A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns (1801)

Richard Allen led his congregation out of St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church over segregated seating and gathered Bethel Church in Philadelphia in 1794, the congregation that would become the founding church of the African Methodist Episcopal Church when Allen formally organized the denomination in 1816. Between those two dates, in 1801, he did something a congregation's founder does not always do himself: he sat down and compiled its hymnal.

Fifty four hymns, printed that year by John Ormrod in Philadelphia, drew on material already circulating from Isaac Watts and from John and Charles Wesley, set alongside pieces attributed to Allen and to members of his own congregation, printed without author credits or musical notation. Later that same year Allen issued an enlarged edition under a new title, A Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs. Hymnologists identify the 1801 collection as the first hymnal published by an African American for African American worshippers, a distinction that sits naturally beside Allen's larger role: a man who would not accept a congregation shaped by someone else's seating chart was, unsurprisingly, also unwilling to hand its songbook to someone else's selections.

Before 1801, a hymn's chorus belonged to that hymn and no other, fixed in place the way a verse and its own melody stay fixed. Allen's collection is credited by hymnologists as the first published hymnal to break that pairing deliberately, printing refrains and choruses meant to be sung with whichever hymn a congregation chose, freely interchangeable rather than locked to a single text. That is a small technical change with a large practical consequence: a congregation singing without notation, from memory and call and response as much as from the printed page, gains a shared musical vocabulary that can move fluidly between texts rather than relearning a new chorus every time the hymn changes.

The form did not stay confined to Bethel Church. Interchangeable refrains of the kind this collection published became a defining feature of the camp meeting hymnals that flourished in the following decades, suggesting a musical practice already alive in oral tradition before 1801 that Allen's hymnal was among the first to fix in print rather than the first to invent outright. A founding congregation's own songbook, in other words, turned out to be an early and durable record of how American religious song was already starting to be sung.