Presbyterian immigrants of Scotch-Irish descent, fleeing unrest and displacement in Ulster, began arriving in the American colonies beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing into the early nineteenth. Settling initially in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England, many continued their journey further into frontier areas of Virginia, North Carolina, and Ohio, where there were greater opportunities. Daniel Steele, whose name is inscribed in this remarkable illustrated and illuminated tunebook, is not identified but was of Scotch-Irish heritage based on the psalm tunes contained in these pages. They comprise ten of the twelve traditional tunes used with the Scottish Psalter published in 1650, the metrical version of the psalms in which singing constituted a primary feature of the denomination.

It has recently been recognized that a small number of such illuminated psalm books, once believed to be of Pennsylvania German origin, were actually made by members of Scotch-Irish communities. They are written in English, and the earliest examples include the sanctioned tunes that are written using Sol-Fa notation, a system of musical notes that enabled all congregants to sing the sacred psalms. This booklet of forty some-odd pages further includes several drawings that apparently derive from English and Irish sources, such as a depiction of Springhill Castle in Ireland. One illustration of the "Whimsical Lover and Frail Alice" is based on an engraving of 1786, an anti-Semitic lampoon on Sampson Gideon, a banker and financier of Jewish heritage who was raised as a Christian and granted an Irish peerage as First Baron Eardley of Spalding, County Lincoln. Another page illustrates the "Moon and Seven Stars," which may refer to the jig tune played by American patriots as they burned a British war ship in the harbor of Warwick, Rhode Island, in 1772, and may also have held Masonic connotations. A page of particular note shows a figure in the guise of a plague doctor, wearing the characteristic mask in the form of a beaked bird and carrying a scythe, a symbol of death. The imagery may be connected to two pages whose inscriptions indicate the death of an infant. These include Epitaph on an Infant, composed in 1794 by Samuel Coleridge and later emended in the form as it appears in this tunebook, and verses from Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs, first published in 1715.

Stacy C. Hollander, "Tunebook, 1821" exhibition copy for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020.