Introduction

The first newspapers in what would become the United States were launched by colonial journalists during the 18th century. The Thirteen Colonies had scarcely been founded before far-sighted editors and writers began turning out broadsheets crowded with news and features. Amongst these were accounts of music.

These accounts could be lofty, such as this reference to a harp-playing singer from Greek mythology:  

Orpheus is said, in old poetic fables, to have built a city by the force of his musick, the sound of his harp charming even the trees and stones to collect themselves together …[1]

However, most colonial journalists focused on more earthly sounds. Many wrote astute commentary about music in the nation’s first newspapers; these texts provide contemporaneous accounts of the first forms of American music.   

Although largely overlooked by popular culture scholars, the writings by colonial journalists warrant study. Emblazoned with printers’ ink on rough-hewn newsprint, these texts embodied a set of values, attitudes, and advocacies that foreshadowed those of today’s music press.

Yes, it appears these periodicals didn’t feature the type of music criticism occurring in European newspapers and magazines. But colonial newspapers did attempt to shape readers’ musical tastes and related social attitudes.

This is evident in the earliest examples by colonial journalists dating back to the 1730s and 1740s. These texts established a model of irreverent, socially conscious journalism that often resisted the dominant culture.   

A Dispute

In company the other night, I was entertained by some gentlemen for the space of three hours in a dispute about music.[2]

Thus began one of the first lengthy pieces on music by a colonial journalist. The “dispute” was whether music could be appreciated solely by the senses, or, as the writer argued, appreciation required mental engagement.

The piece was written in 1736 for the Virginia Gazette, the colony’s first newspaper.

The writer, likely a student at the neighboring College of William & Mary, said:   

Nothing can be more unjust than to imagine that the sole pleasure in hearing good music consists in the sound, or that it is nothing but the tickling of the ear and a mere delight of sense,  as they were pleased to call it. [3]

The writer refers to the Enlightenment debate between rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists argued that reason is the main source of knowledge, while empiricists maintained that knowledge is derived from sensory experience.

They elaborated:

The hearing of two or more sounds is the operation of the senses, but the perceiving of harmony between them is the act of the mind. To call music, therefore, the pleasure of the ear is no less improper than it would be to call reading the pleasure of the eye or writing the pleasure of the hand. The ear, the eye, and the hand furnished the materials, but it is the operation of the mind upon those materials that gives the delight.[4]

Even dissenting music reviewer Lester Bangs would have concurred with that. Great music warrants thoughtful consideration, even as it pleases our senses.

An Ear for Music

The Virginia Gazette was based in Williamsburg, the capital of colonial Virginia. The town was also an early center of music and the arts. Perhaps this was why the newspaper published critiques of idle listening, such as this 1736 text by a colonial journalist:   

This power of perceiving, of harmony and sounds, is what is generally called an ear for music. Those who are possessed of it will enter into the remarks I am making. As for those who have it not, it would be as impossible to give them any notion of the pleasure arising from harmony as to convey to the blind man an idea of color.

I would therefore advise those gentlemen who find themselves unmoved by harmony … to look upon music as a thing out of their province, and I warn them from intermeddling with it in any manner whatsoever, for fear of making that foolish figure which is so well described in the old proverb, Afinus ad Lyram.[5] 

This phrase means, “an ass to the lyre,” referring to an incompetent person. In this case, it refers to someone incapable of appreciating music.

The piece was part of a series of letters from a writer using the pseudonym “The Monitor.” The Gazette published them as a regular front-page feature akin to a column.

One scholar believes they were written by a coterie of William & Mary students because “they evince a transference of themes and characters from the classical literature that dominated the school’s curriculum …”[6]

This article hinted at discussions on music, aesthetics, and listening by future music journalists. Written in the 1730s, the piece reflected the state of journalism and musical culture in the thirteen colonies, 130 years after the founding of Jamestown.  

The Hellfire Club

When the Virginia Gazette published the Monitor piece, the four-page newspaper was only two months old. It was the latest in a series of newspapers published in the colonies.

The first was Boston’s Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, launched in 1690. However, the colonial governor shut it down after the first issue because he found some of the content to be offensive. The government then announced that a license would be required for printing any materials thereafter. The action had a chilling effect on the start-up of newspapers in the colonies for over a decade.

