Jeremiah Ingalls

Jeremiah Ingalls was an American composer, singing master, and compiler born in Andover, Massachusetts, on March 1, 1764. He settled in Newbury, Vermont, by the early 1790s and served as chorister of the Congregational church beginning in 1794. He introduced the bass viol into its public worship and later served as a deacon. Alongside his musical work, he earned his living as a cooper, farmer, and tavern keeper. He remained active in church music after moving to the Rochester area and died in Hancock, Vermont, on April 6, 1838.

Ingalls's principal publication was The Christian Harmony; or, Songster's Companion, printed at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1805. The collection joined sacred texts to a mixture of original work, borrowed material, and Ingalls's harmonizations of tunes circulating in oral or secular traditions. It is an important witness to vernacular sacred music in the early United States. FILLMORE is attributed to Ingalls in hymnological indexes and in the 1905 Methodist Hymnal. That hymnal labels it long meter in six lines and sets it to Charles Wesley's And can it be, not to Longfellow's poem. Because Ingalls died before Blind Bartimeus was published, the present text-tune combination is necessarily a later editorial pairing.