Writing William Billings

Billings was a self-taught composer, a lifelong member of Boston’s South End working class, and an active associate of the Whigs who spearheaded the American Revolution. He was a companion of Samuel Adams, with whom he often sang psalms. Paul Revere engraved the frontispiece for his first tunebook. And he tanned leather for most of his life.

Not surprisingly, he’s been the subject of scholarly work, including at least three monographs written by music historians, though their focus is musicological. These studies make some passing connections between Billings’s music and his life and times, but provide little linear narrative and granular detail of the sort expected in biography. We learn almost nothing about his personal life and private thoughts.

I’ve been writing about the quirky composer since my second book, How Sweet the Sound (2004) and always find more to say about him. “Lamentation over Boston,” his colorful adaptation of a Hebrew psalm to the American revolutionary cause, helped fuel my interest in what became Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (2016).

Existing scholarship leaves much work to be done reconstructing Billings’ family life and situating him in the political and cultural events of revolutionary Boston. Personal information on him is in short supply: Billings left behind no journals and only one letter. As Louis Benson wrote in 1915, “The personality and work of this one-eyed, illtaught, and enthusiastic natural genius, form an engaging theme, from whatever view-point it be approached. The only adequate materials for studying him are the music, treatises, prefaces, &c., contained in the series of his tune books.”

So what sources are available to historians and biographers? First of all, his musical output. The Complete Works of William Billings were published in four large volumes between 1977 and 1990. They run to more than 1500 pages, mainly musical transcriptions of his pieces but also prefaces and other miscellaneous writings included in his tunebooks, along with extensive commentary by the editors.

Several of his pieces have found their way into hymnals and other collections, including “Jordan,” “Creation,” and “When Jesus Wept.” Billings is especially beloved of shape-note singers, who regularly sing his pieces. Also called “fasola,” shape-note singing is an American heritage music, sung around the country by devotees every weekend. It is almost never performed for an audience; everyone who comes to a “lesson” is expect to participate. This entails sitting along one of the four sides—comprising treble voices, altos, tenors, and basses—of the distinctive “hollow square,” the rotating song leader standing in the middle. Shape-note singers use music first compiled in the 19^th century, and notated in four distinctive shapes: ovals, squares, triangles, and diamonds. The most widely used shape-note collection, The Sacred Harp, first published in 1844, includes fourteen of Billings’ works.

From the beginning Billings was publishing prose along with music, starting in 1770 with his first tunebook, the New-England Psalm-Singer. His second, The Singing Master’s Assistant (1778), features Billings’ writing at its most ebullient. It includes a lengthy letter “To the several Teachers of Music,” “A Musical Dictionary,” a letter “To the Goddess of Discord,” “An Encomium on Music,” “A Musical Creed; In Imitation of St Athanasius,” and an odd piece titled “Jargon”:

 

Let horrid Jargon split the Air,

And rive the Nerves asunder,

Let hateful Discord greet the Ear,

As terrible as Thunder

Arguably, the highwater mark of Billings’ literary career came in 1783, when he served as editor of Boston Magazine—for only one issue before being removed, apparently for his uncouth taste. Billings was drawn to lurid tales and animal allegories. The best known of these, titled “The porcupine, alias the hedge-hog; or, The fox turned preacher,” was published by Benjamin Edes, a Son of Liberty who also printed the staunchly Whig Boston Gazette.

The editor leaves the reader with no moral or conclusion to take away from the gruesome tale. And maybe that was part of the problem for customers. “A Boston Magazine…& who is the director? Mr. Billings, the psalm singer,” wrote an indignant reader named John Eliot. “I send you a subscription paper put into my hands. It is one way of getting rid of it.” His taste for gore might also have accounted, according to historian Michael Broyles, for Billings helping to publish The American Bloody Register in 1784. Modeled on so-called “execution sheets,” cheap tabloids popular on the streets of English cities, The Bloody Register offers “a true and complete history of the lives, last words, and dying confession of three of the most noted criminals…together with the dying confession of Alexander White, a murderer and pirate.”

That’s pretty much it for Billings’ writings. No journals or diaries. Only a handful of letters sent or received. The paucity of sources on Billings stands in striking contrast to the immense archive and historiography on revolutionary Boston, in which he is almost never mentioned. Even Stacy Schiff’s recent biography of Samuel Adams, which describes his singing, includes not a single reference to Billings. (Though Kenneth Silverman, in his massive study of art of the Revolution, credits Billings with being “one of the liveliest prose writers in eighteenth-century America.”)

