Mid-nineteenth-century American WASPS were, as Richard Jackson puts it in his lengthy and scholarly notes to this issue, ''eager to have their sadder feelings aroused and massaged''. Twentieth-century satirists have devoted much energy to lampooning Victorian sentiment, especially the sort of thing to be heard here such as, ''The grass is growing on the turf / Where Willie sleeps / Among the flow'rs we've planted there / The soft wind creeps''. Ugh! The creaking noise of the parlour harmonium and the sanctimonious holier-than-thou piety that exudes from this material is insurmountable, no matter how pure the instincts of the singers, players and musicologists involved. In fact the selection seems to have been made more to accentuate the sugary, creepy atmosphere rather than to perhaps unearth some hidden treasures.
Although Kathleen Battle's name is printed large on the CD insert, she only sings two songs, Angels' Visits and Trusting. This is one of a long series of exploratory records under the general title ''Anthology of American Music'' made in the late 1970s, so it was probably one of her first recordings. Even she cannot escape sounding arch and knowing at such lines as ''Down in prisons dark / Where the wretched moan / Wings of angels burst / Through walls of stone''. Throughout, the close harmony of the choir and the dedication of the accompanists and soloists are not in doubt, but the audience is invited to snicker and one ultimately feels a little sorry for the composers whose work is being dug up for the hilarity of a later, sourly ironic age.
Only one song suggests the more vigorous and characterful American music that was just around the corner—the setting by an anonymous composer (initials J. N. S.) of Isaac Watts's Oh you must be a lover of the Lord. Here, suddenly, the fervour of a camp-meeting service affirms that in the fusion of European sentimentality with African dance and chant lay the future greatness of American song.'