Old 100th

The story

"Old Hundredth", or "Old Hundred", is a hymn tune in long metre from the second edition of the Genevan Psalter, usually attributed to the French composer Louis Bourgeois (c. 1510 – c. 1560). The psalter was compiled over a number of years in Geneva, a centre of the Reformation, in answer to John Calvin's teaching that the communal singing of psalms in the people's own language is a foundation of church life; in the Catholic practice of the time the sacred texts were chanted in Latin by the clergy alone. Bourgeois and other Calvinist musicians supplied new melodies and adapted others from sacred and secular sources. Calvin meant them to be sung in unison in church, with harmonised versions for singing at home, and the psalter was completed in 1562.

In Geneva the tune was set to a French paraphrase of Psalm 134. It takes its English name from the 100th Psalm, in the version "All People That on Earth Do Dwell" attributed to the Scottish clergyman William Kethe, who was in exile at Geneva while the Scottish Reformation was only beginning; it first appeared in the Anglo-Genevan Psalter of 1561. Any hymn in long metre, four lines of eight syllables, fits the tune. The Doxology, "Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow", written in 1674 by Thomas Ken, a bishop of the Church of England, as the last verse of his "Awake, My Soul, and With the Sun", is the text most often sung to it in the United States, where it is especially linked with the Mainline Protestant churches. Isaac Watts's paraphrase of Psalm 117 is sung to it, shape-note singers of the Sacred Harp use it for Tate and Brady's Psalm 95, and Hiram Bingham I translated a Hawaiian version, Hoʻonani i ka Makua mau.

It also carries German Lutheran chorales, among them Paul Eber's "Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir", after Philipp Melanchthon, which Johann Sebastian Bach used as the cantus firmus of his chorale cantata BWV 130. A Voluntary on the Old Hundredth for organ is ascribed to John Blow or to his pupil Henry Purcell. Ralph Vaughan Williams arranged Kethe's version, with a brass fanfare and a 1621 setting by John Dowland, for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, where it was sung.

The tune runs through later music and writing: Hubert Parry's Three Chorale Fantasias, Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Trio in C minor, Virgil Thomson's score for The Plow that Broke the Plains and Paul Hindemith's Trauermusik (both 1936), and Benjamin Britten's cantata St Nicolas (1948). In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer the congregation sings "Old Hundred" when the boys believed dead appear at their own funeral. It was the first piece transmitted by telephone, at Alexander Graham Bell's first demonstration before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston on 10 May 1876.

What it says

Kethe's words are a metrical paraphrase of Psalm 100, which calls on all people on earth to praise God; the Doxology sung to the same tune is a single verse of praise. The tune is plain and stately, in long metre (four lines of eight syllables), made for a whole congregation to sing together.

The words