But in 1721, an upstart Boston paper rose and took on the establishment – the New England Courant. Printer James Franklin published the paper, assisted by his younger brother Benjamin, who would become a Founding Father of the United States. Newspaper historian John Tebbel wrote:

In starting the Courant, James could not have become a publisher at a better time, nor one more calculated to demonstrate the newspaper’s future usefulness as a propaganda medium. It had already demonstrated its value as a government-controlled press designed to serve the purposes of authority. Now it became a vehicle for the growing body of dissent in the colony.

Tebbel added:

At the bottom of the new dissent was resentment against [Cotton] Mather and the powerful Congregationalism which had dominated the colony for so long …

Cotton Mather found the Courant intolerable. He termed its writers “the Hellfire Club” and asserted that “the practice of supporting and publishing every week a libel on purpose to lessen and blacken and burlesque the virtuous and principled ministers of religion in a country, and render the services of their ministry despicable, even detestable to the people, is a wickedness that was never known before …”

Like the colonial journalists who preceded them, future music writers would rail against puritanical moralizing for generations to come.

Satirizing Moral Panic

The Puritans were a group of English Protestants who rejected the Church of England. Many came to the New England colonies to find religious freedom and to establish churches and schools. They became a dominant cultural force.

Puritans adhered to a strict moral code. For instance, they opposed dancing on the grounds that it led to promiscuity. Additionally, Puritans opposed secular music. Even in worship services, they forbid organs, other musical instruments, and singing, especially by women.  

James Franklin wasn’t the only colonial journalist willing to criticize Puritanism. For example, one editor published a piece satirizing Puritans’ objections to musical instruments and singing in church services:

[A writer] proposes that between the services on Sundays and holidays, we may be entertained, sometimes with a new minuet, sometimes a rigadoon, but above all, a reviving jig after the sermon. And he would not have us restrained from the violin, hautboy [oboe], trumpet, French horn, flute, et cetera, any more than the organ, which is modern music compared to some others.

He further proposes that there may be no vocal music in churches unless Italian eunuchs might be imported for that purpose, and one or more placed in every parish to sing a favorite song from one of our best operas …

He has been informed by physicians that there is no more danger of getting the piles at church than at a playhouse, especially if soft, primitive velvet cushions can be had to sit upon.[7]

Humorous commentary like this by colonial journalists foreshadowed the use of satire by 20th-century music journalists, who mocked authoritarian institutions.

Innocent Amusements

In contrast to this light-hearted commentary on church music, colonial journalists at newspapers like the Virginia Gazette continued to publish pieces exploring the debate between rationality and perception. For example, a 1736 article addressed the rationality of musical entertainment:  

I have known it urged against music as a proof of its irrationality, that it is only an amusement. I should be very sorry to be rational if, to maintain that character, I were to renounce the enjoyment of innocent amusements. Recreations and diversions are as essential to the preservation of health and vigor in the mind as exercise is to the body.

In contrast to previous pieces we examined, this article suggested that it was acceptable to enjoy music as an “innocent amusement.” This belief is a prerequisite for any concept of “popular music” as accessible to all. The writer then requested the reader:

Allow music, therefore, to be nothing but a mere amusement; that very qualification (especially when at the same time innocent) ought to render it acceptable to a reasonable man; the nobler passions and affections of the mind are capable of being expressed by it with equal force and delicacy, as by either of its sister arts, painting, or poetry.

… no one can enjoy this pleasure completely without the habit of attention and clearness of head, which is universally useful in everything a man [does].[8]

An early treatise on an egalitarian – and rational – approach to music appreciation.  

The First Musicians’ Ads

In addition to articles about music, colonial newspapers ran the first “musicians’ ads.” These promotions offer us a glimpse into the types of music prevalent in colonial society.

For example, an Annapolis musician advertised:

If any gentlemen should want music to their balls or merry-makings, upon application made, they shall be diligently waited on by their humble servant, John Lamond.[9]

The ad gives insight into the role of music in the colonial upper class. In another ad, a keyboardist offered his services:

Edmund Larkin, organist from London, begs leave to inform such gentlemen and ladies who are desirous of being instructed in the art of playing upon the harpsichord, spinet, and singing with the instruments that he proposes to teach them.[10]

This politely phrased advertisement illustrates how playing an instrument and singing were considered essential social skills at that time.

