About
The Christian Harmony Index provides information about the music and poetry in William Walker's Christian Harmony tunebook and the people who created the psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, and anthems in the book.
William “Singing Billy” Walker published the Christian Harmony in 1867 and then reprinted it in 1873 with minor changes. A revision in 1901 failed to gain acceptance in the singing community, but John Deason and O. A. Parris compiled a Christian Harmony revision in 1958 that gained wide acceptance in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. In western North Carolina, singers continued to use reprints of the 1873 Christian Harmony, which singers referred to as the North Carolina Book to distinguish it from The Deason-Parris Revision, which singers called the Alabama Book. The Christian Harmony Index provides a concordance between these versions of the book and the 2010 Revision that combined them together.
Creation of the Index
When The Christian Harmony, 2010 Combined Edition needed to be reprinted, the Christian Harmony Music Company solicited help on improving the music and text attributions in the book, many of which were inaccurate or missing. Rachel Hall and Robert Kelley did most of the work researching tune origins, sources of song arrangements, authors of texts, and dates of first publication. Robert Kelley used this research to publish an early version of this database online in 2013.
The present index corrects many inaccurate and incomplete attributions in the 2013 database and greatly expands the amount of data available on the songs and their creators. The content of the earlier database was corrected and used to form the basis of the new database, but the new database structure was built from the ground up beginning in 2021.
This web resource is coded in PHP to access a MySQL database.
Credits
SQL database researched, designed, and created, and PHP web interface coded by Robert T. Kelley.
Thanks to Rachel Hall for researching a large number of tune origins and arrangers.
Thanks to Rebekah Logan for her work converting data from text format into database table format.
Thanks also to Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg and Bill Hollingsworth for serving as reviewers for the index and providing a large number of suggestions that have greatly improved this resource.
Provide Feedback on the Index
Please contact Robert Kelley with corrections, suggestions, or newly discovered song information or biographical information.
Notes on the Index
Composer, arranger, author, text arranger, and text translator names have been listed as they are printed in The Christian Harmony, 2010 Revision, with certain exceptions. Some given names are written out in full where only initials are given in the Christian Harmony, especially when other sources were found that attribute songs to incorrect individuals with the same initials, or when the person's full name was difficult to find.
Hymn meters are listed using the format that William Walker used in the 1867 and 1873 Christian Harmony. The modern convention is to use C.M.D. (Common Meter Double) to indicate when a tune is sung to two four-line stanzas of text, but the Christian Harmony calls this hymn meter C.M. 8 lines.
How to Cite This Resource
To cite the entire database: Kelley, Robert T. The Christian Harmony Index, 2023, https://www.christianharmonyindex.com/.
To cite the entry for a composer, arranger, author, or translator: Kelley, Robert T. “O. A. Parris.” The Christian Harmony Index, 2023, https://christianharmonyindex.com/source/Parris/O.+A..
To cite the entry for a song: Kelley, Robert T. “Resignation (First).” The Christian Harmony Index, 2023, https://christianharmonyindex.com/tune/107.