Book Review

Baptist Offspring, Southern Midwife—Jesse Mercer's Cluster of Spiritual Songs (1810): A Study in American Hymnody by Kay Norton. Detroit: Harmonie Park Press, 2002. Detroit Monograph in Musicology/Studies in Music 34. ISBN 0-89990-109-3. Pp. xxiii, 203. $47.50

Jesse Mercer, pioneer Baptist pastor, is primarily remembered as the person for whom Georgia's Mercer University is named. The student newspaper on Mercer University's campus is called The Cluster, and probably as many as 99 percent of its readers are unaware that this is also the name of Jesse Mercer's words-only hymnal, The Cluster of Spiritual Songs (3rd ed., Augusta, Ga., 1810). The Cluster is one of a number of words-only hymnals compiled by Baptist pastors in the South in the pre-Civil War period. Mercer's hymnal, however, is the only one of its kind to be given two book-length studies. In 1968 Mercer University professor of Christianity C. Ray Brewster's "The Cluster" of Jesse Mercer was published. And now Kay Norton, a native of Georgia and a musicologist on the faculty at Arizona State University, has produced a new study of The Cluster.