The archives seem to have been well combed over by the authors of William Billings of Boston (1980), the eminent American music historian Richard Crawford and his co-author, David McKay, who did most of the archival digging. Significant spadework was also conducted by editors of the four-volume Collected Works, one of whom was Crawford.

My own search of family records, death notices, and wills in the New England Historic Genealogical Society turned up previously unreported discoveries. I found details about William Billings’ wife Lucy Swan’s family, based in Stoughton, Massachusetts, as well as about their eldest daughter, Abigail, her husband Amos Penniman, and their descendants. For years I’ve harbored a fantasy that a trove of personal papers might surface in someone’s attic, or mis-catalogued in a dusty archive. At this point that seems highly unlikely. There are many aspects of Billings’ experience, including some of the most important ones, researchers may never have access to.

But his life was too rich and interesting to leave alone. Billings seemed to me a bona fide Boston working-class hero and Renaissance man: he composed music, he wrote hymns and fanciful stories, he tanned leather. Could I write Billings into a historical novel, based on extensive research into his life and times, but filling out the many details of his personal life absent from the archive? That would solve the problem of the dearth of sources. When historical details are nonexistent, make them up. Not usually considered sound advice to historians, granted, but possibly warranted under these circumstances.

There were some other and possibly better reasons to attempt fiction. One had to do with audience. I thought historical fiction might be a way to reach a broader readership than a standard biography would, especially for a less familiar name like Billings. The challenge of writing in a different genre also appealed. During the pandemic I published my first novel, Learning from Loons, and mostly enjoyed the process of fictional invention.

Billings’ life certainly had a novelistic quality. It followed a kind of fall, rise, and fall—not quite rags to riches and back, but close. He began life with some advantages. He apparently received some early schooling. But at age 14, Billings’ father died, leaving his wife and children nothing from his estate. He was apprenticed to a tanner and began learning the trade, while also picking up sufficient knowledge of music to become a singing school instructor. Soon he began composing his own music, and at age 24 published his first tunebook.

Four years later, in 1774, Billings married Lucy Swan, a few months after meeting her at a singing school he taught in Stoughton, Mass. They had six children that survived childhood. He continued composing and teaching prolifically during the 1770s and 1780s, allowing him to buy a house on fashionable Newbury Street. And then, in Renaissance-man fashion, Billings turned his attention to literature.

After that, Billings’ fortunes declined. In the 1790s, he was required to take work as a scavenger and streetcleaner. His last musical work was an anthem, now lost, performed after the death of George Washington. Billings himself died in 1800 and was buried in an unmarked grave on Boston Common, where his devotees commemorate his death each year.

Some other facts about Billings: he had a voracious appetite for snuff and his appearance was unforgettable. “Billings was somewhat deformed in person,” wrote Nathaniel Gould in 1853, “blind with one eye, one leg shorter than the other, one arm somewhat withered, with a mind as eccentric as his person was deformed.” (Given that Gould was born in 1781, and Billings wasn’t teaching many singing schools in the 1790s, it’s unclear whether they actually met.) It is intriguing to speculate how Billings’ career might have been shaped by these disabilities, and what produced them. Judging from his occupations, they failed to constrain him much. He was apparently a successful tanner, a job that required considerable strength and dexterity. He traveled around New England to teach singing schools, which required considerable stamina and working as a Boston street clearer cannot have been easy.

In order to capture a variety of perspectives on Billings, I decided to structure my novel in three parts, each with a different narrator. Part One is narrated by Billings’ wife, Lucy. It begins with their meeting at the singing school in Stoughton in 1774. It relates their courtship, marriage, early years in Boston as fighting broke out, the privations of living in Boston under siege, and the birth of their first daughter, Abigail. Billings himself narrates Part Two. It recounts his childhood, coming of age and apprenticeship to a tanner, and increasing involvement in Whig politics and Boston’s music scene. It ends with the publication of his landmark tunebook, The New-England Psalm-Singer, in 1770. Part Three, narrated by the Billings’ eldest daughter, Abigail (nicknamed  Nabby), takes place in William’s final days. It consists of flashbacks and stream of consciousness that take place in her father’s final days, and at his visitation and burial. These events prompt Nabby to recall surprising conversations she had with her mother, Lucy, on her deathbed. Her account gives us a glimpse into the hidden underside of her strange, driven father.

