David W. Music

    Have you ever wished for a law against poor singing in church?
    As it happens, at various times the legal system has actually gotten involved with the quality of singing
    in American churches.
One early instance of this was reported in the diary of John Hull, the Puritan treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. According to Hull, in 1657 a woman named Joan Hogg would “sometime sing so indecently and loud, that, for this, she was first arrested by the church, and committed to the prison and to the civil magistrate, that she might not disturb the congregation.”
Legal entanglements over singing in church were not confined to the seventeenth century, the Puritans, nor New England. In the January 24, 1878, issue of the Texas Baptist Herald, J. B. Link, the editor, noted that
Mr. and Mrs. Hart of Houston have got into trouble because they sang out of tune in church. They are fond of singing and would sing and make discord while the choir was trying to make harmony, and in consequence they have been arraigned before the court on the charge of disturbing public worship and have been bound over to answer in the sum of $100.00 each for being unable to put the fine points on “Old Hundred.”
More recently (1990), the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram reported that a woman was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for disrupting services at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in San Antonio by singing songs of her own choosing. The charges were dropped at the request of the church’s priest, who noted that he had heard the woman was now “worshipping elsewhere.”                      fine