The making of this book was a commission rather than a project. A revelation given to Emma Smith in July 1830, within months of the church's founding, directed her to make a selection of sacred hymns for its use, and the resulting volume appeared five years later. That is an unusual origin for a hymnal. Most are compiled by committees or by musicians; this one exists because the church's scripture told a particular woman to make it, and her name stands on the title page.
The work of preparing it fell substantially to William W. Phelps, a printer and editor who put the texts into shape, and who wrote several of the strongest new hymns in the collection himself. The delay between commission and publication was not idleness. The church moved twice in those years, lost a press to a mob in Missouri in 1833, and was building the Kirtland temple while the hymnal went through the press.
What resulted is a small book, ninety texts, and its contents show a movement working out what it was. Roughly a third are new, written inside the church and dealing with its own claims: restoration, gathering, a temple, the imminence of the millennium. The rest are borrowed from the Protestant hymnody its converts already knew, and a good many of those were edited, sometimes lightly and sometimes heavily, to remove what the church did not teach and to insert what it did. Reading the alterations is one of the better ways of seeing early Latter Day Saint theology take shape.