If you’ve glanced at my book, you may have encountered the part where I explain about Bayley and Ferguson and the services of song. Services of song are a virtually forgotten genre nowadays, but be assured that they were once a very common form of entertainment/instruction.
It’s not an abstract concept – these were a genre of magic lantern show, aimed at adult and/or juvenile audiences. To put on a magic lantern show, you needed a few key ingredients:-
- A venue
- A magic lantern
- Something to project onto
- Set of slides
- Something containing a narrative (for the narrator), and plenty of songs for the audience. The music could be in Tonic Sol-Fa or staff notation (notes on lines and spaces).
The narrative could be a biblical story or an adaptation from a moralistic story. Or perhaps something about a poet or a place.
Whatever, the narrative and the songs were in a wee booklet, and that was your Service of Song. You bought multiple copies – they were cheap! The event itself was advertised as a service of song.
So, as you can see, a Service of Song was an early slideshow providing a variable mix of education, entertainment and religion. They were popular with Sunday Schools as a special treat, and they were often used by the temperance movement. Bayley and Ferguson published loads of them. (Organisers would have to buy or hire the slides – possibly from somewhere else.)
If you would like to know more … read the book!
Karen E McAulay,
A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music 1880-1951 🎶
Routledge, 2025.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 