Lives of Consequence: Blacks in Early Kittery & Berwick in the Massachusetts Province of Maine

Abstract

designed and fabricated by the legendary Boston publisher David R. Godine. The collection’s two paperbound volumes with heavy card covers are protected by a durable slipcase. These three elements bear different early American colors—Volume One is earthen red, Volume Two deep lime, and the case dark teal. The pages, cut from the finest stock, are two inches longer and wider than standard oblong tunebooks. While this size makes the volumes difficult for singers to handle and it is not clear that the covers can stand up to frequent use, the scale gives the scores a remarkable presence on the page. Cooke has added to the collection’s attractiveness by filling open space with wonderful images of manuscript sources, historic tunebook scores, composer portraits, and splendid gravestone photographs from the Farber Collection of the American Antiquarian Society. In sum, American Harmony is the Rolls-Royce of contemporary tunebooks, a career-long labor of love by a leading scholar of early American psalmody, beautifully produced by the pre-eminent book arts publisher in New England. Its purpose is not to establish a new academic canon for American singing school music, but rather to present Nym Cooke’s considered choice of works from that tradition with the highest possible standards of scholarship, graphic design, and book production. The collection realizes all of these goals with elegance and excellence, but its achievement comes with an unfortunate consequence. Most of today’s revival singers cannot afford a Rolls.