Millennial praises

From the very beginning in the 1770s, singing was an important part of the worship services of the Shakers, formally known as the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. Yet until the early nineteenth century, nearly all Shaker songs were wordless--expressed in unknown tongues or as enthusiastic vocalizations. Only when Shaker missionaries moved west into Ohio and Kentucky did they begin composing hymn texts, chiefly as a means of conveying the sect's unconventional religious ideas to new converts. In 1812-13, the Shakers published their first hymnal. This venture, titled Millennial Praises, included the texts without music for one hundred and forty hymns and elucidated the radical and feminist theology of the Shakers, neatly distilled in verse. This scholarly edition of the hymnal joins the texts to original Shaker tunes for the first time. One hundred and twenty-six of the tunes preserved in the Society's manuscript hymnals have been transcribed from Shaker musical notation into modern standard notation, thus opening this important religious and folk repertoire to modern scholars. Many texts are presented with a wide range of variant tunes from Shaker communitie