In addition to musical instruction, colonial newspapers routinely featured ads for keyboards and other musical instruments, including guitars, violins, flutes, and fifes. Music stores also offered sheet music of concertos, sonatas, minuets, marches, “country dances, Venetian ballads,” and “Oswald and Jackson songs.”[11] This was likely a reference to two popular composers: Scottish composer James Oswald, who wrote both folk tunes and minuets, and English opera composer Jackson of Exeter. 

Venues also advertised. These ads, too, provide insight into colonial music. For example, an advertisement for an Annapolis theater advertised a “ballad opera called Damon and Philida.”[12] The ballad opera was a type of English comic opera popular in the 18th century. It featured songs paired with spoken dialogue, a precursor to the modern musical.  

Banjos and Fiddles

Another type of advertisement providing insight into colonial music was, sadly, commonplace in newspapers: announcements about runaway slaves. Here’s an example from Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette:

Run away, some months ago, from Capt. Thomas Prather of Prince George’s County, Maryland. A Negroe man named Scipio … of short stature, plays on the banjo, and can sing.[13]

Unfortunately, there was no contemporary reporting on African American music by colonial journalists. Instead, we’re left with hints like this, in ads for runaway slaves.

These ads also referenced fiddle playing by runaways. Although Black and white individuals performed fiddle music in colonial America, colonial journalists reported only performances by white musicians. For instance, a society brief in the Virginia Gazette announced an upcoming St. Andrews Day festival in Williamsburg in which “a fine Cremona fiddle” would be played by a “number of country fiddlers.”[14]

And then there’s this piece from a 1739 Pennsylvania Gazette:

Conclusion

Scholars have overlooked the writings on music by colonial journalists. However, a study of their texts reveals that they were integral to the American experiment. The examples we looked at do more than provide contemporaneous accounts of early American music. These articles embodied a set of values, attitudes, and advocacies that foreshadowed music journalism to come.

More broadly, these writings by colonial journalists contributed to the culturalization of America. Indeed, within these texts, we see the complexities and contradictions of a society that embraced both musical beauty and social repulsiveness in the form of slavery.  

However, within that cultural churning lay the promise of freedom for all. That unknown writer for the Maryland Gazette who wrote that Orpheus “built a city by the force of his musick,” concluded that:

… the sweetest of all sounds is liberty; and wholesome laws with good government make the most enchanting harmony; musick, which, like the last trumpet, will be heard in the remotest regions, and collect mankind from the most distant parts of the globe.[15]

For colonial journalists, music and liberty were intertwined; a precursor to future music writers’ advocacy of equality and free speech.

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To learn more about the history of American music journalism, read my book, The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason.

Notes

[1] Uncredited. Untitled. Maryland Gazette, June 7, 1749. Webpage retrieved Sept. 24, 2025: https://cdss.org/elibrary/PacanNew/.

[2] The Monitor. Untitled, Virginia Gazette, Oct. 15, 1736: 1.

[3] The Monitor. Untitled, Virginia Gazette, Oct. 15, 1736: 1.

[4] The Monitor. Untitled, Virginia Gazette, Oct. 15, 1736: 1.

[5] The Monitor. Untitled, Virginia Gazette, Oct. 15, 1736: 1.

[6] Uncredited. “Virginia Gazette I,” Library of Virginia. Webpage retrieved Sept. 22, 2025: https://old.lva.virginia.gov/virginiaprint/lineages/lineage.php?id=109#:~:text=In%20the%20early%20months%20that,adjourned%20on%20September%2023%2C%201736.

[7] Uncredited, untitled, Pennsylvania Gazette, July 22, 1731: 2.

[8] Uncredited, untitled, Virginia Gazette, Oct. 29, 1736: 1.

[9] Advertisement, Maryland Gazette, Nov. 21, 1750: 3.

[10] Advertisement, South Carolina Gazette, Nov.8, 1751: 2.

[11] Advertisement, Pennsylvania Gazette, Jan. 26, 1764: 3.

[12] Advertisement, Maryland Gazette, July 23, 1752: 2.

[13] Advertisement, Pennsylvania Gazette, July 13, 1749: 3.

[14] Uncredited. Untitled, Virginia Gazette, Nov. 19, 1736: 4.

[15] Uncredited. Untitled. Maryland Gazette, June 7, 1749. Webpage retrieved Sept. 24, 2025: https://cdss.org/elibrary/PacanNew/.