As I worked on the novel I took inspiration from some recent historical fiction: Hilary Mantel’s superb trio of Cromwell novels, and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo. Of course, the illustrious example of Johnny Tremain also came to mind. Rereading it, I learned something remarkable about its author, Esther Forbes, who pulled off a publishing coup amid World War II. She managed to win a Pulitzer in 1943 for a biography of Paul Revere and a Newbery Medal the following year for Tremain, which she wrote in roughly eight months. Even Jill Lepore hasn’t done that.

These and many others have shored up my sense that fictionalizing Billings is not out of line for an historian of American music. My guiding principle was same as Margaret Atwood’s: Respect the facts as far as possible but extrapolate when the story called for it. As an academic historian, I felt some tension between adhering strictly to the known facts and the desire to tell a compelling story. One illustrative challenge was imagining William’s early life. For some reason I imagined him as a first-born or only child. That would have simplified the fictional task. But judging from his parents’ marriage date, he must have had older siblings. Then I discovered some notes I’d taken earlier but overlooked. According to Frank Metcalf, he was the fourth child born to William and Elizabeth Billings. Later archival research confirmed that Billings had a younger sister; I found a 1756 reference to a Mary Billings in the records of the New South Church, where William’s parents were members. 

I was sorely tempted to play around with what I knew about Billings’ birth family. But having hewed to the facts until then, why change course over a handful of siblings? I decided that elaboration where the facts were lacking was one thing, indeed necessary to creating a novel; adding or eliminating family members whole cloth was another matter. Of course, in the case of Billings, many of the “facts” come from sources written long after the fact and are far from unimpeachable, with later writers reiterating without verifying the work of earlier writers; some of the tales told about him are likely apocryphal.

That said, one of the most enjoyable parts of writing the novel was recreating encounters with historical figures: Samuel Adams, which several sources indicate did take place, and with Phillis Wheatley, which doesn’t exist in the historical record but seemed plausible, given the small circle of creatives in Revolutionary-era Boston. A somewhat lesser-known person, a shoemaker named George Robert Twelves Hewes, also wanders into my narrative.

The Musical Tanner is now complete. But even with an accelerated schedule, a novel would take much longer to get through the editorial and publication process than I had, if I wanted to reach readers during the year when many people will be thinking, however briefly, about the American Revolution. So I decided to publish it on Substack in serial form. Every Friday appears a new chapter, free of charge, scheduled to finish up sometime before July 2026.

All of us are about to be barraged with information about the nation’s founding. It’s time this unique and prolific early American got some of the recognition he deserves. I continue to work on a more conventional biography of Billings, taking a deeper dive into his rich published corpus. A colleague from Tulane, Dr. Leonard Raybon, founder of the Sacred Nine Project on early American religious music, has composed a one-act musical program that captures through musical pieces Billings’ life; we hope to stage it in venues around the country over the next year. But for now I’m happy to have my research represented by historical fiction. And that elusive trove of personal papers may yet surface. I’d be thrilled if this article encourages the scholar who eventually discovers them.

Further Reading:

Atwood, Margaret, et.al., AHR Forum: Histories and Historical Fictions. American Historical Review, Dec. 1998.

Barbour, J. Murray, The Church Music of William Billings. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960.

Barrett, Andrea, Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction. New York, Norton, 2024.

Benson, Louis F., “The English Hymn: Its Development and Use in Worship. New York: Hodden & Stoughton, 1915.

Billings, William, The Complete Works of William Billings, edited by Hans Nathan, Karl Kroeger, and Richard Crawford. Boston: American Musicological Society & The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1977-1990.

Brewer, Charles E. Singing Sedition: Piety and Politics in the Music of William Billings. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2017.

Broyles, Michael, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Cook, Nym, “William Billings in the District of Maine, 1780.” American Music 9:3,

Autumn 1991.

Gould, Nathaniel D., Church Music in America. Boston: A. N. Johnson, 1853.

Lepore, Jill, “What Was the American Revolution For?” The New Yorker, 10 November 2025.

McKay, David P., and Richard Crawford. William Billings of Boston: Eighteenth-century Composer. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Metcalf, Frank J., American Writers and Compilers of Sacred Music. New York: The Abingdon Press, 1925.

Schiff, Stacy. The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2022.

Silverman, Kenneth, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763-1789. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1976.

Young, Alfred F., and Harvey J. Kaye. Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

 

This article originally appeared in January 2026

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David Stowe teaches religious studies at Michigan State University. A musician and historian, he has published several works of non-fiction, most recently Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137 (2016) in addition to short fiction, poems, and a novel.