by Jim Fussell

This article was originally created as a handout for a workshop offered during the 2026 Quaker Institute gathering on the subject “Sing a New Song”. It is based on the article Singing in the Spirit in Early Quakerism by Kenneth Carroll.

The Surprise

Most people think of early Quakers as a silent people. That is true—but it is not the whole truth. Early Friends also sang. They sang in prison cells, in the stocks, under the whip, and in their meetings for worship. What they refused was not singing but singing from the official church’s psalter or songbook in the same way the refused prayer book or ‘Book of Common Prayer.’. This workshop asks why that distinction mattered so much to early Friends, and what it might mean for us today.

What They Refused—and Why

In seventeenth-century England, most churches sang the Psalms of David in rhymed, metered versions printed in a popular book by Sternhold and Hopkins published between 1549 and 1621. Every Sunday, congregations opened that book and sang David’s words—his prayers of humility, his cries of fear, his expressions of mourning.

Early Friends had a pointed objection: David’s words described David’s inner condition. Singing them honestly required actually being in that condition. A roomful of ordinary people—some proud, some perfectly cheerful—singing ‘I go mourning all the day’ on cue from a printed page was not worship. It was performance. It was, as Quaker John Whitehead, 25, wrote in 1655, ‘singing lies to the Lord.’ The deeper principle: when God wants a people to sing, God will tell them what to say. No songbook can do that. Only the Spirit can.

What Quakers Actually Did

Spirit-led singing meant the song arose unbidden—from what was alive in the Spirit at that moment. It was understood as a form of vocal ministry, like a spoken message. You did not choose to sing; you were moved to. Some of the most vivid accounts come from Friends under persecution:

“A little before midnight the power of the Lord came upon me and sweet melody was within me and about midnight I was compelled to sing, and the power was so great it made all my fellow prisoners amazed.” —Thomas Holme, Chester Prison, 1654

“I never startled at a blow; but the Lord made me to rejoice, and I Sung aloud; and the Beadle said, Do ye Sing, I shall make ye Cry by and by.” —Barbara Blaugdone, after a public whipping

Two women held in the stocks at Evesham were ordered not to sing or their hands would be locked in as well. They sang anyway, “moved eternally by the Lord.” George Fox recorded whole meetings breaking into audible song together. A Scottish Friend described bystanders weeping and saying: “such a heavenly sound we never heard in either old or new church.”

Robert Barclay captured the standard: singing is “very sweet and refreshful, when it proceeds from a true sense of God’s Love in the Heart, and arises from the Divine Influence of the Spirit.” The key is ‘words suitable to the present condition’—not David’s condition, not a performed condition, but what is genuinely alive right now.

When It Got Complicated

Any practice grounded in immediate spiritual experience faces a hard question: how do you tell the real thing from an imitation? Early Friends wrestled with cases of singing that disrupted meetings, or that seemed driven by emotion rather than genuine leading.

In 1675, London Yearly Meeting issued a careful minute—not shutting the practice down, but trying to hold freedom and discipline together:

“Reverent Singing, breathing forth a heavenly Sound of Joy with Grace, with the Spirit and with understanding… is not to be Quenched or discouraged by any. But where any… are more unmoderate, or do either in Imitation, which rather Burthens than Edifys, such ought to be privately Admonished.” —London Yearly Meeting, Minute 42, 1675

Three categories: genuine Spirit-led singing (honor it), excess or imitation (correct gently), outright rebellion (address more firmly). It is a model of Quaker discernment.

What Happened to the Practice

After 1675, open Spirit-led singing in meetings faded—but it did not vanish. It transformed into the chanting or singsong delivery of Quaker traveling ministers, sometimes called ‘the tone’ or ‘the twang.’ In Ireland, this tuneful preaching moved listeners to tears into the nineteenth century. Elias Hicks was known for his singsong cadence. Kenneth Carroll, the scholar whose 1984 article underlies this workshop, closes with a memory of hearing an elderly Minister Anna E.C. Fisher (1878-1966) give her message in the old singsong way at North Carolina Yearly Meeting, Conservative—and knowing he was hearing something very rare.

Questions for Reflection

  • What is the difference between bringing a song and being given one?
  • Have you ever experienced the tension between being prepared for worship and being open to something unplanned? What did that feel like?
  • The 1675 minute tried to honor genuine leading while gently correcting imitation and excess. How does your community hold that balance today?
  • This weekend is about singing a new song. What might the early Quaker insistence that the song must be given—not brought—offer to that project?

Jim Fussell is a member of Friends Meeting of Washington in Baltimore Yearly Meeting. He has spent the last several years living in Richmond, Indiana, attending West Richmond Meeting.

He was a Kenneth Carroll Scholar at Pendle Hill in the spring of 2026. He carries particular concerns about Quaker witness and our “testimonies” as well as the way marginalized groups of Friends including enslaved people and LGBTQ+ Friends have played a central role in their own movement towards liberation.

This handout is based on Kenneth L. Carroll’s article, “Singing in the Spirit in Early Quakerism,” Quaker History, 73 (1984), p. 1-13.