Old Indian Hymn

Old Indian Hymn by Thomas Commuck (arr. Phil Snedecor, band setting by Robert Franzblau), featuring Moriah Ramos, flute. Recorded live by the Rhode Island Wind Ensemble on May 19, 2024. Videography by Jack Zornado jackzornado.com/.
Old Indian Hymn
View a 15-minute lecture on the origins of “Old Indian Hymn” by scholar and musician Gabriel Kastelle at • Old Indian Hymn: Uncov... .
A member of the Narragansett tribe, composer Thomas Commuck (1804-1855) was born in Charlestown, RI. In 1811 he began attending a school sponsored by the Society for Propagating the Gospel among Indians and Others in North America, continuing in attendance off and on through 1814. As a young man he moved to Oneida County NY, where he joined the community of Mohegans and Pequots later to become known as the Brothertown Indians. In 1831 he married a Pequot woman, Hanna Abner, and with the rest of the Brothertown community moved to Calumet County, WI, where he came to occupy a number of important positions within the Brothertown community; he acted as the tribe's postmaster, justice of the peace, and historian, and in 1844 was nominated by the Whig Party to stand as a candidate for the Wisconsin House of Representatives.
Commuck’s 1845 collection Indian Melodies has been described as the first published musical work by a Native American. The book contains 120 Christian hymns whose titles were taken from the names of Indian chiefs, tribes, and places; in the introduction to the volume Commuck states that "this has been done merely as a tribute of respect to the memory of some tribes that are now nearly if not quite extinct; also a mark of courtesy to some tribes with whom the author is acquainted." The book is one of the earliest written by a Native American to deal specifically with Native American culture.
A curious and moving footnote to “Old Indian Hymn” appears in Commuck’s 1845 publication: "The Narragansett Indians have a tradition, that the following tune was heard in the air by them, and other tribes bordering on the Atlantic coast, many years before the arrival of the whites in America; and that on their first visiting a church in Plymouth Colony, after the settlement of that place by the whites, the same tune was sung while performing divine service, and the Indians knew it as well as the whites. The tune therefore is preserved among them to this day."
This concert band setting of Old Indian Hymn was inspired by a 2019 arrangement for trumpet and piano by Phil Snedecor, associate professor of trumpet at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, CT. Both versions were created with knowledge and approval of the Brothertown Indian Nation.