Ralph Harrison

Ralph Harrison was an English dissenting minister, educator, and church musician born in Derbyshire in 1748. He studied at Warrington Academy, where his teachers included Joseph Priestley, and entered the ministry at Shrewsbury before becoming co-minister of Cross Street Chapel in Manchester in 1771. His theology was described as Arian, and the congregation belonged to the developing liberal dissenting tradition later identified with Unitarianism.

Education was central to Harrison's vocation. He opened a boys' school in Manchester in 1774 and helped establish the Manchester Academy in 1786, serving there as professor of classics and belles-lettres until 1789. That dissenting academy, created without a religious test for students, eventually developed into Harris Manchester College, Oxford. Harrison's work therefore joined congregational ministry, classical learning, and the wider educational life of English Nonconformity.

Harrison published the first volume of Sacred Harmony in 1784 and a second in 1791. The collection arranged psalm and hymn tunes in four parts with figured bass and included tunes of his own, among them WARRINGTON. The name recalls the academy at which he studied. WARRINGTON was not written for Cowper's hymn, which preceded it by fifteen years, and Harrison should be credited as its composer rather than as an arranger of Thomas Arne. Harrison did adapt an Arne melody as ARLINGTON, but that is a separate tune.