an ideal version.

The result was a book of hymns that survived over the course of several editions, only falling out of use over a century later.

The preface to ed. no. 1. Note the Hebrew characters in the top right-hand corner. I do not know if Hezekiah Usher (the book publisher and the first recorded printer in North America) brought over his own type, or if he had to make these characters by hand. Either way, that the book could be produced at all, just twenty years after the establishment of the colony, represents a significant achievement.



Psalm 23: The Lord to Me a Shepard Is

Now for the music. There is no definitive setting of the lyrics in the BPB. Music was not included until the ninth edition (1698 – over 40 years after landing at Plymouth Rock). Likely, they just sung the old tunes from previous translations. Regardless, the words changed little between printings. Here is a performance of Pslam 23, from that same 1698 edition:

Note the strange syntax; it is far less direct than the King James:

KJV: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

BPB: The Lord to me a shepherd is,

Want therefore shall not I

He in the folds of tender grass doth make me down to lie

I am no authority on Biblical Hebrew, but when you take the two verses together, it seems rather obvious that the KJV translators did not even try to preserve the original grammar. Each sentence is a simple string of “Subject-Verb-Object”: “The Lord is my Shepherd,” “He maketh me to lie down,” and so on. On the other hand, the BPB makes much freer use of clauses, expressing the same information but in a more complex and jumbled order. “Want therefore shall not I”: Verb, Subject. “He in the folds of tender grass doth make me down to lie”: Subject, prepositional phrase, Verb, Direct Object, and so on.

Considering this, the music is oddly (though also predictably) elegant. It follows the standard late-baroque idiom. The overall effect, especially when sung with chamber choir as with this recording, is fluid and clear. You might even call it pure.

For Fun: a Modernist Setting

The Psalms (all versions) have been set to music by multiple composers. With words that seem out of order, perhaps a high-modernist rendering is even more fitting – more than one critic has referred to this music as “jumbled.” This piece was written by Jack Beeson:

Jack Beeson (1921-2010) was a celebrated opera composer, active from the 1950s through 1990s. In his youth, he studied with Bartok and attended Eastman. As an adult, he moved among the highest circles of American academic music, serving as professor at Columbia and working variously with the New York City Opera, Julliard, and other renowned institutions.



He is perhaps best known for Lizzie Borden, an opera about a woman in Fall River Mass., accused of murdering her father and step-mother with an axe.



Lili Boulanger comes to mind, doesn’t she? Her settings of the Pslams, written decades earlier, evoke a similar sense of ambiguity and portent.

Beeson at the piano

Boulanger at the piano

Works Cited & Consulted

JACK BEESON. Opera News, 00303607, Sep2010, Vol. 75, Issue 3

Lowens, Irving. “The Bay Psalm Book in 17th-Century New England.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 8, no. 1 (1955): 22-29. doi:10.2307/829584.



