ABSTRACT
The title page of 'Sternhold and Hopkins' referred to the psalms as 'laying apart all ungodly songs and ballads which tend only to the nourishing of vice and corruption of youth', but the link between the 'songs' of the Bible and their secular equivalents persisted. This chapter explores this connection in the context of the eighteenth century, when 'Sternhold and Hopkins' as signifiers of both the 'old' and the 'old' way of singing, came to be implicated in the role of ballads and songs in the evolving politics of literary value. The one hundredth psalm, which emerged from 'Sternhold and Hopkins' as the 'Old Hundredth' at the turn of the eighteenth century, forms the focus of my examination of the intersection between the cultural politics of 'Sternhold and Hopkins' and the ballad. As Fairer also notes, the psalm was sung yearly at the anniversary meeting and, as such, had become a tradition of the charity children's performance.
