• Source: Chester (song)

"Chester" is a patriotic anthem composed by William Billings and sung during the American Revolutionary War. Billings wrote the first version of the song for his 1770 songbook The New England Psalm Singer, and made improvements for the version in his The Singing Master's Assistant (1778). It is the latter version that is best known today.
The name of the song reflects a common practice of Billings's day, in which tunes were labeled with (often arbitrarily chosen) place names. Billings's song evidently has little more to do with any particular town named Chester than his famous hymn "Africa" has to do with Africa. The idea behind this practice was that by labeling the tunes independently, one could sing them to different words without creating confusion (indeed, this later did happen; see below).




Tune in version of 1778




Parts labeled "Treble, Counter, Tenor, and Bass" correspond to the modern SATB four-voice choir. However, the melody is in the tenor part, not the treble part.




Lyrics


Although this cannot be established with certainty, it appears that these lyrics are by Billings himself.




Later uses


The song was later provided with religious (as opposed to patriotic) words by Philip Doddridge, and in this form is a favorite of Sacred Harp singers. The Doddridge words are as follows:

A slightly altered version of this text and the music by Billings was recorded in 1975 by the Old Stoughton Musical Society for their LP album, "An Appeal to Heaven".
20th century American composer William Schuman employed the tune in his New England Triptych (1956) and later expanded it into his Chester Overture.
Bernard Herrmann quoted the tune prominently in his score for the Colonial Williamsburg orientation film, Williamsburg: the Story of a Patriot.
An instrumental version of the song was used as background music for CBS's Bicentennial Minutes segments.
The HBO miniseries John Adams has a scene in episode 1 where a group of men sing this song together.
There is a concert band piece called Chester Variations, arranged by Elliot Del Borgo.




Book


The Singing Master's Assistant, in which the final version of "Chester" was published, is in print today in a scholarly edition by Hans Nathan (University Press of Virginia, 1977, ISBN 0-8139-0839-6).
The Stoughton Musical Society's Centennial Collection of Sacred Music, which contains a version with the later text and was published in Boston in 1878; reprint by DaCapo Press, 1980, with New Introduction by Roger L. Hall.




References






External links


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Chester

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