BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY
Adams, Charles Augustus. A collection of sacred hymns, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Selected and published by Charles A. Adams. Bellows Falls: Printed by S. M. Blake. 1845.
iv[5]-160 pp. 10.5 cm.
Charles A. Adams remains an obscure figure. Born in Jaffrey, Cheshire County, New Hampshire, August 17, 1824, he was called in April 1844 to campaign for Joseph Smith in New Hampshire. At some point he labored in Peterborough, seven miles from his place of birth, so it would have been natural for him to have his hymnbook printed in Bellows Falls, thirty miles to the northwest. When the Saints went west, Adams remained in New England. In 1855 he married Sarah Holder in Lynn, Massachusetts; five years later he died.
Adams’ marriage record gives his occupation as “music teacher.” Probably his hymnbook grew out of his musical background and perhaps includes some of his own compositions. The book contains 104 hymn texts, preceded by a preface which is taken from the 1835 hymnal, and followed by an index of first lines. Most of the songs came from two sources: seventy-three are from the 1841 Nauvoo hymnal; and twenty others are from the 1839 Elsworth book. Four songs do not seem to be in any other Mormon hymnbook. Adams’s book includes forty of the hymns in the 1835 hymnal and fifty-two of those in the 1840.
Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church. Volume One, 1830-1847. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, Religious Studies Center, [1997]). Item 289, p. 331.
Used by permission of the author and the Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University