This is the first modern edition of the collected works of Supply Belcher, Maine's most celebrated early composer, who was known in his day as the Handel of Maine. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Maine was part of the northeastern frontier, a sparsely settled area that held to the old ways. Thus, its compilers reprinted and singers sang the music of Billings, Read, Swan, Holden, and other Yankee psalmodists long after a reform movement had swept them from the galleries of southern New-England churches. Belcher was a man much honored in the region as a musician, a public servant, and a civic leader. Following military service in the Revolutionary War, he opened Belcher's Tavern, where local musicians frequently gathered for sings. In addition to being a composer, Belcher was also a singer, a violinist, and a prominent member of the Stoughton Musical Society. He published seventy-four works between l788, when his first tune appeared in print, and 1819, when his final contributions to psalmody were issued. As this edition of his collected works reveals, his vigorous and skillful pieces show him to have been an original and creative spirit in psalmody, and even today are worthy of attention and performance.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

As early as the eighteenth century, New England's ministers were decrying public morality. Evangelical leaders such as Jonathan Edwards called for rulers to become spiritual as well as political leaders who would renew the people's covenant with God. The prosperous merchant Jonathan Belcher (1682-1757) self-consciously strove to become such a leader, an American Nehemiah. As governor of three royal colonies and early patron of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), Belcher became an important but controversial figure in colonial America. In this first biography of the colonial governor, Michael C. Batinski depicts a man unusually riddled with contradictions. While governor of Massachusetts, Belcher deftly maneuvered longstanding rivals toward a political settlement; yet as chief executive of New Hampshire, he plunged into bitter factional disputes that destroyed his administration. The quintessential Puritan, Belcher learned to thrive in London's cosmopolitan world and in the whiggish realm of the marketplace. He was at once the courtier and the country patriot. An insightful blend of social and political history, this biography demands that Belcher be recognized as the embodiment of the Nehemiah, perhaps as important in his own realm as Cotton Mather was in religious circles. Grappling with the contradictions of Belcher's actions, the author explains much about the complexities of the world in which Belcher lived and wielded influence.